THIS GUIDE ASSUMES YOU HATE CLIFFS, LIKE A NORMAL PERSON AND HAVE THEM
TURNED OFF

Before you even press load, it is important to make sure you are on a good map. When in the
pre-game options screen press the "preview" button in the bottom, this will bring up your to-be games map.

From Here, You want to make sure your resources are not all clumped up together or too far away or even there at all. Something like this is an example of a BAD starting area:


This isn't ideal as:

• Copper and Iron are Way too close. This means that electric miners will be harder to place efficiently and you will get less ore as they overlap.
  
• Coal and Stone are very small and miles away from everything else.

To remedy this keep switching seeds using the 'Random Seed' button near the top left of your screen. Keep switching till you find something that you think is good. Like this:

Now this is much better as:

• All ores are relatively nearby
  
• None overlap
  
• Decent size and as a bonus, neatly in rows.
  
• Water nearby

You can tweak ores richness/frequency/size in this menu too which is up to personal prefrences. Also take this time to look around at the surrounding area and make sure there is sufficient ore patches for later game use, if not, keep switching seeds.


Now your starter ore patches are all ready, turn to the surrounding map.
(This next bit of the guide is personal preference) If there is lots of trees and you don't wanna be endlessly removing them, turn them down a little. In the terrain options just turn down their coverage and that should do the trick. Do the same with water if you wish and tweak the coverage/scale settings to your needs.

Trees are a good thing too, unlike water they absorb lots of pollution in the early game well which can aid you against the natives, so leave some to buy you time.

Pollution spreads quicker over deserts than the grassy regions of the map, so if you are worried about that you can change the moisture settings in terrain options.


Again this is down to preference, if you want the game harder you can increase these settings to your liking or if you want the game easier you can turn on peaceful mode in which biters only attack if you provoke them.
If you want more time before fighting you can increase the starting area size which will make the first enemy bases spawn further away. And if you want full stress free game-play? You can just turn them off.


Now this is very important; TURN ON THE RESEARCH QUEUE it is unbelievably helpful to have as you can just queue up your techs and forget.

Here is also where you can change pollution factors or turn it off. You can also set the width and height of the map here too i.e: if your doing a ribbon world play-through. Finally you can also change technology difficulty and recipe costs for a challenge.