Just wrapped up my first game. Chieftain, playing Persians (Scientific/Industrious just matches my play style so well) vs. 7 other civs on a huge map. Cultural Victory in 1834, just getting into the Modern era having constructed every pre-modern Wonder.:king:

Some random thoughts about that game:

The resource distribution is seriously whacked out. I controlled about a quarter of the map, and in that area, the total luxury resources were 7 squares of Dye, all in the same 5x5 area. The total strategic resources were 3 horses, 1 saltpeter, and 1 iron (fortunately, none ever ran out). No oil, no coal, no rubber, no aluminum, no uranium. Given that there's supposed to be some minimum number of each resource in existence (like 2 per civ, IIRC), that is seriously weird - and annoying, too.:mad: :cry: :confused:

If you're a Democracy, sometimes you'll be called "Mr." Just Mr. For example, "Mr., Persopolis is growing slowly." (Well suprise, show me a size 28 city that's growing FAST and I'll be really impressed) Obviously supposed to be "Mr. <insert player name here>," but it isn't.:rolleyes:

My Science Advisor must be snorting something rather potent. He ALWAYS kept whining about how I needed to increase science funding to keep up in the technology race. Even when I was two full eras ahead of everyone else and churning out the advances like clockwork every four turns. Eh, Sid, pull your little virtual advisor head out of your little virtual advisor rear end... :rolleyes: (In case you hadn't noticed, the Science advisor IS Sid)

Barbarians are very useful. :goodjob: I set it on "Raging" and all they ever managed to do was give me a bunch of Elite units. If I'd ever bothered to go to war (or for that matter, if I'd ever found anyone worth going to war WITH) I would've gotten about a dozen Great Leaders easily - since I could have attacked, by the end of the game, with 42 assorted Elite units.

Barbarians can sometimes be utterly shocking. :eek: Consider this situation - late Industrial Age, all of my home continent is inside my borders except two unproductive peninsulae (one all tundra, one jungle and mountains). I get a message about a major barbarian uprising near the city at the base of the jungle peninsula. I didn't think much of it until they spilled into view - from both peninsulas, which were separated by something like 75 tiles distance. I kid you not, there were over 100 barbarian Horsemen coming off those two peninsulas! 127, to be exact, I counted them. Oh, and one Warrior. Of course, they all died, since they were trying to attack fortified Riflemen in metropolises, but some intresting things happened first. Like my Elite Horseman who got cut off by their appearance, ended up fighting 24 enemies at once, and actually killed 15 before going down. Or the Regular Warrior (I couldn't upgrade them, so I still had some Warriors sitting around) who was defending against 13 Horsemen attacking across a river into Tundra - and killed them all, becoming Elite in the process. He didn't lose a single point of health, either. Or the lone Rifleman who killed, all by himself, 57!!! enemies, becoming Elite and again, not losing a single point of health.:cool:

I never saw the problem with clumped resources mentioned in the forums on the PC side, but I sure can confirm it in the Mac version. I think we're going to need a Mac-specific bug thread real soon now.;)

They are supposed to be clumped, so as to encourage competition in order to obtain them ;) Naturally I suggest the sword ;)

In Civ3 the player (and maybe AI) have enormous combat advantages against barbarians. Combat advantage at Regent is 400%, Chieftan level is 800% (as I recall)! At Diety there is 0% advantage.

I bought a (cringe!) Wintel to play Civ3, and these settings are available and modifiable in the Editor. I have now changed all these settings to 0%, and am about to start my first game with them.

Editor not yet available on the Mac as I understand.

I have been playing the PC version of CIV III for a few weeks now and am interested by the "resource clumping." Can you explain what you mean by that?

Do all the resources clump or just some of them? What TYPE of resources clump? Is it the strategic or just the occasional tradable one like firs or spice?

What I have witnessed in the PC version (so I assume that the Mac version should be the same) is that tradable resources, like firs and silk and ivory etc often clump in an area small enough that one city can control 3-5 of them. This is very common and I have often plopped a city in the center of one of these areas.

Strategic resources however(iron, oil etc), NEVER clump like that. I have only seen one game (out of 10-12) where there was more than 2 strategic resources in a single city control box. And usually if you have one resource, getting another to appear there (later in the game, like coal and iron together) is not all that common (I assume there will be arguments from people who say that they have gotten to build the iron works many many times, but I only got it once.)

Anyhow, bottom line is: If strategic resources are bunching, there seems to be a problem. If some of the trade resources bunch some (there shouldn't always be 5 of them in one area) then that seems in line with the PC version.

Notice I didn't talk about resources such as gold, I don't really remember one way or the other if they bunch, after all, they are just bonuses, and not really worth killing someone for, unlike the others.

Hope this helps,

Dave

Dave, the only thing I have noticed clumping are the luxury resources. Strategic resources haven't done that in any of my games yet. As for gold I have seen it clump on occasion...but usually only two or three in a cluster. Like Cunobelin said though (above) this encourages competition, trade and sometimes the sword. After all, if everyone had oil then there'd be no OPEC :)

Yes, I noticed luxuries tend to clump; I think bonus resources like wheat and cattle also tend to clump, but to a lesser extent. Strategic resources haven't clumped that I've noticed.

Originally posted by Rustus Maximus
After all, if everyone had oil then there'd be no OPEC :)

Well, that's a strategic resource, and so shouldn't be expected to clump. Which is fine, because countries like Venezuela are also members of OPEC.

I do, however, wish that there would be some effort to make coal and iron have a slightly higher likelihood of appearing near each other, sicne there is a specific feature of the game (ironworks) that can't be used without the combo.

Well, I've seen bonus resources clumping many times, but that may just be an artifact of their frequency - which may be just a bit higher than ideal. I can fairly often found cities with access to 4-5 bonus resources, without choosing sites specifically for that (I tend to choose city sites to try and use every tile inside my borders, with as little overlap as possible).
As for strategic resources, I've never seen them clump, but that's because there aren't enough of them in existence to FORM a clump! At this point I've gotten four games well into the modern era. In each case I had the technology to see all the resources, and had explored 80-90% of the map at least. All were on huge maps with 8 civs. I have NEVER found uranium. Rubber I found precisely one tile of - total. Aluminum I found three tiles of, all on the same map. Iron and Coal seem to average 2-3 tiles in the entire world (both in one city radius for the Ironworks? That would be funny if it wasn't so maddening. In my experience, you're REALLY lucky to get both on one CONTINENT!), Oil and Saltpeter maybe 5-6. Horses are pretty plentiful, about 20 tiles or so for the world. SOMETHING is not right here, and I really wish I had an editor available so I could check the appearance frequencies...
Oh, and does anyone else think fresh water is also way too scarce given how useful it is? Even on "wet" worlds, rivers are very very rare, and lakes even more so. More than once, I've started a "water war" because the only river anywhere on any nearby continent was in someone else's territory.

In my first game, at Chieftain level, around 380 AD. I thought I took the last city of the English, but the old broad is still on my advisor screen. I chose to sign a peace treaty for some gold because I didn't know where to find her. Have the English restarted somewhere else? Nothing I've read has given any clue to civs restarting.

maybe she has recently built a nearby city, and the fog of war is just blocking it from your view?

Her Majesty probably has a city or two hiding in some unexplored area of the map, remember the AI will build cities anywhere there is an opening ;)

Now back to the resource thing...
Originally posted by Beamup
Iron and Coal seem to average 2-3 tiles in the entire world (both in one city radius for the Ironworks? That would be funny if it wasn't so maddening. In my experience, you're REALLY lucky to get both on one CONTINENT!)I haven't reached Steam Power in my games yet, but I'm going to in my current one, however I have seen in my games that Iron was more plentiful than that. In my current game my empire controls 5 sources of Iron (Huge world, 8 civs), mainly thanks to my rush to acquire this resource and hold it wherever I found it (having learned quickly that a lack of it makes the game very tough :(). I haven't seen a scarcity of Iron, not saying it couldn't happen, but that's the challenge of the game. Not every game you play will be like Earth. The alternate world you are playing on may have an overabundance of Iron and Coal or be a world where water (as you said) is the most important "strategic" resource.

Strategic resources shouldn't clump but they should be more rare than other resources in the game. I think it's pretty cool that you had to start a "water war" :goodjob: (think of how that one might read in the imaginary history books of your little electronic citizens). That's the reason wars are fought...resources...plain and simple. Every war can be traced back to this basic root, be it land, oil, food, water or whatever, and that is one of the great things about this new resource system. I went to war twice to secure the Iron resources I spoke of in my current game. I didn't need to but I decided I didn't want my rivals to acquire them and I wanted to prevent some from building Iron related units. This tactic has worked so far on 2 of my enemies and I have been able to run roughshod over their forces.

My point about OPEC was that they are a group of nations with access to a specific resource for which everyone must barter with them if they want it. We can either trade with them to get the oil or attempt to take the oil for ourselves through military means, and CIV 3 does a pretty good job of mimicking this reality (although it's alot more simplified). Every Civ is not going to have every resource, you may have to trade or conquer it.

Oh, I'm not complaining about the possibility of having to go to war over resources - I'm quite happy to do so if I think I need them. What's annoying me is that, even by going to war with everybody, I STILL can't get resources because they simply don't exist - on any of the several maps I've played! Either I'm getting unbelievably unlucky and 90% of the resources are winding up in the 10% of each map I didn't get to exploring (several times in a row), or something VERY strange is going on here. I'd be willing to accept one or maybe two maps with very scant resources, but four in a row scarce in most strategic resources AND water (despite all being "wet"!) really pushes the bounds of credulity more than a little bit - especially sice #5 is showing the same tendencies.

Here's an idea - I tend to pick the same map settings, and I just realized that there might be something about the settings I choose that's the cause. I customarily play on a Huge map, with 8 civs total, small land mass archipelago, wet, warm, and young. If anyone else has played a map with the same settings, knowing what the resources were like on that map would be potentially very useful information.

I am not sure, but I think that "young" may be your problem. I remember something about young worlds in CIV II having less spread out resources. That is probably affecting it.

Well, I just finished up a game on a mid-age map, and it seems you may be correct - each resource averaged about 1 tile per civilization. Moral of the story - don't play on "young" maps. I originally started doing so to see if it might change the tendency to dump my initial settler in a huge swath of jungle/hills/tundra/mountains without any food in sight, but that didn't seem to work anyway. I've started a new thread to discuss the AI based on that game's experiences.

Beamup,

Have you researched the right techs to be able to locate all those resources? For strategic resources, you have to get a specific advance before they show up on the map. Aluminum and uranium in particular do not appear until very late in the game.

Just a thought, hope it helps.

Dojoboy,

It's likely that Lizzie has a settler out there somewhere, possibly on a ship looking for a place to land and start a city. As long as she has at least one settler, she's still in the game, even if she can't manage to find a suitable spot to start a city. Kill or capture that settler and she'll be out of the game.

Civs do restart, but only in the early stages of the game. I doubt one would "spawn" as late as 380 AD, even on Chieftan. I can't say for sure, though.

Originally posted by Salvor
Beamup,
Dojoboy,

It's likely that Lizzie has a settler out there somewhere, possibly on a ship looking for a place to land and start a city. As long as she has at least one settler, she's still in the game, even if she can't manage to find a suitable spot to start a city. Kill or capture that settler and she'll be out of the game.

Do NOT kill that settler! If you've been reading the threads around here, it is a well-known bug that killing a civ by destroying their last settler after all their cities have been destroyed or captured will CRASH THE GAME. Instead, you must let the settler build a city and then take the city.


As for beamup's resource issues:

The young earth hypothesis is interesting. Not something that would be noticeable until very extended play since strat. resources don't appear until way down the tech tree. I play on standard earth settings and found plentiful iron so far--5 in my empire alone. Haven't gotten steam yet.

I tried at first playing archipelago with the lowest water coverage setting (i.e. large islands), but I kept finding rivers too rare; so I think the continents setting produces more rivers (which makes some sense geologically). Generally, I don't waste time if the AI dumps my initial settler in a bad spot--I restart :-). When I get more experienced and have won some games at Emperor or Deity, I'll probably go back and try to win with settlers in crappy initial locations for more challenge.