4X Do you move your settler?

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

Fun question I saw on the internet while searching for the original SMAC site, about Civ (and civ-like games).
So, do you move your settler?


I used to, but lately I've stopped doing that because I'm starting to think it is ultimately prejudicial.

Here's what they think at Firaxis:

DO YOU EVER MOVE YOUR SETTLER?
By Site Administrator
An average game of Civilization V lasts for hundreds of turns. Starting from a single settler, a player builds his first city, before spreading his nation over the landscape. By the end of the game, the player’s civilization spans continents, oozes culture, peels back the hidden secrets of nature, conquers all, and brings forth the earth’s riches. But at the beginning, most Civ players will tell you they feel very much at the mercy of the world.
Experienced Civilization players know the feeling acutely. The first time you load into a game, you’ve got a view of only a handful of tiles, with the rest of the world obscured by the fog of war. And if you’ve played enough games, you can get a feel right away for what makes for a “good” or a “bad” start. Do you see wheat? Or a river running past the feet of your settlers into the sea? Maybe a hilltop sparkling with gems or copper, or rugged with marble or stone? That’s a good start. Do you see the dark span of tundra (or worse, sheets of polar ice), or a pen of mountains around you? That’s a rough start.
But what about the case where you start in a location, but you can see your proverbial Garden of Eden just a few hexes away? Civilization is a game of hundreds of turns, yes, but it’s also a game of building success upon success. If you don’t settle right away, on turn 1, and begin your empire, are you putting yourself at a permanent disadvantage?
It’s not an easy question to answer. On the face of it, it might seem like for a game that lasts hundreds of turns, taking what amounts to a mulligan on the first turn might not have any effect over the entire game. But many simple systems are subject to radical changes over time due to simple differences in starting conditions. Chaos theory: Weather influenced by butterfly’s wings, or Ian Malcom being chased by dinosaurs, for example. It turns out this question of moving your settler on turn 1 splits the Civilization team, and this is a team that knows Civ, plays a lot Civ, and might be expected to have some insight into the question.
Recently, at a team meeting on gameplay design, one of the members said: “So I saw a better spot and moved my settler…” The reaction was instant. Half the people in the room snorted, or hooted, or yelled whoa whoa whoa. You don’t move your settler. Ever. No matter how nice it looks over there, you’ll get those tiles eventually.
The remaining half of the room countered in support of the speaker. You can’t make blanket statements like “never.” You’re not taking any kind of loss by moving to prime real estate with your first settler. Even if you do take a hit for not having the first turn’s production, you get so much better later on. Why wouldn’t you move? Don’t make blanket statements.
It was a philosophical discussion that derailed the meeting and went on for another 20 minutes until producers (ever mindful of schedule) waded into the fray, tabled the discussion, and returned the meeting to order. Until the moment the meeting ended, when everyone immediately picked up the discussion again.
It turns out that a team that knows a lot about Civ also knows how to answer questions about Civ: Play it out.
Ed Beach is the lead designer and lead gameplay programmer for the Civ V expansion packs, Brave New World and Gods & Kings. He was on the gameplay team for the base game, where he developed a tool that lets him automate Civ V gameplay. For a designer, this tool is crucial for checking balance and feeling out rough ideas with gameplay changes. Ed’s tool takes Civ, and spits out spreadsheets showing the course of a game for each of the AI players over many, many turns. Hundreds of turns, in deep detail for each player – a cold chronology of the alternate history of thousands of games of Civ.
Does moving your settler put you at a permanent disadvantage? Ed knew he had a tool that could address this question. There was just the matter of creating the right experiment. It wouldn’t be necessary to run a full game. The first 100 turns would be enough for any differences to manifest themselves. But it did have to have the clearest conditions to demonstrate a moved-settler effect.
The right setup was a simple world: A duel map (the smallest size), with two Civilizations. The test case Civ would have to be one that didn’t have any major advantage in early game, so Ed picked Brazil. It was important not to have the competitor civ be too aggressive or expansionist, so Ed picked Venice. And then he started to look for the right start.
It turns out that to do this, you just have to restart the game enough times, until you see what you want to see: A slightly crappy opening, with a good spot for a city just out of reach of your settler on turn 1. So worlds cycled as Ed loaded and reloaded world after world, until he got the geography to test questions of destiny.
Ed subscribed to the theory that moving your settler was always bad. In his case, in seeing thousands of games’ results through his tools, it looked like to be competitive you needed to bite the bullet and settle on turn 1. But it was still a question worth addressing.
There were three cases that he had to look at: Case One was Brazil 100 turns after founding its first city on turn 1. This is the control condition. Case Two was Brazil 100 turns after moving to the better city location. Case Three was Brazil 100 turns after simply holding its settler for the first turn and then founding a city in the same location as Case One.
It took 45 minutes to run the simulations. The Olympics played in the background while Civ V autoplayed and Ed’s tools converted the rise and fall of three alternate Brazils into lines on a spreadsheet.
The result surprised Ed. Case Two showed improvement over Case One. Moving a settler to a better area and founding a city on turn 2 can be a good strategy. Ed’s intuition had been wrong in this case.
But it was Case Three that showed a surprisingly weak Brazil, one lingering behind in population, culture (Brazil’s most potent tool in endgame), and technology. In the world of Case Three, something had gone terribly wrong for Brazil. Ed poured back through the spreadsheet, reconstructing the history of the world. What had happened was something that most veteran Civ players can relate to: Brazil had been beaten to a World Wonder around Turn 30.
There is enough flexibility in the AI for Civ that it will consider a variety of approaches. With as many approaches to victory as there are in Civ, most of the time the AI won’t choose the same goals. In this case they did. Both Brazil and Venice had tried to rush the Great Library. But Venice won. In Civ, you get a consolation prize – a small amount of gold – but losing a wonder is decidedly a blow. The opportunity costs of a missed wonder were laid bare on Ed’s spreadsheets, with Case Three’s Brazil languishing behind the other two cases.
So the question of moving your settler is addressed: It can benefit you to do so in some cases. But Ed points to a larger cautionary tale with Case Three. Whiffing on an early Wonder will be worse for you than you might expect. All that production you might have put into Workers, or explorers, or a settler, or growth, all of that will be wasted, the storm that resulted from the butterfly flap of choosing wrongly earlier in the game.
—Pete Murray
If you want to read more about this, then be sure to check out the article in The Escapist.

The Escapist on the subject, link ausent to avoid giving them extra clicks in case that's verbatim:

You Never Move Your Settler! - Opening Strategy Splits Civ V Studio
GREG TITO | 27 FEBRUARY 2014 8:00 PM
"What?! Are you crazy?! You never do that! You fool!"

People got a little crazy during a routine design meeting in the Firaxis Games offices, where the developers of Civilization V take strategy very seriously. A designer talking about his recent playthrough to a large group of his gathered colleagues casually mentioned he didn't like the starting position of his settler so he moved it that turn to look for greener pastures. The reaction was immediate. Half the designers in the room erupted in anger and disbelief - while the other half vehemently defended the move. They ditched what the meeting was supposed to be about, and instead argued for or against a specific move in the first turn of a Civ game. Clearly, this issue was very important. Sid Meier once said that all good games were a series of interesting decisions, and it's a testament to the power of Civilization that even the first decision could evoke such a strong reaction in the current Civ team at Firaxis.

But why? Why is moving your settler or not so important? It's a question I've struggled with in my own time with the series. I spoke to Firaxis to figure that out, and maybe discover if there's empirical evidence to support either decision beyond individual play style. The three developers I spoke to were Ed Beach, lead designer on the last two Civ V expansions, Peter Murray and Dennis Shirk, and they all had very different positions on the Settler Dilemma.

never move settler first turn
"I was on the side saying 'You never move your settler' when he first mentioned it," said Dennis Shirk, longtime producer of the Civilization series. "You never know how everything is going to ripple across the entire game."

The first Civilization came out in 1991, and the series has been a PC gaming staple ever since. Originally designed by Sid Meier, Civ lets you take on the role of a famous cultural group like the Egyptians or the Chinese and guide it through an alternate history from the Stone Age to the Nuclear Age and beyond. You found cities with settlers, and those cities can produce military units or buildings. How quickly these cities grow or research science is directly dependent on the makeup of the landscape around them. And because Civilization is a turn-based game you begin with one single settler, what you do in those first few turns matters. If you don't have a city providing you with culture or science for even one turn, you may be missing out and never be able to recover.

"It is so ingrained in my head," Shirk continued, "how bad it would be to lose out on that early production, culture or food. It feels bad. I can't do it. I have to click 'Found City.'"

"It's also possible to scout a little bit, and maybe just tweak your settler one hex and still settle on the first turn," Beach said. "But the more extreme strategy of going off one to three turns trying to find a better settling spot, the discussion was very heated as to whether that was something you should ever pursue."

Moving your settler a few hexes can be very advantageous though. On a random Civ V map, your starting position usually has a few natural resources like wine grapes or wheat nearby, but the hex you start in might not be able to work them all. Likewise, starting near a coast but not actually adjacent to a sea is a terrible position, because you'll never be able to benefit from building ships or coastal improvements like lighthouses. Moving your settler to the coast in that case is almost always a better start, even if it takes a turn or two.

Designer Pete Murray agrees. "The only thing worse than an obviously bad Civ start is a Civ start that's mostly bad, but has a good city position just a few hexes away," he said. "I've always moved my settler then, because I figure compound interest on a better position will make up the difference. The grass is always greener two hexes away."

The Civilization community at large is just as split as the designers. I put a quick question on Twitter, and received dozens of responses ranging from "Always" to "Never". Most advocated some kind of a compromise in which you explore a bit to see whether moving the settler would be a good idea or not, but many clearly were opposed one way or the other. Notably, the original lead designer of Civ VJon Shafer, now making his own way at Conifer Games, was in the "Never" camp .

Ed Beach, the current lead designer, surmised there had to be a way to test it. One of the tools at Firaxis' disposal is a quick way to simulate games, and Beach decided to use this to get some hard data. The hypothesis? Does founding your first city on turn 2 or later substantially impact the performance of the civilization over the entire game? The science experiment of the Settler Dilemma had begun!

"We needed a clean game environment where you could develop a civ and measure its economic performance under controlled conditions," Beach said, trying to sound as much like a scientist as possible. "I started with a map with only two civs, and made sure the other civ was Venice and it was on another continent. Venice being restricted to only settling one city, I knew it was going to be a while before they started grabbing land from me." For the test civilization, Beach thought it should be one that didn't have any early game benefits to skew results, so he went with Brazil.

Beach had a couple of starts before he got to just the right game state to test the hypothesis. Barbarians were an early problem. Those rampaging fiends ruined the test's economic focus, so Beach turned them off. Then he started the game with three possibilities and then ran through the first 100 turns to see how the different game states were impacted. The first test was founding the city on the first turn. The second was moving the settler to a more ideal location and founding a city on turn two, while the third was a kind of control state of not moving the settler, but delaying founding the city until turn two. Once Beach set those three states up, he ran the simulations and went to watch the Olympics.








When he got back, he was surprised at the results. It was much better to move your settler, at least according to the data Beach collected. The baseline simulation -- settling on the first turn -- fared well, but moving to a more optimal location with more resources ending up being empirically better. The civilization that moved the settler on turn one had more technologies discovered, more social policies, and a higher yield of resources after 100 turns. In contrast, the "control" state of waiting one turn to settle without moving was disastrous. At turn 48, Venice beat Brazil to building the Great Library, and that was a terrible blow to the economy.

The developers of Civ V believe it is better to move your settler to a more optimal location and stubbornly founding the city on turn one is not always ideal. Well, most of them.

"My psyche will never allow me to move my settler on the first turn, regardless of staring cold hard facts in the face," Shirk said with a laugh.

While comparing the three test cases certainly shows it is better to move, the truth is that a suitable location just may not exist on the procedurally generated map you're playing on. "There is a huge risk if you spend the first turn scouting," Beach admitted. "You're pretty sure over that hill there's a better location, but there could be a desert too. It's risky, but we've proved that in right circumstances it definitely will pay off [to move your settler]."

"Moving your settler isn't the only poor decision you can make in the first turns," designer Pete Murray added. "If you get beat to building a wonder [like the Great Library], you can get hosed pretty badly."

It's easy to fixate on that one failure - not getting the wonder built - but it just emphasizes Sid Meier's philosophy even more. Every decision point in Civilizationis an important and potentially interesting one, and these tests proved that even more than just this specific hypothesis. "Not only does moving your settler not hurt you in some cases, but there are many other decisions that could hurt you much worse and it was cool to see one of those illustrated so starkly," Murray said.

Beach decided to have a very focused test, but there could certainly have been more hard data to account for a larger number of permutations. How does the hypothesis of moving your settler hold up with the barbarians on, for example, or if you have a city state close by? Or if you're playing an archipelago as opposed to continents or Pangaea? How do the simulations hold up after a hundred playthoughs, a thousand? Well, that kind of experimentation might be beyond the scope of what Firaxis can accomplish.

"I can't let them keep testing this out, because we have to keep making games," the producer Shirk grumbled, cracking the whip.

"Civ fans are nothing if not full of their own theories on best strategies and we think this is something they are going to run with," added Murray. "We hope this is something our players will take up and continue to define."

So if any of the data sounds off to you, or you can't fathom how moving your settler would do any good, consider this a call to arms. Firaxis and I are interested in seeing your tests and your data. Does the hypothesis hold up after more extensive testing? It's time for some peer review.

I was tickled to hear about a long discussion on a comparably silly and specific topic like moving your settler which derailed all work for the day at the Firaxis offices. The makers of the most widely adored strategy franchise in the industry clearly had an emotional reaction, and that speaks to the excellent foundation laid by Sid Meier. When you talk about tactics or common moves with the crew making Civilization, it's gratifying to see such strong reactions. It's akin to chess masters discussing Fischer v. Kasparov, or baseball managers talking about the intentional walk. And while the specifics of why the Firaxis team got a little heated that day is a little "inside baseball" - pun intended - it illustrates why Civilization is such an important game in the industry. Players debate about Civ strategies on forums like Civfanatics and Apolyton all the time, but the fact that even the current designers care deeply about the details of the game means the Civ series will continue to be successful for a very long time.

If they can stop arguing in meetings and get something done, that is.

 

[spectre]

I remember civ 4 had an "Advanced Start" feature which solved this "dilemma" rather nicely.

While I used to build the city straight away in older civs, cause it wasn't that imporertant. In Civ 3 you would go into full expansion mode straight away anyway, so initial placement in fact didn't matter that much.
The more recent games iusually are bigger on specializing cities and using resources, grabbing an early + food tile might give you an important bit of oomph.
They usually let you start with two units, settler + warrior or scout equivalent, and the settler itself often is pretty mobile (I keep seeing 2 move values very often), which means it's easier to get away with moving the settler at least one tile after scouting with the other unit.
Unless the starting position is horribad though, I tend to settle in the immediate vicinity anyway, maybe making minor adjustments e.g. to get sea access.

 

[Malakal]

Yes, very often, if I see resources I like nearby. Especially in civ5 where certain resources arent even different fro basic tiles.

 

[tuluse]

I remember civ 4 had an "Advanced Start" feature which solved this "dilemma" rather nicely.

While I used to build the city straight away in older civs, cause it wasn't that imporertant. In Civ 3 you would go into full expansion mode straight away anyway, so initial placement in fact didn't matter that much.
The more recent games iusually are bigger on specializing cities and using resources, grabbing an early + food tile might give you an important bit of oomph.
They usually let you start with two units, settler + warrior or scout equivalent, and the settler itself often is pretty mobile (I keep seeing 2 move values very often), which means it's easier to get away with moving the settler at least one tile after scouting with the other unit.
Unless the starting position is horribad though, I tend to settle in the immediate vicinity anyway, maybe making minor adjustments e.g. to get sea access.

The advanced start system was cool.

Someday I want to make a 4x game that combines advanced start with faction generation inspired by Darklands character generation.

 

[Ulminati]

If I can get some really good resources (like, say, marble) by delaying one turn to move the settler, I will usually do so.

 

[Zed]

In Civ V, can't you move the settler one hex and settle in the same (opening) turn? I believe I often do that.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Always. Afterwards in Civ4 I usually fired up the World Builder because I was obsessed with improving the world geography to look and feel better.

 

[tuluse]

If I can get some really good resources (like, say, marble) by delaying one turn to move the settler, I will usually do so.

This exactly.

 

[Metro]

^ That exactly. It's only really prejudicial to you if you're playing on the second highest or highest difficulty where the AI gets massive advantages.

 

[Destroid]

I remember civ 4 had an "Advanced Start" feature which solved this "dilemma" rather nicely.

While I used to build the city straight away in older civs, cause it wasn't that imporertant. In Civ 3 you would go into full expansion mode straight away anyway, so initial placement in fact didn't matter that much.
The more recent games iusually are bigger on specializing cities and using resources, grabbing an early + food tile might give you an important bit of oomph.
They usually let you start with two units, settler + warrior or scout equivalent, and the settler itself often is pretty mobile (I keep seeing 2 move values very often), which means it's easier to get away with moving the settler at least one tile after scouting with the other unit.
Unless the starting position is horribad though, I tend to settle in the immediate vicinity anyway, maybe making minor adjustments e.g. to get sea access.

The advanced start system was cool.

Someday I want to make a 4x game that combines advanced start with faction generation inspired by Darklands character generation.

I think tiagocc0 has something similar planned for Starlife.

 

[DwarvenFood]

95% of the time I do move the settler, just feels the right thing to do.

 

[Spectacle]

I'll definitely spend a turn to move my settler if it means getting access to the sea or a strategic resource. In the early civ games placement was not so important since you were going to carpet the map with cities anyway, but in the later games overexpansion is punished so you really want every city to be as good as possible.

 

[Turisas]

Why move, when you can regen?

 

[Drax]

In the cases I do, it's because there's a good strategic point just out of that first turn's reach, I generally try to look for a grass/river/coast combination (duh)

 

[King Arthur]

I think most people make the mistake of trying to make 'the perfect city'. From Civ 4 onwards your first city always has several resources around it, so by the time you're ready to work them additional settlers will have been produced , meaning that any resources you missed with your first city can be taken up by your others (which you will want to be close by anyway, due to maintenance costs and logistics). The main thing you want to look out for are passive bonuses that come from settling by rivers or on plains hills, as those are huge bonuses in the early game, especially the hills (you get one extra hammer per turn in Civ 4). There are certain resources you want to be near for early growth, but a lot of resources can be ignored for later. Basically you're looking for early game advantages.

In Alpha Centauri and earlier Civ games, the starting locations aren't always loaded with resources, so you would sometimes want to move around a bit. In Alpha Centauri I think having either mineral resources or an obelisk by your first city is extremely worthwhile, as production is your bottleneck in the early game.

 

[Azrael the cat]

My decision-making is as follows:

1. Am I likely to develop this city? If I'm pursuing a massive expansion strategy, and there's more than 1 direction to expand in, then I definitely won't move. Having a crappier first city doesn't matter as I won't be relying on any one city for production early on, whereas it's absolutely critical to get my next settler out ASAP, because of the compound effects upon future expansion (earlier that 2nd settler goes out, the quicker I have 2 cities producing 2 settlers, who will go off and create 2 more, etc.). If conditions indicate that my first city is definitely going to be developed relatively early, then go to 2.

2. Is the alternative site massively better, or just moderately better? If moderate, build, if massive then go to 3.

3. Do I know exactly where I'm going, or do I need to scout? Never ever scout, for the reasons in the article (the 'good spot' might be further than you think). If the good spot is obvious without scouting, then go to 4.

4. Can I occupy that spot, or one almost as good, in my next 2 cities if I expand quickly? If so, then build, as the window in which the alternative site will give me greater production is probably too small to justify the cost. If not, then consider moving to the alternative site.

In practice, this means that I usually only move if I'm just out of reach of the coast or a river. The difference there, for me, isn't the coastal upgrades (they fall into the category of 'I can get those with my next city'). It's that if I don't move, there will be a strip of prime land that is now a 'dead zone' - I won't be able to settle on that strip of the coast for fear of crowding my existing city out of resources, which could mean that there's resources that I will never be able to tap economically. It also creates an easy landing point for an enemy invading from across the sea (not that the AI is any good at taking advantage of it).

 

[TripJack]

i disband that settler faggot and conquer the world with my scout if i can move to a hill or closer to a river or coastline, i usually will

 

[whatevername]

Civ 5 AI sucks so much that thinking about moving settlers should be the last of Firaxis' problems.

 

[Whisky]

Don't Settlers have 2 move points in Civ5?

Well, I wouldn't know. Never moved on from Civ4.

In which case, I only move it if I can still settle that turn. Missing out on one turn of science research just makes me feel awful.

 

[Drax]

But if that extra turn gives you 2-3 more production points I think it's worth it.

 

[Malakal]

It is worth in several cases, mainly when settling opens up special buildings - like settling on hills, near a river, on the coast. It does happen that you can spawn near sea with sea resources but not on the coast, in which case its always beneficial to move. Its also definitely worth it settling in a way that gives you a bonus production point in your capital city (hills earlier, marble or stone resource). Sometimes its good to settle directly on a resource just to have it connected instantly with the right tech - mainly marble and stone which give little benefit from their buildings but matter a lot when building wonders.

 

[Xu Fugui]

I mostly play the older games so this might change if I started playing the new shit. When I began playing I always weighted the loss of turn(s) against the potential gains I could see myself getting by moving my settler but these days I never do unless it's a competitive multiplayer session since I think it's more interesting to just go with whatever you start with. Besides, I'm always as immovable as a mountain when it comes to playing style anyway so I think it's fitting that my very first move is not to move.

 

[oscar]

Civ 4 gives you a reasonable starting position usually but I slightly adjust it if moving one square gets me sea or river access. I get a bit paranoid about losing access to hidden resources if I move though.

Civ 5 AI sucks so much that thinking about moving settlers should be the last of Firaxis' problems.

Indeed, the Civ 5 AI feels far more placid and non-threatening. Do I have to play on a high difficulty to actually have anyone declare war on me?

Even on normal the Civ 4 AI seems to show some awareness e.g neighbours and even distant major powers ganging up on me with large invasions when I was nearing a cultural victory

 

[KoolNoodles]

In my experience, same with Civ5 as in 4. On the higher difficulties(at least two above Prince/Normal), the AI(if aggressive leader) will almost always attack you if you aren't keep up on military/tech. The more positive your diplomacy, the longer you can delay an attack, but being weak militarily is like an automatic trigger. Heck, in one of my games I had a country send a fleet of 30 warships over in a "sneak" attack. My spy had warned me of trouble brewing, and I had some subs park in the ocean to check things out, so I was ready, but it was still interesting and fun. Fleet engagements on that scale happened twice in that game. That alone is miles ahead of Civ4 A.I., which honestly couldn't do anything coordinated related to naval.

 

[oscar]

Damn, I don't want to have to give the AI arbitrary bonuses and cheats just to unlock its full AI.