Gavagai is the last to open his thread

[RefSteel]

The problem is that the start is designed in such away that scouting out the possible avenues of moving is a really awkward thing to do.

Since it looks like you've built your city, I think it should be safe to say: I didn't restrict the scouting intentionally; sorry about that!  On the contrary, if it had occurred to me when I was building this start that the player would consider moving the starting settler, I might have tried to make scouting easier so it could at least be a more-informed decision.

As for destroying the balance of the map, there are many gambits a player can try that could unbalance the game one way or another (or for the RNG to do so, e.g. via the civ/leader picks it makes available, neighbor luck, or early barb spawns and combat) and the mapmakers have little or no control over any of that without getting really heavy-handed about it.  Someone even suggested in the mapmaker's thread (back when the starts were being built) that we could give everyone a pre-built city instead of a settler, but the idea kind of dropped, and I never liked it.  I did want to make the starts attractive, to encourage people to settle in place and give everyone a good running start, but if you'd rejected the start in favor of doing something else, I'd have been okay with that:  A big part of my map-making philosophy is, "It's the player's game; let them play it out."

(Which doesn't mean my philosophy's actually right!)

[Gavagai]

About the start. I decided to settle in place mostly because of the Spices. They give me a free coin which is rather important, given that I have bad starting techs.
News. Met Commodore. This is bad. The thing with Commodore is that he is a lunatic. This is how he operates: he assumes very early on something about his neighbors because of some fucked up "reason" and after that there is no way to move him away from this assumption. He will act on it against all possible evidence. If he now assumes that I want his blood, I am fucked.

[Gavagai]

And, of course, he has a mining civ. Ultra-early rush is not off the table here. I can open Hunting - AH, build a few WCs and wreck his face. I am seriously considering that. This is the second worst possible neighbor after Mackoti.

[Gavagai]

Came up to Commodore's borders with my scout, declared war with the intention to look inside, tried to move in my scout... was asked whether I want to declare war on China!? It turned out that it was not Commodore's borders but Pindicator's who has almost identical colors. Fuck me, game...

[Gavagai]

This is why I dislike these big games. Everyone starts on top of each other, some people miss turns and at least one person opened with warrior. Randomfest.

[Gavagai]

[Gavagai]

The state of the game: already chaotic. I have two neighbors, Pindicator at the very top north, Commodore somewhere nearby, presumably to north-east. My scout was eaten by a lion, despite defending on a hill. Here is the idea, by the way: remove animals from RB mod and may be make human barbs to appear slightly earlier. Because I really do not see what else animals bring into the game aside from a random chance to lose your early scouting.
Plans: second city on the hill 1NW from the Rice. BW is being researched, Hunting and Mining were two first techs.
Global situation: Aretas opended with a warrior and is now forever behind. He has a Hunting civ, btw, he could go warrior-archer. I am not saying that it would be a good idea but he could do that. Just mentioning. At least two more people went religion first what also puts them in a pretty tough spot. I wonder when Monotheism will fall, in PB37 it happened after T100, I think. I, actually, would like to land Judaism (not right now, of course, but at appropriate time) but if I fail, I just use my early prophet to bulb Teo.

[RefSteel]

My scout was eaten by a lion, despite defending on a hill. Here is the idea, by the way: remove animals from RB mod and may be make human barbs to appear slightly earlier. Because I really do not see what else animals bring into the game aside from a random chance to lose your early scouting.

I agree with this almost completely. The faint arguments I can see for leaving animals in would be to provide an incentive to guard early settlers and workers outside of borders and for moving early scouts and warriors onto defensive terrain. But this can be accomplished without lions (and especially bears and panthers) routinely eating scouts and sometimes even warriors, even on the "right" tiles. My suggestion would be [EDIT: on conisderation, better than my first suggestion would be to just reduce animals' strength: Make lions and panthers Str1, bears Str2, and then give bears and wolves say a -50% attack penalty.]

[Coeurva]

I don't see a reason for them, either (might have said this in PB37, certainly felt it). On Monarch difficulty, which has become standard, animals can spawn on T5-T24 inclusive. This period is extended for as long as the average number of cities per player remains < 1.5. After this, the game gradually deletes them and starts spawning barbarians instead.

Differences between animals and barbs: the former start with UNITAI_ANIMAL (which effectively means they don't seek out targets) and attack 90% of the time while suffering a -20% combat malus (iirc the combat log mentions it, but it might be completely hidden). Average animal density is slightly higher than barb density at 35 to 40 unowned land tiles per unit respectively. (These figures are all Monarch-specific except for the 1.5 city average and the 5t grace period at the beginning of the game, which essentially ensures that you can choose not to SIP without risking freak accidents. Animals can spawn within two tiles of the starting settler (MIN_ANIMAL_STARTING_DISTANCE, probably among the most useless global defines in the game).)

If anyone gets out both a settler and worker before T25 without whipping the capital down to size1, congratulations.

Vision rules already reward putting scouts on hills, the trade-off being that you might have moved via flatland onto a better-positioned hill thus revealed. Same goes for whether to enter a forest, sacrificing movement, to scout more promising terrain next turn. Animals aren't needed for this.

[Gavagai]

This is happening: