I hate you!

Pre-beta feedback:   Map generation should check to ensure starting cities are not isolated on an island all by their lonesome (unless you are about to build into the ocean)

Man, I want my floating landmass spell.

So, I am interested to see how other feels about that.   Obviously the above should never happen.   However how balanced do we want starting locations?    I like my games (Be it Civ IV, Master of Magic, random HoMM map, or just Settlers of Catan) to have a bit of that randomsness on map creation so I can say "man, I won because  I got a really good starting location" or "that was  a good game, my starting location wasn't that grand either, so I had to rush navy to get to that other gold-mine of an island"

Now, I'm sure you could make map creation calculate to get a REALLY balanced map.  Example:  AI > This red player city has xx points of resources on its starting location, and it has 3 level 1 dungeons, and 1 level 5 dungeon nearby.  There are also 5 crystals/nodes with 3 being his element.        This other city for player green, is about the same, +3 resources, -1 node, but otherwise balanced.     Yellow picked to be "hard" difficulty, so he gets -1 node, -3 resources, and only a level 3 dungeon.

So the random map generator could FORCESplayers to have balanced starting positions.    Is that what we want?  

We definatly have some awesome things in the works for ensuring your first few turns are interesting....they're just not implemented yet (obviously) 

I'll see your Dev Tease, and raise you one Insane User Demand.

Please, indeed, do whatever you can to polish map-gen code so that horribly crappy starting locations are as rare as possible.

But it seems to me that Elemental, being a fantasy TBS, has the room to build some foundation mechanics that would enable an average player to start on one frakkin' tiny island and still have a chance to do well. It worked for Crete in the boardgame version of Civilization. I want the PC descendants to catch up.

It'd actually be quite nice if we could have some ability to influence our starting locations (while keeping the rest of the map totally randomly generated) just for roleplaying reasons, I remember in MoM once wanting to play as a civilisation that started out on top of a lone mountain in the middle of a vast plain... anyway long story short I had to restart the game like a hundred times to make that happen totally at random .. a little OCD I know but you get my point

I agree.    jonny said something about being able to influence starting position, such a thing would be nice.   I of course have no idea what you have to ensure it is 'interesting' for us, boogiebac.   However if there was some sort of map options that let us influence it that would be awesome.  

It might be interesting for one or two of the factions to start off without a city, and without the ability to create one until they trade/buy/steal/capture the abiltiy from another player.  However, they could start off with a large, war-like population.  Think "German barbarians" around 300-500 A.D.  Whole peoples on the move: that sort of stuff.

You're in luck (at least partially)! There was a thread a long time ago, and I quote the relevant part here:

So if you want to start out in an unlikely situation (or any particular situation at all, really) you can design a small region and tell the random map generator to incorporate that piece you created into a larger random map. This would only work if we can also choose the starting location using this method. If we can (I hope we can!), it will be awesome. Much better than the usual method of generating a random map and then editing a small portion of it to suit your desires.

WHAT I just want a.... DAMN ISLAND FOR MY SELF!.... MINE!

Cheers piDgeon!. .tee hee hee.. I'm just joshing you, couldn't resist

But yeah that does sound promising. It might be a bit of a tricky balancing act to implement this feature exactly as I would want it as ideally I'd like to be able to choose my starting location but then have no idea what exists anywhere else as I love to explore the random world. I can imagine that might make it tough for the game to know where to slot that little "stamp" that I've created in so that it will make sense and allow me to start on it without just showing me the whole map and allowing me to choose a starting location that way.

You are honor bound now, sir.

Not necessarily. In every map editor I've ever used, it lets you set starting locations. In this case, if you design a 'stamp' you should also be able to place a player's starting location on it. Then, if you choose to incorporate said stamp into a random map, that player's starting location will be on that stamp, wherever the RMG decides to put said stamp. Problem solved!

The only random map generator I've ever used that I would actually call great was the one for HoMM 3, but even that had a lot of room for improvement. There were certain things it would do that were very predictable.

Whats HoMM 3, and what was the random map generator like?