When you start a game of Farthest Frontier, you select some settings for the map and the difficulty. From that, a random map is generated. And while playing Farthest Frontier, I fell into a pattern that is familiar for me with games that have random maps: I play the game for a while, find out how the game works, find that the map isn't great, or I made a mistake choosing my starting location, and thus reroll the map and start over. That can happen several times, until I finally have a map I am really happy with. With Farthest Frontier, I am now on the third game where I have been playing for more than 1 hour, and had a number of rerolls to get there. In particular, my first game didn't have any sources of sand, and my second map had a sand pit which turned out to be a "deep" sand pit, that you can't use until much later in the game. As sand is important to modify the fertility of your fields, I was only happy with my third map that had sand attainable from tier 2 on.

Farthest Frontier is good for rerolling maps, as it shows you a large part of the map after creating it, before you choose a starting location. In other games, e.g. Civilization or Age of Wonders, you only see a very small part of the map at the start, and it is hard to tell whether the location is any good. Then I need to either play a few turns just scouting before rerolling, or I save the game, use a cheat to reveal the map, and then reload with the fog of war back on when I am happy with the map. I admit that it is a bit of a weird obsession of mine to want to have a "good" map in these kind of games. A lot of people just take the random map / starting location as part of the game they need to accept. However, I have played too many of these games where it turns out much later that some "bad" maps can lead to very annoying situations which make me abandon that particular run. So I am preempting that by rerolling the map.

I am playing Farthest Frontier while waiting for the Civilization VII update 1.4.0, Test of Time, this evening. I am not sure why they didn't call it 2.0, because it really is a kind of relaunch of the game, after the first launch wasn't a big success. I didn't mind that you had to switch civilizations in Civ 7 1.0, but the transition between eras was jarring, the "victory conditions" between eras and at the end weren't much fun, and the whole thing felt rather restrictive. As patch 1.4.0. changes all that, I want to give Civ 7 another try sometimes in the coming weeks. Maybe not on the first day, I'll wait for the inevitable hotfix first and watch some reviews too. But I am sure that this will be another game where I will be rerolling maps until I find one I like.