[Beta 3] Starting Locations Still an Issue

In your situation i would have beelined for magic wands and logistics nad pumped out big group of mages to tear through magnar - taking a few of his cities would make things easier for you - soften him up with militias while you prepare your mages.

you also have the opportunity to take out the shrills and the ogre with a group of leather armoured militias and a hero to kill it

That's 100 or so turns of research and production for one starting city, though. An additional 30-40 minutes of playtime just to get traction. Forgive me for being a bit grumpy about it, but choosing a LARGE map with relatively few opponent's should allow for a giant fat stack more expansion before the wars start.

I like to crush developed opponents.

On that point I agree completely.

Way too often do you start at a location with 2/3 or 3/2 and 1 resource (metal or horse etc) as opposed to by forest on a river with 4/4 and 2 resources.  I am often stuck on a 3-4 tile wide pass between canyons, mountains or seas. I's not a big deal for me becuase I can just Ctrl N, but two of my opponents on average seem to be crippled by the same thing. It's no fun when just the terrain screws up my opponents.

i go nuts when i move my sovereign 2 tiles to grab  better location than find the spot i was going to go to is usesless because another sovereign has built a city within the limit - this happens 1 in 5 games for me on large maps - its the difference between getting a 3/3 spot versus a 5/3 or 5/4 spot plus resources - totallt frustrating

Type Cntl-N to load a new map. Problem solved. But ya I've found there to be too many long mountain ranges. 

Except its gauranteed that 1-3 AI are crippled by the same thing per game. It would be ok if it was just a little thing but some start locations are really bad.

Yeah seriously, plus something needs to be done about starting location resources. Every starting location should guarantee one random shard, including Life and Death relative to the faction. And regular agricultural resources should be 100% available for starting locations as well.

Because as much as I hate being picky and greedy, I restart my maps over WAY to much for someone of my type when it comes to 4X games. Some starting areas are horrid.

Yeah, yeah, I know we can keep reloading until we get "the right" map. My issue is that frequently, you don't know for sure until you have spent a half hour or more playing it out. Wasted time, and no amount of Ctrl+N Fixes that.

Not sure if I'm remembering right, but right after you hit the "settle button" for the first time, isn't there a splash screen that pops up talking about how "after years of wandering the wastes, you have finally found a place where you can start your kingdom"? Seems odd to celebrate finding a small copse of dried up twigs growing out of shallow ash. I would keep looking until I found somewhere useful if I were a sovereign.

In practice, starting areas really ought to have at LEAST one 4/3 or 3/4 (or several 3/3) area within the first turn's walk, as well as two resources *just* far enough apart that you can't have both in your ZoC at city founding. If I were a sovereign, I probably would not put down roots for anything that didn't come off as a relatively surprising concentration of resources.

I think that as is there is to much variance between city building locations. A range from 5/5 to 2/2 is way too much and serves no purpose. While it's a good idea for cities to have differences due to starting resources they shouldn't be divided into bad and good locations. Building locations should probably run from a total of 6 to 8 resources. Even that's a 33% difference. So they should have minimum of 3/3 or 4/2, and max out at 5/3 or 4/4. Within that range there is tons of room to differentiate cities without giving really huge random bonuses or penalties to players and AIs.

As others have said there is also too much variability in how many expansions you can create. Sometimes you play a game for 30 minutes only to realize that you cannot expand at all. Maybe the min distance between cities could come down by 1 and the average size of fertile areas could be increases, and the shape of fertile land could be elongated so that putting one city in the middle doesn't take up an entire patch.

Not to flog a dead horse, but when I meant that on turn 3 - having moved a total of 4 squares, i have encountered games where i could no longer found a settlement because i was locked out by the minimum distance between towns. On large maps in other games i would generally expect to be able to put down three settlements before meeting anyone else.

translating that into this game, taking into account its build times, i would think to have 3 scouts, 2 or 3 heroes, 2 or 3  militia and 4 or so pioneers walking around my three settelements exploring the countryside before meeting anyone so i find this 3 turns - bang no more fertile land available to be particularly strange.

so we have 2 issues we have identified here: fertile land zones, and the value of that land.

I can't quite weigh in yet on the fertile land zones portion yet - i find it too difficult to identify what land is fertile without turning on the button that displays the grain and materials numbers - so i would say that the fertile land needs to be easier to identify by sight alone

to be edited and continued later - too sleepy