Coal: the new Uranium.

They always pick Order because they love to city spam all the barren snowlands and one landhex islands

I find myself paying a city state 200 to improve the resource the majority of the time if I don't get it myself. you just have to find a source that's not on a mine they built already. This is a wayyyyy better option than settling a city, IMO.

If you need a resource from an allied city-state and they haven't built the required improvement on the tile, you can pay them in order to do so.

For a while when I first started BNW i was thinking that the 3 factories or modern era need for ideologies was really hard on the tall/cultural player. There were times playing tall (3 or 4 cities) when I would be first to industrial, but with no coal around. I even would have CS allies with coal, with a mine on the tile, that wouldn't give me the coal for another 100-200 years!

In my experience (emperor) playing wide, If you are keeping up or ahead on science, being the first to 3 factories is generally wise assuming you have been pushing out enough culture to offset the influence of CV favoring civs that might chose a different ideology. In this case, I try to start stockpiling gold after researching economics, in order to rush buy 1 or 2 of them and hard build one or two in my highest hammer cities.

I decided to test how bad it was to be a tall aesthetics civ and ignore factories and rush for radio. I used my oxford on electricity and slogged slowly to radio. It was painfully slow with my wimpy science output, but I did get to ideologies first.

So, my mind is changed. I think in most cases its best to hope for coal at home, or go settle on it, but in the case of culture players, its a clear shot at radio, which is where all the good stuff for a culture player is anyways. I the test game i mentioned, I managed to get Eiffel, Broadway and 3 broadcast towers up as others were building factories. World's Fair kicked in shortly after and I could finally see the logic in that design choice.

My last game on Deity turned strange on ideologies :
I chose Order, Spain and Portugal followed
Poland, Zulu, Mongols chose Autocracy
Maya and Babylon choose Equality
Siam chose last : Autocracy (!)
I won a SV on turn 277. By this this time, 4 players where a war with Poland, there were nuclear strikes on Babylon, Poland and Portugal, and at least 3 AI players had started their spaceship !!! Thanks Go(l)d, I managed to avoid every wars during the whole game, despite Isabelle being nearly trapped behind with with a army 100 times superior in late game (!)
Oh, and the Zulu killed 2 players. Bad boy.

i appreciate the various outlooks here. it turns out that i still found a Ridiculous Coal City if the situation warrants it. last game, i built the RCC, then razed it once my empire got their factories up and running.

nsostos, problem with trying to rely on a CS for the Coal, is that they (in most cases) don't realize that they have the Coal and don't mine it. and, as i said in the op, there's an occasional CS strategic resource bug that means you're not getting that Coal from them no matter what you do.

so for this, rarely i will take a CS over for it. i also checked into the viability of getting it from AI's and have found that they will either not let go of it whatsoever, or offer only the most ridiculous deal for it.

I do agree that coal is a bit more important now, but I'd like to see it used more, as it can only be used for 2 things in total, making a pile of 9 coal left overs. Early rail roads could use coal, but then again, they could use wood, like in America, so maybe there could be an option about how to power your trains, with different outputs? Maybe in BNW, this could also affect your trade routes, such as using steam powered ships for faster routes, and therefore bigger profits?

civ54lyfe said:

nsostos, problem with trying to rely on a CS for the Coal, is that they (in most cases) don't realize that they have the Coal and don't mine it. and, as i said in the op, there's an occasional CS strategic resource bug that means you're not getting that Coal from them no matter what you do.

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It's actually IDEAL if the CS has not created the mine yet. If they created the mine already, you would have to wait until they have the proper tech before receiving the resource, which can be a long time. If they have not created the mine yet, but have the source in their territory, that is when the "spend 200 gold to improve a resource" comes into play. That is the best case scenario, because you get it instantly. And typically, from my experience, at least one CS can usually be found that meet this criteria.

Without coal you can't upgrade your Caravels to Ironclads and next to Destroyers. But, if you had only a few coal resources, you could upgrade them one at a time, and when they have gotten to Destroyers, you have all the coal back.

The thing I hate is when they obsolete a unit for a unit that requires a different resource that you don't have.

compwiz1202 said:

The thing I hate is when they obsolete a unit for a unit that requires a different resource that you don't have.

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Worse is when you want to upgrade two steps and the transition unit is the one that needs the resource. I had a bunch of caravels that had been off exploring the world, when they got back I wanted to upgrade them to destroyers but the game says "nu-uh, you have to upgrade them to ironclads first", and there's me with no coal.