I hate you!

 Well at least they would have a lot of fish Best bet for your people? to become pirates and raid the coastal cities, and hope the other nations dont upgrade their units with the Amphibious upgrade to take their last city... Stupid Civ IV strategies of mine 

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?  

Maybe they can specialize in fishing ...
And turn into an Atlantis before its fall!

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

No no no! It could be worse. We could be starting on a boat!

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.

So that is how you devs plan on winning the multiplayer games... nice move!

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

There can be some fun in horrible biased starting locations, not to the degree shown above of course. But imagine if you started in a fleet of ships fleeing from your homeland which has become conquered and occupied.

Where that fleet lands will have a profound effect on the growth of your empire. You could return to your home continent and set up shop in an isolated by well defensible region. Or colonize an island with all the related pros and cons.

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.  

Maybe an option or a function of difficulty level. If you were playing at Impossible difficulty level, maybe a starting position like the one above (not quite so nasty) would be a possibility.

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.

That would be grand, rather than just changing settings for all players, the advanced players will perhaps be put in tougher starting locations, and the noob/easy players will be in more forgiving location.

Another example I can think myself using is a 3 player (or more) game where 2 players are vetrans, and the 3rd player is not.  So the vetrans are placed in tough locations where they likely are going to have to deal with other enemy AI channelers, but the new player will be placed on an island by himself of reasonable size so he can actually turtle or something without being under early constant pressure.

ALso, don't call it 'easy' 'normal' 'hard' for something like that, since it wouldn't really be accurate (its just starting location) so something a bit more subtle like 'warlord' 'turtle' 'early start' and such would be better.

added note:  Thanks so much Boogie bac.   I have caught myself looking over and over again at that little picture of a town on an island.   To me it means "it is coming" and the game feels closer than ever before it isn't some 'official screenshot' but rather something pulled from what must be a playable* game.   I am just so happy  Maybe its just because I've been talking so much about this possible pre-beta frogboy alluded to having, so anything makes it seem closer.   But still.

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.