I like a challenge but...

[Axeking]

First game I started, I see my lovely little city completely surrounded by water.

Uh... me thinks that the AI players will be rather so far ahead before I can even build my first ship...

Really needs to have a check in the world build code for both players and AI that they start ona continent with at least "X" many other cities...

Getting stuck like this makes for no fun. (unless thats a challenge that you really want...)

[CPWilly]

Which World Builder did you use? What was the size of the map?

[Axeking]

240 wide 100 high horizontal wrap world builder 4.0

[Axeking]

And 8 players total (7 AI)

[Axeking]

Tried generating another game - got same result. After 95 turns I found a second city...

[CPWilly]

The 4.0 World Builder is more complicated than the others, with a lot of options. The little help tip (which is placed a little out of the way) warns that it can be prone to single City starts based on the options settings. What it tried to do is find a "Fair" start for each player. 8 is a large number of players, so probabaly the fairest start was a single city island, as it is unable to find 8 other land masses that had the same number of cities on them.

This 4.0 world builder also has settings for continents/islands and land to water ratios - these can limit land masees and the distribution of cities also has an impact.

The Simple Map WB or The 3.11 WB are better at producing maps with islands with a few cities on them if that is what you are looking for.

Also,if you are not finding a second city until turn 95, the city settings values are most likely set up for cities to be quite scare. Again, the 3.11 WB has less options but more generalizes distribution which it sounds like oyu are looking for.

[bbmike]

Seems like there is an issue with using World Builder 4.0 when creating maps under size 50x50. I usually end up with one or two big land blobs and a lot of one tile land. Also, I've only been creating games with two players and the capitol cities start way too close to each other too frequently.

[CPWilly]

50x50 is a very small area ultimately, and yes I think the Wb 4 would not be well suited for that with default setting. Even if you just have 2 players 50 x 50 is not a lot of room to find goo d start locations.

When using that World Builder, you really have to consider what you are wanting to achieve, and then experiment with it. The most important settings in terms of world building are Land To Water and continents to islands.

[bbmike]

Agree, it is a small map. I'll play around with the settings some more. I also might try saving a map and editing it to place new starting locations.

[Axeking]

Reaaly sounds like you need an extensive guide on how to use/configure the WB4 to get interesting results... (hint hint)

[Randall]

I think the problem is the number of cities defaults to 20. So if you make a large map, they will be very far apart. You might want to play with the options while using a visible map, until you see how the map creation options work. You may also want to play with the ratio of land/water and the % of land/water on the map overall.