Does Spain have a bias for natural wonder proximity after all ?

[Predacivs]

As far as I know, Spain officially has a only a coastal starting bias. However I have been getting the impression of having a noticeably higher probability for natural wonders playing Spain than with any other civ.

Wanting to clarify this suspicion, I have launched over 40 different games and respectively checked the map for gettable natural wonders around the starting location using the ingame editor mod.

Results were as follows:

- Natural wonder in direct proximity of starting location: 0%

- Closest natural wonder within a radius of 6-7 tiles from starting location: 33%

- Closest natural wonder within a radius of 8-11 tiles: 52%

- Closest natural wonder within a radius of 12-20 tiles: 5%

- No natural wonder at all within a radius of 01-20 tiles: 10%

- Two natural wonders within a radius of 01-20 tiles: 70%

- Three natural wonders within a radius of 01-20 tiles: 20%


Spain was additionally in aprox. 90% of the cases clearly the closest civ to the respective natural wonder.

Conclusion: It seems to me that there is in fact a significantly higher chance for settling the second city close to a natural wonder choosing Spain.

Of course a similar battery of tests would have to be repeated with every single civ for better statistical certitude, but I checked in every case the starting locations of the other civs with the ingame editor and Spain almost always appeared to have better odds for close natural wonders.


Does this match your experiences so far?


Weird fact: Despite of the supposed coastal starting bias, I got in 45% of all the cases an interior starting location (always on a river only in one case on a one-tile-lake)!

[Panic Fire]

Nope. I've played spain quite a few times on an interior of an island with 0 natural wonders near me.. Random is random.

[Jarred]

Originally posted by Panic Fire:

Nope. I've played spain quite a few times on an interior of an island with 0 natural wonders near me.. Random is random.

same here

[Nopoe]

Nope. Thats why its called the spanish gamble sadly

[Malvastor]

I've played Spain a few times; the first two were fairly close to natural wonders, while on the third I didn't find one until I was ready to found a second city.

[PhailRaptor]

Insufficient sample size.

[retjero]

Good subject Predacivs. Your sample size may not satisfy all the statisticians, but many posters have made strong claims based on far less data.

[JasonmmLVNV]

I only play spain ... your selection of map is important in this regrad ... I also found the game difficulty level to affect wonders spawns

some maps are better than others

I think the world map , you can spawn in NA and find 3 workable wonders and find 2 more pretty fast

I play the 4 cornors map , restart till you spawn somewhere in the middle of the map , you will be happy ... I think I was the 1st to find 7 wonders once

if you really want to spice things up , add a natural wonder mod - few more wonders - slightly more powerful - nothing OP

play a 'classical' start where you start on turn 75 with the extra spearman
and pick social policy that gives you the extra worker ( turn 1 , dont wait till turn 2 )

now use the spearman and 2nd worker as defacto scouts to find more wonders faster

dont forget to use worker boats as early game scouts

I have played games on the hardest level where I could get 6 cities up and running in 25 turns

I think I know what you want to do , and it can be done , just need to find the right map

I play on epic speed and on the hardest and 2nd hardest level

another trick to combat the cheating AI

if your really good and really fast , your only going to find 10-16 goodies huts , under game options , select new random seed , now quick save your game ( f11) and reload till you find a good hut , 80 gold or 30 culture is alot better than a map of the area

its sucks and you might have to relaod a few times , but its sooo worth it , at this level the AI cheats , so you need to cheat back ( just a little )

gl jay

[Predacivs]

Originally posted by Jasonmm:

I only play spain ... your selection of map is important in this regrad ... I also found the game difficulty level to affect wonders spawns

some maps are better than others

.......

gl jay

Thanks for your input!

You are right. I used in all cases my habitual settings which are:

- Marathon
- Huge map
- Continents or Pangea (50/50)
- Emperor
- Raging barbs
- Low sea level

Since I usually play MP and this was of course all single player, I wonder if this could have any effect on the map generation and natural wonder spawning.

In fact, until now I have mostly avoided Spain in MP games and I am precisely trying to figure out this civ's possible potential I wasn't aware of.

Sadly Spain's UA is weakened in marathon since you get the same amount of gold for finding natural wonders as in standard speed, which does not appear to be fair at all.

[Damsteri]

Simple answer: No. All civs has just one terrain based starting bias, nothing more.

Map generation and placing the civs to the map is done separately. You can save a map and use it in an another game with other civs. The map and possible starting locations will remain the same in that case. Map is not generated based what civs are in the game and civs are not placed using any other means than their terrain based starting bias. And... civs are always placed to predetermined starting locations.

Map is generated first and natural wonders are set to the map and also map is divided to areas and possible starting locations are marked for those areas. Then later, civs are placed to those marked starting locations, based on their terrain starting bias.

You can check the map generation file by yourself (use text editor, like notepad++ or similar), it can be found from here: ..\Steam\SteamApps\common\Sid Meier's Civilization V\Assets\DLC\Expansion2\Gameplay\Lua\AssignStartingPlots.lua. That is the path of the BNW version of the script, there are separate scripts for all three versions of the game, with some differences. The developer has wrote quite nice description what the script does, which starts from the line 9945 (BNW version).

[Sonny Crockett]

i usually play at Earth large map and the only game i've played with Spain started me in USA around their 3 wonders (around the center of the country with Old Faithfull,Barringer Crater and another one)

[Damsteri]

Originally posted by EST 19XX:

i usually play at Earth large map and the only game i've played with Spain started me in USA around their 3 wonders (around the center of the country with Old Faithfull,Barringer Crater and another one)

Yes, some maps (like Earth) has fixed natural wonder locations. Spain is quaranteed to have a natural wonder in Earth maps which has fixed natural wonders and use true start locations (TSL), because then Spain starts next to the Rock of Gibraltar natural wonder. Well, Spain is just too powerful on those maps where you know all natural wonder locations when the game is started.

[Predacivs]

Originally posted by Damsteri:

Simple answer: No. All civs has just one terrain based starting bias, nothing more.

......

Well, thanks a lot for shattering my illusions, pal! I hope, I can return you the favor sometime...

The worst thing, is that you actually seem to know, what you are talking about, while the generation file you pointed out, had for me nearly the same informative value as a chinese newspaper without any pictures.

It seems, I'll have to try to reconcile your technical facts with my empirical experiences, that suggested otherwise to me so far.

[cerberusiv]

On non-Earth maps Spain may have a slightly better chance of getting a natural wonder than a civ without a coastal start bias because several wonders (Rock of Gibraltar, Krakatoa and Great Barrier Reef, also Sri Pada) only occur in coastal tiles or next to water. I doubt whether this is significant though as you would have to have one of them in the game to start with and all can spawn in out of the way locations (Krakatoa particularly).

I'm not sure how any other wonders are restricted to certain terrain types (Sinai occurs in desert areas, Barringer crater seems to favour tundra) but that might favour civs with different starting biases. Not a significant factor though and not enough to base any strategy or civ choice on.

[Damsteri]

Originally posted by Predacivs:

Originally posted by Damsteri:

Simple answer: No. All civs has just one terrain based starting bias, nothing more.

......

Well, thanks a lot for shattering my illusions, pal! I hope, I can return you the favor sometime...

The worst thing, is that you actually seem to know, what you are talking about, while the generation file you pointed out, had for me nearly the same informative value as a chinese newspaper without any pictures.

It seems, I'll have to try to reconcile your technical facts with my empirical experiences, that suggested otherwise to me so far.

Your empirical work has still value. It's all about Civ V's random generator... which sucks. I don't know exactly why, but Civ V's random generator doesn't give good random values. I have noticed many times that random generator gives same natural wonders or same AI civs in games if you start new games in very short interval. For example: If you start a new game and see a natural wonder X near you, then that natural wonder would be in a new game too very likely if you start a new game. Also get the same leader as previous time if "play now" button is clicked when leader is set as random. Random generator clearly lean towards some numbers on one day others on other day.

I planned to do an empirical reseach about game start setting and the effect of the random generator, but didn't do that. It would require something like 100 game starts per day, 10-20 days on row, or similar settings which gives lots of data. And then researching how random those values (natural wonders, civlizations, city states, etc.) really are. It would take maybe hour or two per day to collect that data, if dubug mode is used to reveal the map (for visual check) and some additional comment lines are added to that script file for easy data collection.

Well... but that would partially useless, because all I really need to check would be checking how the random generator works in the code, but that is in the game's core code, which is much harder to read and understand than that "simple" scriptfile, which is not the easiest one to read either.

Humans often see complexity in things that are very simple. Our brains are too effective to accept that something simple can produce complex results.