Why are desert starts considered overpowered?

[chrisg7]

What's petra???


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[Browd]

Really? Are you playing vanilla? Petra was introduced in the G&K expansion, and modified in BNW.

http://www.dndjunkie.com/civilopedia/BUILDING_PETRA.aspx

 

[zukkus]

desert folklore is such a ridiculous no brainer automatic OP no contest immediate knee jerk pick. I mean thats it. in a nutshell. wrapped in a bow, with a chocolate on top.

 

[chrisg7]

Haha sorry thought this was civ 4 I was like desert start is op?


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[BrokTheFanatic]

My favorite start is cows and salt next to a river. And any start with 2+ wheat/deer/banannas is a setup for a big early city.

But after that a river through the desert with 1-2 desert wheat, an oasis, maybe some desert marble, it is risky because you can't guarentee Petra but you do have a good chance at it. And if you get it, then you are golden. Or it is near the coast so you get that and a couple fish. It really isn't all that 'deseeerty'. Pure desert, of course, sucks.

 

[holywar]

Petra is nerfed but Desert Folklore is a goliath. It's almost impossible to lose if you get Desert Folklore and a whole bunch of desert cities. You can convert the whole world.

Personally I think the most overpowered start is salt mines...

 

[zukkus]

so officially...

desert start on a hill coast river with 3 salt and marble nearby. and kind of on a peninsula and not surrounded? and probably 1 NW nearby that no stupid CS has. Along with of course, coal and and oil in easy reach

 

[Vitruvius]

Desert start can usually lack hammers and you may often end up useless luxes on flat dry desert that you don't want to work. . Petra also isn't something so easy to get and its a lot of hammers just to convert flat desert into plains.

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[vivalamexico]

so officially...

desert start on a hill coast river with 3 salt and marble nearby. and kind of on a peninsula and not surrounded? and probably 1 NW nearby that no stupid CS has. Along with of course, coal and and oil in easy reach

Salts on plain desert are terrible. 1 food and 1 gold or something when unimproved iirc. The op salts are on plains (gold, hammers, and food even before improving)

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[BrokTheFanatic]

Salts on plain desert are terrible. 1 food and 1 gold or something when unimproved iirc. The op salts are on plains (gold, hammers, and food even before improving)

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Yeah, I guess ideally you start next to a river by the coast on a hill, with a fish and 2 whales. One side of the river is some grasslands/plains/cow/maybe flood plains with 1-3 salt, the other side is 1 flood plains and 2 desert hills (near river so you can farm em) + oasis. Or something similar. Salt is just great since it only takes mining and provides food+prod+gold, just what yah need early on. Faith from desert is just a little later unless there is an oasis.

I have had a start similar to that, just incense instead of whales. Was an immortal match and I simply took off for an easy win. Was G&K and Ghandi was close for easy pickings. Nowadays I don't start wars since it is too easy to win if you can pick on an AI early on.

 

[lindsay40k]

Kinda makes sense that desert can be powerful and tundra can't. Historically, there have been a reasonable number of powerful empires whose power bases were fertile areas (often river valleys) surrounded by deserts (Egypt, Mesopotamian cultures like Babylon and Sumeria, Iran, etc.) There really haven't been powerful civilizations originating from the tundra.

Maybe, but get a load of Lapland's Tourism

 

[danaphanous]

I read here that as well as the RNG in generating terrain, the game adds extra luxes/resources around your start to "balance" it. This algorithm considers desert the worst, but has desert hills listed as "worse" than normal hills and I think underestimates floodplains as well if I recall. Overall, this means that if the game gives you a nice 8-10 floodplains start with many adjacent desert hills it will also give you an OP amount of resources as well, meaning every time this kind of start is rolled it's given an extra edge. Enough players have played one of these starts to have started thinking of desert in general as "OP" though it's only sometimes that that's true. Doesn't mean every desert start turns out well though--you could roll without a lot of hills around for instance or with only 5 floodplains and then it still sucks no matter how many extra resources you get in the outer ring.

As others have mentioned, desert folklore, if you can get it, is the most OP faith pantheon. It puts faith on "Every Single" desert tile, including floodplains meaning you just get free faith on everything you'll be working anyway. The other faith terrain-belief is nerfed a bit. Tundra one forest doesn't count--meaning it is a lot worse as forest is the best tile in the area and carries most of your deer unless you chop it. Then you trade 1 production for 1 faith. :-/ Desert folklore with desert start you don't even have to reassign tiles, you just get faith on everything in sight. I think even these OP starts don't end up as good if you can't score Petra though. I had a great desert start with the only true desert on the map. Rushed for petra on Deity and lost it to a guy who had 2 nearby desert, it was so sad, and my capital kinda slowed in growth for a while because I missed it. Great, early game though.

 

[kaspergm]

I read here that as well as the RNG in generating terrain, the game adds extra luxes/resources around your start to "balance" it. This algorithm considers desert the worst, but has desert hills listed as "worse" than normal hills and I think underestimates floodplains as well if I recall. Overall, this means that if the game gives you a nice 8-10 floodplains start with many adjacent desert hills it will also give you an OP amount of resources as well, meaning every time this kind of start is rolled it's given an extra edge. Enough players have played one of these starts to have started thinking of desert in general as "OP" though it's only sometimes that that's true. Doesn't mean every desert start turns out well though--you could roll without a lot of hills around for instance or with only 5 floodplains and then it still sucks no matter how many extra resources you get in the outer ring.

It's been a while since I looked at the numbers, I think desert hills are considered same value as any other hills because what the RNG does is evaluate the yield of the tile which is identical for all tiles. As pointed out above, with Desert starts you will pretty much always start on a river because any desert off river will be considered infertile and hence unsutable for start location. A river will be surrounded by Flood Plains on both sites, so generally you will have enough fertile tiles to cover your needs for a long time, but that is no different that grassland river starts (I think the value of flood plain = grassland river).

The "problem" comes from the fact that the RNG will avaluate the value of all 36 hexes (or how many there are) within reach of your city. If you have, say, 10 flat desert tiles, these will lower the total sccore for your city without really causing you any disadvantage because it will only be in very late game you'll actually need to work those tiles (when city has worked the remaining 26 plots and filled whatever specialist slots you have). Thus, a grassland start might have 10 flat dry grassland tiles that add to the value of the start location but doesn't really benefit you, whereas a desert start which has instead 10 flat desert tiles gets compensated with some extra strategic or bonus resources and ends up being better off for that.

 

[LoneRebel]

The rest is just a little late game bonus (it's remarkable though that they squished every large and little advantage imaginable onto desert tiles...).

You could make your point without exaggerating. Did you forget to mention that flat desert tiles that are not next to a river without Petra are COMPLETELY USELESS?

 

[kaspergm]

You could make your point without exaggerating. Did you forget to mention that flat desert tiles that are not next to a river without Petra are COMPLETELY USELESS?

The point is that the fact that flat desert tiles are completely useless doesn't make any difference in game, because only the most horrid city locations will have a large amount of these tiles, and as long as there is a decent array of other tiles, you can have a perfectly functional city while leaving those flat desert tiles unworked.