Natural Wonders and Fountain of Youth

I have never seen the Fountain of Youth in any of my games, which is about 5 completed games and 15-ish half-played games. Do the wonders have varying chances of spawning? Does the Fountain require terra maps? El Dorado is another one I've never seen. The Great Barrier Reef spawned only once in one of my games, but it was right next to Carthage's capital who was running away with the game.

Fountain of Youth is the rarest Natural wonder of all.

No particular setting for it; but you have to play a lot of games; I reached 100 natural wonders first; and that was in vanilla before a few more natural wonders were added.

Carmack said:

I have never seen the Fountain of Youth in any of my games, which is about 5 completed games and 15-ish half-played games. Do the wonders have varying chances of spawning? Does the Fountain require terra maps? El Dorado is another one I've never seen. The Great Barrier Reef spawned only once in one of my games, but it was right next to Carthage's capital who was running away with the game.

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I believe you need the Spain/Inca DLC to have the Fountain of Youth and El Dorado show up in your games.

I thought both civs were free because they came with my copy of Civ V, but apparently the only free DLC civ was Mongolia.

If you can choose to play as Spain and the Inca, then you should be able to see both the Fountain of Youth and El Dorado on a map, not necessarily at the same time....eventually. If you can't play as either civilization, then the Fountain of Youth and El Dorado wouldn't be available.

joncnunn said:

Fountain of Youth is the rarest Natural wonder of all.

No particular setting for it; but you have to play a lot of games; I reached 100 natural wonders first; and that was in vanilla before a few more natural wonders were added.

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The .xml specifies the relative frequency of Natural Wonders. As you note, FoY is the rarest:

Gibraltar - Occurrence Frequency 10
Great Barrier Reef - Occurrence Frequency 10
Grand Mesa - Occurrence Frequency 10
Krakatoa - Occurrence Frequency 10
Mt. Fuji - Occurrence Frequency 10
Old Faithful - Occurrence Frequency 10
Potosi - Occurrence Frequency 5
El Dorado - Occurrence Frequency 2
Fountain of Youth - Occurrence Frequency 1

Browd said:

The .xml specifies the relative frequency of Natural Wonders. As you note, FoY is the rarest:

Gibraltar - Occurrence Frequency 10
Great Barrier Reef - Occurrence Frequency 10
Grand Mesa - Occurrence Frequency 10
Krakatoa - Occurrence Frequency 10
Mt. Fuji - Occurrence Frequency 10
Old Faithful - Occurrence Frequency 10
Potosi - Occurrence Frequency 5
El Dorado - Occurrence Frequency 2
Fountain of Youth - Occurrence Frequency 1

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Where is this file located, and what is it called? I'd like to look up Sinai, Kailash, and the rest.

For G&K: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\Sid Meier's Civilization V\assets\DLC\Expansion\Gameplay\XML\Terrain\CIV5Features.xml

The faith wonders added in G&K (Sri Pada, Mt. Kailash, Mt. Sinai and Uluru) all have frequency of 10. Beringer's Crater is also a 10.

Do these values translate into... percentages? For example, are the 10s merely 100% and the Fountain of Youth is 10% Or is it 10% and 1%? The latter seems too low to be true.

Browd said:

The .xml specifies the relative frequency of Natural Wonders. As you note, FoY is the rarest:

Gibraltar - Occurrence Frequency 10
Great Barrier Reef - Occurrence Frequency 10
Grand Mesa - Occurrence Frequency 10
Krakatoa - Occurrence Frequency 10
Mt. Fuji - Occurrence Frequency 10
Old Faithful - Occurrence Frequency 10
Potosi - Occurrence Frequency 5
El Dorado - Occurrence Frequency 2
Fountain of Youth - Occurrence Frequency 1

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I think there are also some quirks to this - I did a lot of testing with natural wonder spawning while I was designing new ones. Anecdotally, OF 10 does not appear to be 10x more likely to spawn than OF 1, it seems to be at least 100x. Additionally, adding wonders with OF 100 or 1000 does not make them spawn every time as you would expect them to (or even close to every time). Last, I think it checks for them through the list in order, checking the RNG each time, meaning there is a significantly higher chance for some of the natural wonders to be generated than others with the same OF.

I'm not sure on any of this, but it's what it seemed like. I probably spawned 100-200 maps and checked which NWs spawned.

I once got both eldorado and FoY on the same map(and pangea!). I wonder what are the odds for that. Is it 2/100 for eldorado and 1/100 for FoY? I have seen eldorado at least 10x times than FoY...

Carmack said:

Do these values translate into... percentages? For example, are the 10s merely 100% and the Fountain of Youth is 10% Or is it 10% and 1%? The latter seems too low to be true.

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1% for FoY makes sense for me.

I believe occurunce values are ratios, e.g. for every ten times you see Kailash, on average, you'll see FoY once. The 10%/1% things are utter garbage--different size maps have different numbers of wonders on them, and all of those slots must be filled, and with chances like that, it would be possible to have a Huge map with no wonders, or a Duel map with all of them. I'm guessing the generator for natural wonders is that all of the wonders are put into an array with a number of values equal to their occurence frequency, and a number of values equal to the number of required wonders is generated (I believe that Standard, for example, has 7), and if two values overlap on the same wonder, another value is generated. The total value of wonders is 118 with G&K, which would make the odds of finding FoY pretty unlikely. Can someone who's better at math write an equation to find the odds of finding any given wonder on a map, please?

It would be fantastic if Fountain of Youth and Eldorado was removed from this game. They are complete game breakers. Ruins multiplayer games completely, and makes single player almost no-challenge if you get them. At least it would be nice if you could turn of these extreme NW's in the play options menu.

This is "extreme luck dependence" game design.

Luckystrike77 said:

It would be fantastic if Fountain of Youth and Eldorado was removed from this game. They are complete game breakers. Ruins multiplayer games completely, and makes single player almost no-challenge if you get them. At least it would be nice if you could turn of these extreme NW's in the play options menu.

This is "extreme luck dependence" game design.

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This can actually be moded. The rating of 1 for Fountain of Youth could be lowered to 0 which should make it never show up.

joncnunn said:

This can actually be moded. The rating of 1 for Fountain of Youth could be lowered to 0 which should make it never show up.

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Alternatively, you could just go into your XML files and fiddle with them, but deleting or changing anything other than the specific files can lead to !FUN!.

joncnunn said:

This can actually be moded. The rating of 1 for Fountain of Youth could be lowered to 0 which should make it never show up.

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The problem is I only play multiplayer games. They shouldn't force in such an unbalanced feature to the game anyways (2 supreme game breaking NW's), without making it optional (like they do with ruins; on or off).

Carmack said:

Do these values translate into... percentages? For example, are the 10s merely 100% and the Fountain of Youth is 10% Or is it 10% and 1%? The latter seems too low to be true.

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Nope. It's rare. Like really rare.

1% sounds about right.