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Distant Multiplayer Start

9th March 2018: The mod is fully compatible with the March 2018 Civ VI update. Enjoy!

9th February 2018: Mod has been updated for full compatiblity with the latest version of the Civ VI base game, and the Rise & Fall expansion pack.

Rearranges the starting positions of human and AI players, to spread the human players apart. This gives them more time to develop their civilizations before they meet each other.

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Read the documentation below to ensure that your mods are compatible.


A new checkbox will be present on your Multiplayer Game Setup screen, allowing you to enable or disable the mod for each multiplayer game. (See the screenshot above)


Initial starting positions are generated for all human and AI players by Civ VI as normal. At this point, the mod steps in and analyses all possible combinations of x starting positions (where x is the number of human players) to find the combination which is most spread out. Human players are then swapped into those starting positions before the game starts.

Source code is visible here: https://github.com/kevincoghlan/distant-multiplayer-start/blob/master/DistantMultiplayerStart.lua


This mod is incompatible with any mod which overrides the 'AssignStartingPlots.lua' file.

Examples:

• The 'Yet (Not) Another Maps Pack' (YnAMP) mod.
  
• Any 'better starting positions' mod. This includes the various community fixes for the 'too close together' start positions bug introduced by the Fall 2017 Civ VI update, and supposedly fixed in the November 2017 Civ VI update.

Running the mod alongside an incompatible mod will break the functionality of one mod or the other, since only one version of the 'AssignStartingPlots.lua' script will be applied by the game. It is recommended to only run one of these mods at a time. This can be done by clicking 'Additional Content' on the Civ VI main menu and then enabling/disabling specific mods.

It is possible to verify that this mod is working by examining your Lua log file, as described in the 'HOW DO I KNOW IF THE MOD WORKED?' section at the bottom.


Typical map types such as Continents, Fractal, Pangaea, etc. should all work fine with this mod.

As you would expect, the mod has no effect on special maps where all civilizations start in a fixed position, such as 'True Start Location Earth'.

Some custom map packs may be incompatible with this mod, as described in the 'INCOMPATIBLE MODS' section above.


The maximum number of players supported by Distant Multiplayer Start is the same as the number of players officially supported by the Civ VI base game: twelve players in total, including both human and AI players.

The current version of the mod will disable itself if more than 12 players are present. This is a safety measure, as the current version of the mod was not built to handle that number of players. The complexity of analyzing so many starting position combinations could potentially lead to a game crash.

In the future, enhancements may be made to allow the mod to handle more than the officially-supported 12 players.

At least one AI player must be present for the mod have any effect, since the mod works by rearranging human and AI players to maximize distance between the human players.


In order to achieve maximum distance between the human players, the mod ignores the terrain starting bias that is normally applied to some of the civilizations.

For example, Russia is more likely than other civilizations to start the game in tundra terrain. But with this mod enabled, Russia might be swapped to a different starting terrain if this is necessary to maximize the distance between the human players.

If terrain starting bias is important to you, you may prefer not to use this mod. Alternatively, you could restart the game until all players are happy with their starting terrain.

(It is interesting to note that several civilizations, such as Germany, have no terrain starting bias.)


After you have started a multiplayer game with the mod enabled, you can check the Lua.log file on the host's computer to see if the mod has taken effect. On a Windows machine, this log file can be found in Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization VI\Logs.

If the mod has worked, you will see log messages similar to the following:


New features may be added to the mod in future, or improvements upon existing features. For example, special handling for teams of human players is under consideration as a new, optional function. This would allow teams of human players to start close to each other, while also starting far away from other human teams.