If you haven't seen this in a million games you have NOT been leading the orange or the purple civs very often when playing Small World! I have seen this once or twice on a medium map - never on a large one.

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once I got five (5) starting techs and two settlers
and a small (less than 20 tiles) peninsula,
connected to south pole and I was playing
on a large map. the peninsula could only support
two cities. once I found another continent to
build my cities, I got my game going, but the start
was pretty hard.

It was very funny.

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Its cold outside, there's no kind of atmosphere

I accept polar starts. You don't have to find land to make them viable.

The development of the AI seems to be slower (that's just observation, not calculation) so it is my suspicion that there are more "balancing" features built in to favour a human player who is lagging behind early - over and above the bonus techs at the outset and the delay to the adverse balancing features cutting in.

Polar starts make for a different game. Lighthouse goes up in the pecking order of early wonders (getting an early wonder working a polar special is not difficult - there's not much else worth building), the tech path must favour seagoing advances and exploration obviously goes even higher in the priority list. Moving capitals is also firmly on the agenda.

OK, you won't always win but you won't be humiliated by that early barb incursion either.

Ken

P.S. forgot to say that I don't play on small worlds. Standard large or 75 x 133 is the usual, plus whatever is in a scenario.

Small World
Archipelago
Cool
Arid
3 bil. years
Greeks

We walked around and finally found a single beaver square. The whole point of our civ was to get map making, then build beaver-skin boats, and get the heck off the ice. I was only clowning around in that game, but it was still fun.