The resource system in civ as mentioned here is quite arbitrary and has always been this way.
Some resources like coal, oil and uranium feel pretty close to reality but some resources like coal can cover a whole region (essentially several tiles clumped together). I know this because in Australia we have entire areas that are almost being turned into a lunar landscape from our coal mining!
I think the same goes for these shale oil deposits the Americans are starting to extract.
Iron is as mentioned here the most abundant metal on the earth's crust but it is also worth considering that most ancient societies could only really access deposits that were close to the surface and ores of high purity. By the middle-ages most of these early resources were depleted and miners would have to dig deeper and innovate new techniques to better extract lower-purity ores...
So iron sort of works for civ 5. It should be useful early but it could also have some later bonuses maybe a steel works or something to increase tank and ship production.
Other resources though; for instance livestock and plantations are entirely arbitrary and really can be moved around or planted where ever conditions are appropriate. And it's not really game balancing if a worker can build a cattle pasture or banana plantation on every tile of their terrain - in the end you have to see the resources in the context of the average fertility of the area the city is using for food.
On a side note- A lot of ecologists will tell us that growing vegetables has 10X the efficiency compared to growing animals for meat but its really a simplistic example that doesn't take into account every variable for producing food.
In Australia for instance most of our land is too marginal in rainfall, fertility and soil structure to be able to handle large-scale cropping or intensive grazing. So instead farmers have adapted by running herds of cattle over enormous stretches of land that they fluctuate depending on what the weather is like.
But it really comes to this - horses and cattle exist on the map purely to make the terrain and environment more interesting. Otherwise it will just be quite bare and boring.
Some resources like coal, oil and uranium feel pretty close to reality but some resources like coal can cover a whole region (essentially several tiles clumped together). I know this because in Australia we have entire areas that are almost being turned into a lunar landscape from our coal mining!
I think the same goes for these shale oil deposits the Americans are starting to extract.
Iron is as mentioned here the most abundant metal on the earth's crust but it is also worth considering that most ancient societies could only really access deposits that were close to the surface and ores of high purity. By the middle-ages most of these early resources were depleted and miners would have to dig deeper and innovate new techniques to better extract lower-purity ores...
So iron sort of works for civ 5. It should be useful early but it could also have some later bonuses maybe a steel works or something to increase tank and ship production.
Other resources though; for instance livestock and plantations are entirely arbitrary and really can be moved around or planted where ever conditions are appropriate. And it's not really game balancing if a worker can build a cattle pasture or banana plantation on every tile of their terrain - in the end you have to see the resources in the context of the average fertility of the area the city is using for food.
On a side note- A lot of ecologists will tell us that growing vegetables has 10X the efficiency compared to growing animals for meat but its really a simplistic example that doesn't take into account every variable for producing food.
In Australia for instance most of our land is too marginal in rainfall, fertility and soil structure to be able to handle large-scale cropping or intensive grazing. So instead farmers have adapted by running herds of cattle over enormous stretches of land that they fluctuate depending on what the weather is like.
But it really comes to this - horses and cattle exist on the map purely to make the terrain and environment more interesting. Otherwise it will just be quite bare and boring.