For the last few weeks Civilisation V always generates the same kind of boring map: flat land, very few mountains, most of the land desert or tundra. Is there anything that could have caused this? I have not installed any mods or modified the game in any way.
Civilization V map generator
civilization-5
Related Solutions
In the load menu, when you click a saved game, you can see a question mark signifying that your map choice was random. If you hover your mouse over that question mark, the tool-tip will display the actual map type which was chosen:
You can also see a similar graphics in-game by opening the game menu (by clicking the button or hitting Esc), where you can also hover the cursor over the map type to see what it is:
(had to edit the cursor back in because the screenshots won't show it :)
Hover the mouse pointer over the tile you are interested in. After a couple of seconds a popup will appear over the tile, and it will include a line in the form of "owned by England".
So in effect there are two separate "tile information" windows - the one which appears immediately in the bottom-right, and another which appears over the tile itself after hovering. Confusing indeed :)
Best Answer
Did you configure it to be arid and old; or random for everything and just have a run of similar worlds?
You could explicitly set the World Age and Rainfall (from your description, the temperature could have varied a bit) to mix it up.
Configure the settings to a younger earth (3 or 4 Gyr) and temperate or wet rainfall if you want to get away from what you're describing. You can do so on the "Advanced Setup" panel when you configure a game.