Inequality of Starting Positions

[Kordanor]

Starting Positions always had a huge random factor in Civ games. I remember that in Civ 4 I was always glad to have fish. In Civ 5 river were always a big advantage and if you manage to get a coastal city with a mountain that was even better due to some wonders (also because settling broad was punished). And yes, Salt was an extremely strong resource.

But the randomness of previous Civs is nothing compared to Civilization 6 and this is especially problematic in multiplayer:

Fresh Water:
If your capital city cannot be placed next to fresh water, you are gimped immediately and chances for winning are already almost zero. While fresh water isn't necessary for follow up cities it is for your very first city. If you create your new city without access to fresh water you have 2+1 housing. Meaning that once you reached 2 pop you already get heavy losses on growth.
If you place your City next to coast you get 3+1 housing at least. But that is still bad and in addition makes you very vulnerable for naval attacks. If possible you should never build a city directly at the coast, also because water tiles are basically not usable in Civ 6.
If you have the option to build it at a river, you also get a boost via the watermills and production boost from lumbermills.
When I am playing multiplayer with friends we basically restart until everyone has fresh water (with 1 move). Normally in 4 out of 5 cases you have fresh water. It's really unnecessary to have a "you are screwed" factor by a such simple thing.

Bonus/ Strategic / Luxury Resources:
I don't think that any Civilization game was so unbalanced regarding starting resources. Sometimes you have 1 luxury resource in your first cities reach. Sometimes you have 3 different ones and 5 total. Most of the times you have horses, but iron and all the other strategic resources are spread so thin over the map that in lots of games you won't have access to some of the "basic" resources.
But even the amount of bonus resources couldn't be more random. I have seen starting spots with 3 resources, and others with having 5 in 1 tile radius of your starting position with additional 5 further out. The spread of all the resources seems to be vastly broken. Especially considering you need some of the resources to get the science boosts. Someone with cows, wheat and stones and possibly copper already has a huge advantage regarding boosts over someone who only has like some cattle, coffee and fishes. Also the yields of the different resources are extremely different, making it very random how good your start is.

Hill / Flatland:
In Civ 5 there was a tradeoff for hills. Instead of 1 food you got 1 production. In Civ 6 Hills always add 1 production to your yield. This basically makes an area with hills vastly superior to an area of flatland.

Tunda:
It's not just that Tundra is really bad regarding tile yields. If you are starting next to tundra you basically already know that you won't have City States in that direction and can expect barbarians to come from there. While some barbarians can be nice to get the boosts, and Greek can tranform it into culture, it can seriously hamper your development if hordes of horsemen barbarians keep coming from the tundra where nobody will ever settle and no city state will interrupt them.
Chosing Russia with it's tundra bias is basically chosing the disadvantage of starting out with tundra malus.

Faction Placement:
It seems to really not matter what size of map and number of players you chose. Most of the times the players are distributed over the map extremely unevenly. Some players are clustered together with 10 tiles distance, others are completely on their own. Most of the time some players are basically surrounded by someone else, while some players have huge amounts of free land to settle on. The distribution of the players on the map seems to be horribly wrong.

City States:
Receiving the first Envoy for free when meeting in a city state is also a huge random factor as it's extremely poweful. Someone who has 2-3 City States in their backyard and who gets all the bonuses for the start (and some easy to conquer cities later on) has a huge bonus towards someone who is built in and isn't even the first to meet a single one of the citiy states. The very first of the bonuses is so disproportionately that it screws other systems and adds to a huge randomness at the start. Yes, producing scouts right away can help, but only if there actually ARE City States nearby.

And of course there are also goodie huts with relics which are extremely poweful.
Now you might think "with so many random odds it is likely that it even's out". But that's not the case as often several of these are connected with each other.
In lots of the 40+ multoplayer games I played so far, you would have been able to tell right away which player had no chance purely by looking at the starting position. And that already includes restarting for fresh water.

And while you can ban unbalanced factions like Scythia and Sumeria (and Germany) you can't really ban anything map related...

In the end Civ 6 has the most inequal starting locations in any Civ game yet.

Edit: Typos

[Slimane]

I agree with most points. The whole balance factor seems to have gone out of the window for this civ.

Take a look at this start, imagine getting that in multiplayer :

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=790457563

In contrast to that I've had starts on a plains hill next to a river, tons of hills a few mountains for adjacency bonuses. Some forest/hill spices that gives 5 foood 3 hammers. ETC.

[Freedom]

It is bad, quite horrible really.

[Render]

It does seem worse on this new version, civ6.
But it has always been a gamble in the other versions as well.
It usually takes me four or five tries before a get a starting position i will accept.
and even then sometimes it turns out bad because i'm on some tiny island or something.
I accept this as just how it is when I think how hard it would be to program it better with a random map generator.

[Waeress]

Just checking; you know about the starting position setting? It's in advanced setup and default option is IIRC that all get OK'ish positions while some can get better. It can be set to all getting good starting positions.

[Kordanor]

Yes, I know about it. And I tested around with it. But it does not seem to have any real impact. Even with balanced starting positions you can start out with only very vew resources.
I am not sure how exactly this effects world generation if affects it at all.

[ambershee]

If you start near Tundra, take the belief that gives you faith bonuses from adjacent tundra tiles and go heavy religion. The bonuses you can get from your religion can quickly outweigh the detrimental starting position since you can generate absurd amounts of faith.

[Waeress]

Originally posted by Kordanor:

Yes, I know about it. And I tested around with it. But it does not seem to have any real impact. Even with balanced starting positions you can start out with only very vew resources.
I am not sure how this effects world generation if affects it at all.

Ok, got it. Haven't played around with it myself yet. Was assuming it would work good :)

[Freedom]

Originally posted by Waeress:

Originally posted by Kordanor:

Yes, I know about it. And I tested around with it. But it does not seem to have any real impact. Even with balanced starting positions you can start out with only very vew resources.
I am not sure how this effects world generation if affects it at all.

Ok, got it. Haven't played around with it myself yet. Was assuming it would work good :)

Nope, it is still crap..

[Joi Ægiss]

Well i have started some 100+ games (with restarts + mp) (never realy finished the run though, gets boring while waitng for the win) and what i found out that it might mater what nation you are playing. England most often is near sea, Russia close to tundra, Aztec in the rainforrest and so forth. But game is still unbalanced by massive randomness of resources and city-states location.
I like the random factor and starting locatins should not be equal but this is a bit overkill in in randomness.