Civ comes packed with options enough for a life of gaming by themselves. What are the maps you play like?

Most of the time I have played the default Continents with average conditions. You get variety enouth, with the ocassional island and large islands and some chokepoints. A solid generalistic map.

Then, other variants are interesting, like for example the one with the inner sea, if you feel like living in the old Mediterranean again. There are others: fractal, archipelago (if you want to try something like the leguinian Earthsea), etc.

With the GOG install I am giving a shot to Earth2. With the "rocky" climate setting, as suggested in the description. It makes maps full of interesting features. Full of strategic points, chokepoints and landmarks. It invites to you name the features, like in Alpha Centauri--did you know that you can do it in Civ IV? It really adds to the game.

For these large maps I would suggest the slower paces in the settings, at least the intermediate between normal and epic (the one that takes longer but still feels like a normal Civ game). Although it might be interesting to try the one that makes each age take what normal Civ IV games last.

After all these years, this game can still surprise the player with happy findings.

So, what have you been trying? What do you like more so far?

My favourite map script is Fractal because of its unpredictability. You don't know in advance how many landmasses there are in the world, or how big they are. Starting locations are unpredictable as well -you might even start isolated.

I have also enjoyed the Tectonics script. It creates very attractive shapes, and even chokepoints, so controlling certain regions of the map becomes crucial.

In CivFanatics you can find a script called Scenario World. Even though it's a script, it works like an Earth scenario where every civ starts in its correct location, but it works with every civilization up to Beyond the Sword, and you can choose how many and which ones you want to be in the map.