^Yea, capitals shouldn't be on bonus tiles and I shouldn't have to pay taxes either.

DARCA

I like one of Earth seeds I've seen - most hexes available for construction were in seas and oceans. Initial colony was in south Atlantic. What, our descendands grew fins?

  So true! I had this too. I particularly liked that the ocean tiles in question were classified as prairie lands and mountains. 

I also like Stalker0's idea of choosing where the initial colony goes when you colonize the planet. I think this makes perfect sense and solves a bunch of issues. Although admittedly the initial colony on your starting world should probably still be placed by computer.

But what if (unlikely I know) all the available tiles are bonus tiles? Maybe the player should be able to choose where to put the initial settlement, with an option for automatic placement

Schaefespeare raises a good point though. If it's symptomatic of a general problem with how the AI places facilities, then manual settlement placement would only solve part of it

I agree. If we can't cure the disease we can at least treat some of the symptoms. And to be honest, manual settlement placement should be an option anyway if not necessarily the method of settlement placement

Well right now it's not AI placing the colony, it's a random number generator.

Other possible solutions:

1. Designate the colony space when the planet is generated at the beginning of the game. The original colony would always appear on the same space no matter when or who colonizes the planet. The designated colony space would never have a bonus. This is pretty much a stand-alone solution, but minimizes multiple save/load cycles trying to roll a good placement

2. The colony placed manually by the player, and using the internet-based adaptive AI to data mine player strategies for the AI players to use. A simple algorithm could probably work without the adaptive AI, but I'd love to tie it in to 3, 4 and 5.

3. The colony building *benefits* from whatever bonus tile it's on.

4. The colony building counts as an adjacent building for all other types of building. It has manufacturing, research, food, morale, and economy attributes and should be counted as a level 1 of each of those types for adjacency purposes.

5. The colony building itself can benefit from adjacent buildings; surrounding it with factories could create a massive manufacturing planet.

Combining 2, 3, 4, and 5 would turn the colony building from the current liability into a huge asset.

Initial colonies already provide +1 level to any adjacent building, so consider this part of your request granted. I agree that 3 and 5 should be there as well, if we're not going to guarantee that the initial colony only spawns on a tile which is never adjacent to anything and never has a bonus. 2 is fine by me, as well. I don't know that I'd consider the initial colony a 'huge asset' if 2, 3, and 5 were added; at only +1 level to adjacent structures it's no better than any other structure for a highly specialized planet build, and depending on just how the level bonuses it would get from 5 work out, it could be a slight liability in a specialized cluster by reducing the total bonus from levels added to the specialty multiplier. On the other hand, it would in general be an asset for mixed and balanced planet builds.

Option 1 seems like the only decent alternative to option 2 or the combination of options 3, 4, and 5; if options 3 and 5 are implemented, then 1 and 2 are unnecessary, though the implementation of 2 would be appreciated, and I don't see much point in having only one or two of options 3, 4, and 5 implemented; with those three, I tend to feel that it should be all of it or none of it.

Absolute worst is the Hyperion Matrix on any kind of food bonus tile (especially the 300% ones), built on the Thalan homeworld. You can't get rid of it, and it boosts the population cap so astronomically that there's no reasonable way to control the approval rating of the planet. But yes, some work on the improvement-placement portion of the routines would be appreciated, especially since improvements and tile bonuses on adjacent tiles now matter when building things, in addition to what's on the tile you're improving.

I actually don't know that this is terribly unlikely anymore, as Mountainous, Arid, and Grasslands tiles each carry a tile bonus before you add any special resources, and I'm fairly certain that I've seen planets where half or more of the tiles available were one of those three types (Mountainous and Grasslands are a pain to find, though, since they display no differently than the default prairie tiles).