How do you get a "good start"

[Fatum]

I see people play this game on youtube and they ALWAYS start with like 5 product baseline, or surrounded by luxury goods they sell to the AI for piles of gold....best start I've gotten even after restarting 20x trying to get "lucky" is a quarry 4 tiles away....I've even started with desert on one side and tundra on the other!

Is there a mod or something that they are all using to get these starts?

[Sticky Wicket]

If you are having problems with this you can always set luxury resources to *abundant* in the game/map settings. You won't have any problem finding good start areas with it like that.

[Stormwinds]

You gotta understand that YouTube videos are made to entertain, and it's a lot less entertaining to watch someone be crippled out of the gate than have a decent start. Watch PotatoMcWhiskey's latest Scotland series. His start is pretty lackluster.

Other than that, there's no specific advise we can give you to always get a decent start. Randomness is a part of the game, and the restart button exists for a reason. Even with abundant resources, you can be placed in the tundra with 5 nearby deer and nothing else.

[jonnin]

you can't enforce one but lowering the number of civs and city states on bigger maps helps a lot. balanced locations is a good click. your civ matters too, if you are playing peter, you are gonna get stuck in the artic, and while he can use that, its still meh. nubia gets stuck in the desert. For those types of civs you want to be on the border of the civ-terrain and good terrain, but that takes some luck or restarts. Try civs that are not tied so heavily to 'bad' tiles. Then you just need 2-3 of the 4+ tiles. that is, the 2 food 2 production tiles (4 points) or the ones that quickly convert to this (horses, for example, can be 5 points after builder). Civs that rely on horses can score on that, which are kahn & tomaris.

all in all, once you understand the game, a bad start is actually more fun than an epic start to me. Fight through it, make it your own. Any scrub can win if they get an epic start.

[Cryten]

As long as you are playing on standard starting settings you are guarenteed to have at least 1 luxury withing 3 tiles of your starting location and 2-3 of your civs preferred type of tile. Keep in mind that cities that prefer grasslands generally have a bad start because hills offer production and starting without some jungle or forested hills can be a slow start.

[andrew.c.f.clarke]

In addition to using the advanced menu to set luxuries to abundant there is another option for start location.

New Game -> Advanced -> Start location -> Legendary

You can further tinker with start position by installing mods.

Also, if you spot another player getting a good start copy their "Game Random Seed" and "Map Random Seed" in addition to the other options, many YouTubers will leave the seeds on screen long enough for you to see and copy.

[ChanceGateau]

If all else fails, you can customize a map and put a boatload of resources near all of the spawn points, so you are guaranteed a great start.

[Shiva]

Check out your map with reveal all and then reroll until you find a good spot.

[Fatum]

Well..I try to avoid using cheats and mods until I've at least beaten a game "to my highest potential" (then use mods for fun) I did actually discover that legendary setting by chance after posting this, it's helped a bit, still struggling with the weird AI tho...always seem to get super powered barbarians near me, or I'll get surprise war from the AI which for some reason makes every other civ dislike me...

[Fatum]

Or.....stupid stuff like this that litterally just happened lol...I fight my way through enemy cities and as I'm about to take out their capital a flood wipes out 90% of my remaining troops... /facepalm

[andrew.c.f.clarke]

The barbarian swarm will be from a scout hitting your borders and running back to the barb camp. When you see a scout with an exclamation point intercept if before it returns to base.

[FailedNormiee]

What size and type of map do you use? I would try to go standard size continents or panegea. While there is nothing wrong with trying to start out a city with a bunch of resource tiles as a matter of what's practical all you really need is a couple good 1 ring tiles around the city, with maybe one or 2 good 2nd ring tiles to have a good start. Production is the most important, followed by food at the start.