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Starting Location Overhaul

A Mod that overhauls how Starting Positions are assigned.


This mod started with me getting frustrated that I constantly had AIs landing 5 Tiles away from me. It's annoying. Really annoying. I don't enjoy being forced into extremely early wars (especially on Apollo) and especially with the "Staggered Starts"-Option it can be really annoying to have already played 20 turns or so just to have 2 AIs land left and right of your capital. I understand that may be fun for some people - but for me it's not.

- Sponsors will, if physically possible, no longer be spawned close to each other but instead get spread out around the map. In my testings this had a very high success-rate, almost never did I find myself in a situation where there were any AIs on the map that were not separated by at least ~12 tiles between them.
- There's also a joke going around that you can predict where other Sponsors are going to land by looking at the areas with the least resources. (Which seems to be somewhat true and caused by the fact that Luxury Resources from Civ 5 have been removed from the Equation). I made some minor changes here, too - especially starting locations with few food-heavy base tiles get additional basic resources.
- This mod overrides AssignStartingPlots.lua and will be incompatible with other mods that do the same

This mod can easily be imported into the base game by copying the AssignStartingPlots.lua that can be found in the mod folder to:

Steam\steamapps\common\Sid Meier's Civilization Beyond Earth\assets\Gameplay\Lua
(Create a backup of the original file and if you want to play Multiplayer you most restore it first! (Unless everybody uses the edited version))

And that's all you "need" to know if you're only checking in to see what this mod does and if it's interesting for you.
For those who want some more in-depth about the Pros and Cons of this mod, feel free to continue reading.

Changes to Starting Plot Distribution
The game now tries to space out Civs with at least 15 tiles between them (default is 7) - the original Script that decides where to put starting locations basically evaluates every plot and then calculates what areas have a good overall "score". It evaluates many factors, but they're for the most part divided into "How fertile is the area?", "Are there already other starting locations around?" and "Are there Aliens around?".

Of course you can't just magically create new terrain to put Players on, so every change made to lower the chance of spawning "Close to other Civilization" also means that some other Situations are more likely to occur. To have a very high success rate at spreading out Civs I reduced the overall terrain requirements by quite a bit - that means that you're now more likely to start in tundra or desert - however, the script will make up for that by placing bonus-resources, so this should not be much of an issue. The overall fertility of Starting Plots should almost always be higher than what the Standard script creates.

It also increases the likelihood of starting next to "wild areas" (= resource-heavy areas where Alien Nests are spawned) - this is especially true if you add more sponsors to the map than the map is meant to support, or on small water-heavy maps. You still won't spawn IN wild areas, but the chance that you have one of these areas near you is a lot higher now. I think it's a lot better to have an area with Aliens next to you than starting next to another Civ. After all, Aliens will usually not try to invade you and you have the choice to either ignore them or to remove them from the map to free up all the juice resources in their territory.

Given the fact that my changes put a VERY high emphasis on not spawning Civs close to each other this means that the less space that is available (on water-heavy maps for example, or if you put more sponsors than the map-size is meant to support), the bigger the chances of spawning in areas that have the other 2 attributes above. For ideal results you should stick with somewhat standard settings (just like with the original scripts)

Changes to Starting Plot Fertility
I reduced the overall scale of the weights between different map terrains a bit and re-evaluated them. This means that more plots become valid as starting positions, but at the same time the game will try to get them somewhat on the same level by placing additional resources.