Just to be clear, you do realize that ONLY the center square of your city should be the numbers you are worried about. All the squares show the total for themselves and the 8 around them. So far the group consensus seems to be aim for a 5,2 square (5 grain, 2 production).

Now, if you realize this and are just saying you are getting some very bad choices for buildable land, then yeah. Have had a couple games like that (nothing better than a 3,2 available after searching for 10-20 turns) and just said, "f it... starting over"

On SEVERAL restarts, I couldn't get that much on the center eight ring. But you do realize that your city's influence expands out, right?

Seriously, REALLY bad starts--- with more than half the tiles showing NO use when "Settle" was highlighted. If more than half of the tiles WHERE YOU ARE STANDING for your first city are unusable, that's a "DO NOT SETTLE HERE". And that's counting the adventure areas as eventually being usable (as they will disappear once explored/quested).

Doesn't matter though--- I can't get a good empire game going. Black maps with lots of super strong monsters that you don't know are there tracking and attacking you, killing you repeatedily is definitely no fun as well. I'm up to 70 restarts--- and that is no exaggeration. The beta is hateful of being played so far. It is truly amazing how this game hates being played at the moment. I hope that's just my RNGods having fun.

Balancing a start for these type of games has always been a very hard challenge, so I am not overly worried about that at this time.

I may not have much insight into Fallen Enchantress at the moment, but I've got a lot of experience with the original and three decades of experience with empire growing world conquest games (predating Civ1). So it doesn't take me long to clue in on these things.

Lol? I died only once to random overpowered monster killing my first city together with all my troops.

All the other games are about exploring and looking for easy kills and goodies at first and then killing stronger and stronger opponents. Oh and don't auto-resolve, you never want to auto-resolve until you got an unkillable lvl 20+ Hero.