Freeciv

One of the first times I started the civ2civ3_earth modpack (2.6 v2017_09), I immediately got a message "The Aztecs are no more!" (I was not the Aztecs.)

This ruleset has animals. I suspect that wild animals got the Aztecs immediately. This would have been quite annoying for them, had they been a human player.

I haven't reproduced this symptom in 34 trials with the earth-160x90-civ2civ3 scenario nor 17 of earth-80x50-civ2civ3 (and default settings), but I certainly had starts where I had animals in my vision radius and would probably have been lucky to survive, had I played on (example attached). I haven't thought about who gets to move when, but I have seen what appeared to be animals moving at the start of the first turn.

If I bump 'animals' modestly (from 20 for 50), I can readily reproduce this. In the attached savegame, the Chinese died immediately, and the savegame's event cache is full of skirmishes between animals and players, including "Your attacking Tiger succeeded against the Chinese Settlers (and 3 other units!)" Which is surely all of them.

It would be in keeping with other barbarians to start animal units some distance away from players.

create_animals() happens after start positions are determined (indeed, after players are assigned and startunits placed). It already doesn't place animals directly adjacent to other units/cities (including other animals, as it happens). However, civ2civ3_earth's animals typically have move_rate 2, so that's not much comfort.

Perhaps we should have a bigger distance between animals and any start units / cities / positions; either some hardcoded distance, or taking their move_rate into account and trying to avoid animals meeting other players for a certain number of turns. (Bearing in mind startunit dispersion.)