Why are my city founding sites always so lousy?

Sherlock

Just one more turn...
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I was just watching a video from PotatoMcwhiskey and his game start is awesome. River, mountains, five resources, three and four yield tiles. I NEVER GET A STARTING POSITION THAT GOOD.

I watched him setup the game and he didn't do anything fancy, all standard.

I'm tired of watching these video's and seeing really good city sites that I never get. What the frack, am I just unlucky? Or maybe these people are using mods they don't mention? My major gripe with this game is how hard it is to find a half decent city site.

 
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Luck is all I can chalk it up to. Sometimes mine are amazing, sometimes I can go 5 or six games before i get a great start again.
 
That's what the "restart" button is for. Unless you're trying to impress somebody, there's no reason to play out a start you don't like.

Sometimes the streamers will choose Legendary Start, which makes sense because they're trying to keep an audience interested and want the game to get off to a fast start.
 
Do you restart your games often or do you rarely do so? Because to get good starts like this, you'll have to reroll a few times before you can get starts like these.
 
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Rerolls, basically. They keep restarting the game until they get what they want. Makes sense, they don't want to spend a tons of tirnsnjust clicking for the next next turn because they're waiting for something to build if they don't have to.

You can do it at home as well, but it does make the game easier by shortening the growth phase, which is the part where the AI does actually provide some challenge. If you do that though, do me a favour and don't come here whinging about the AI. Can't complaintthat the game is too easy while skipping the tougher parts.
 
Usually it’s my mindset rather than the actual start. Most situations are workable.
I think that goes for me. When I've got two mines, a quarry and three lots of wood, I'm annoyed that there won't be enough food; when I've got only one mine but two lots of grain and two sugars, I'm whinging about poor production.

I'm not gung-ho for winning as fast as possible though. Unless the start position is really, really terrible, I will play it and see what happens. Sometimes I'm quitting after ten turns because Alexander is attacking me with eleven units..
 
I mean, what's a playable start? Try posting a few rolls.

Though sometimes it really just seems to stick you in some random corner of the map without anything.,
 
There are sometimes starts you absolutely know will be terrible (middle of desert or tundra, flat no resource grassland, etc), but usually I think it can be helpful to play out 5-10 turns before restarting. Sometimes you get a roll that looks bad until you find Paititi or spice hills a few tiles over, or find a whole batch of nice hills for a second city.
 
In addition to restarting and using legendary starts, you can also try increasing the amount of land tiles per civ on the map so that the game's start positioner has more locations to choose from when deciding where to place settlers.

A few ways that you can accomplish this:
  1. Lower sea level if that option is available.
  2. Increase map size without increasing the number of major civs on the map.
 
Thanks for all the good suggestions.

I'm trying something else and it's working great for me.... I've re-loaded CiV. It's refreshingly fun, doesn't have any odd gameplay mechanics that really add nothing to the game, and let's you make decisions that actually mean something.

CiV was my all-time favorite game but I haven't played since CiVI came out. That was a nice long rest, it's good to get back to it. It's like playing a new game.
 
I only restart on games where there are only plains and no hills. It's just too big of a drag for me if there is no production at all.
 
I don't have a lot of problems with Start Positions themselves, because I have the Faster Starting Settlers Mod, so I just Move to a better position - trying to implement a Civ VI version of Humankind's Neolithic Starting Era, so to speak.

What I have a problem with is Start Positions that are totally incompatible with the Civ I'm trying to play. On occasion I have had to restart several times to get a start anywhere near the coast for Harald, Dido or Victoria. Now, what's the point of playing Civs with such pronounced Naval/Trade/Sea Uniques when you start away from the Sea? Or a flat plains start for the Inca. Say What? I find that the supposed starting biases for the Civs in Civ VI are very unreliable and inconsistent, and that has probably caused me to restart more than any other single thing in the game.
 
What I have a problem with is Start Positions that are totally incompatible with the Civ I'm trying to play.
Part of the problem is how the Civ 6 map generator chooses start locations and then assigns the locations to civs. How Civ 6 actually chooses locations is a black box (unlike Civ 5 which did the whole algorithm in Lua), but I suspect that there is no awareness of Civs or start biases (except for Kupe's water start) until after the locations have already been decided.

So if all of the locations happen to be inland, then even the naval civs won't get a coastal start. Likewise, if all of the chosen locations are mostly flat plains then tough luck for the Inca.

For this reason I either tailor the map type to match my Civ's strengths (as in Archipelago for Harald, heavy-mountain pangea for Inca, and so on) or I choose a Civ that can adapt to a variety of start locations.
 
whenever I play as Vietnam the game LOVES to put me next to desert... WHY!!!!!!! EVEN IN WETLANDS MAP!!! WHY GAME WHY!!!!
 
How many times do you think these youtubers start recording their starts from setup until they get the perfect one to give you the illusion that they are playing "random" setups?

Don't feel bad. If anything defines "cooked setups" better than youtubers, please show it to me.

EDIT: forget it, it does not work as expected.
 
How many times do you think these youtubers start recording their starts from setup until they get the perfect one to give you the illusion that they are playing "random" setups?

Don't feel bad. If anything defines "cooked setups" better than youtubers, please show it to me.
If my experience is anything to go by, they must spend more time rerolling than playing. I mean, when I first started playing, everyone was talking about 2f/2p starts, and I had to reroll 7 times to get one even nearby. One of the reasons why I generally won't reroll. If I had to reroll that many times for a 2f2p start, imagine how many times they have to to some of the starts mentioned. Or use a mod to force a good start.
EDIT: forget it, it does not work as expected.
I'm not sure what this is referring to.
 
Potato imo seems to cook his games.
I asked him about it in a YT comment once and he denied it, but I have no faith in that he doesn't cook his games as some of the starts and even in-game RNG is just over the top.
Example: Him trying out the Soothsayer exploit for OCC Ethiopia (repeatedly flooding a river with Great Bath) on Deity.
His CS and Tribal Village RNG there was just so crazy over the top lucky that I have no faith in him not knowing where to walk, and not restarting until he gets the desired outcomes.
I tried to replicate his strategy, and it took me well over 25 starts just to find a suiting starting location, and countless restarts to be able to snag the Great Bath before the AI (by knowing where and when to send my warrior for the "perfect tribal village" pickups, and getting the best RNG for super early Void Singers + another SS for the neccesary governor upgrades).
Meanwhile Potato "had a couple of restarts" and got it right on the first try - yeah right.

If my experience is anything to go by, they must spend more time rerolling than playing. I mean, when I first started playing, everyone was talking about 2f/2p starts, and I had to reroll 7 times to get one even nearby. One of the reasons why I generally won't reroll. If I had to reroll that many times for a 2f2p start, imagine how many times they have to to some of the starts mentioned. Or use a mod to force a good start.

Having map settings set the world age to "new", as well as climate to "wet", it almost ensures a ton of hills and forest/jungle that yield 2/2 or better.
Could have been the case.
 
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