Pre-beta feedback: Map generation should check to ensure starting cities are not isolated on an island all by their lonesome (unless you are about to build into the ocean)
Man, I want my floating landmass spell.
So, I am interested to see how other feels about that. Obviously the above should never happen. However how balanced do we want starting locations? I like my games (Be it Civ IV, Master of Magic, random HoMM map, or just Settlers of Catan) to have a bit of that randomsness on map creation so I can say "man, I won because I got a really good starting location" or "that was a good game, my starting location wasn't that grand either, so I had to rush navy to get to that other gold-mine of an island"
Now, I'm sure you could make map creation calculate to get a REALLY balanced map. Example: AI > This red player city has xx points of resources on its starting location, and it has 3 level 1 dungeons, and 1 level 5 dungeon nearby. There are also 5 crystals/nodes with 3 being his element. This other city for player green, is about the same, +3 resources, -1 node, but otherwise balanced. Yellow picked to be "hard" difficulty, so he gets -1 node, -3 resources, and only a level 3 dungeon.
So the random map generator could FORCESplayers to have balanced starting positions. Is that what we want?