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Thursday, March 06, 2025
How to get a good map in Civilization VII
So patch 1.1.0 of Civ 7 released this week, and with it the first part of the Crossroads of the World DLC. Among other things, this gives us a new civilization to play in the antiquity: Carthage. And that quickly turns out to highly dependent on a good starting position, because Carthage has two features that are working at cross-purposes: Carthage forces you to play "tall", with just a single city, and no way to upgrade other settlements to cities. But at the same time it has special buildings that need to be constructed on coastal tiles. If you would, for example, put your starting city directly next to a straight piece of coast, the production building you can get with Carthaginian civics would give awesome production; but with so many water tiles and just one city, where do you build all your other buildings and especially wonders? On the other hand, putting Carthage inland would obviously also be a bad idea. You need a map with a starting position that is just a bit away from the coast to get the perfect Carthage.
While there is discussion of a future feature that lets you "reroll" your start with the same selected leader, civilization, and settings, right now you need to go a slightly more complicated way to do that: Under the "Confirm" tab of the "New Game", after selecting your leader and civilization, you need to go to "Advanced Options". There you find your current Game Random Seed and Map Random Seed. What I do to search for a good starting position is set both of these seeds to something easy, like 1. Then I use the "Save Config" button, save that configuration, and then "Launch Game".
You can either play a few turns to see how your starting positions is, or alternatively you can enable the debug console and use the "Reveal All" button under "Debug" and "Map". If you are happy with your starting position, just reload the autosave from the start of the turn. If the position is bad, you quit to main menu, go to "New Game" again, but this time just go directly to "Confirm", "Advanced Options" and "Load Config". There you can change the map seed (which determines basic geography) and game seed (which determines AI opponents, but that can change your starting position). I then usually save the configuration again to keep track of it, and then launch the game again. Repeat until you have a good starting position. You might consider that cheating, but believe me, playing Carthage with a bad starting geography will be no fun at all.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:22 PM Permanent Link
