Lack of Coal
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Randall_Flagg
The Evil One
It is not you at all. I bet in 70 % of my games I have had 0 coal and 0 iron. Yes we all know you can bribe and pay the CS's for this. But that still does not change the fact that coal and iron are now a lot more scarce for me.
SammyKhalifa
Deity
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Except that you have to wait seemingly forever for CS to get the tech to "see" the coal.
DuseCutter
Chieftain
I also find Iron and Coal to be scarce.
this. But beware, sometimes the game decides to give you your coal only after a random number of turns
VainoValkea
Emperor
Isn't this because the CS has to improve the coal tiles first? It shows up on the resource list even before getting mined.
You don't have to. As long as you can see the coal, you can pay the city state to upgrade whatever resource you desire.
I usually don't find coal to be much of a problem. Aluminum on the other hand always eludes me. I never seem to be able to get the any deposits on my land or even none at all. The city states usually only have 2-3 deposits of 3 aluminum each. This makes the hydro plants, jets, tanks, and space ship really hard to get late game without warring people sitting on the aluminum mother-load.
The city state has to have the tech and the proper improvements before they will gift it to you. I've had instances where a coal resource is sitting on a mined hill. The allied city state shows coal on their resource list, but I still didn't get the resource and I can't pay to improve the said tile because it's already mined.
kaspergm
Deity
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Well it's not just you in the sense that it's "just as rare" as before. No changes was made to the Coal placing algorithm, so it should be neither more nor less rare than before.
When that's said, Coal balance has always been a real ***** in my games. In my last game, I had something like 50 Coal. In the game before that, a Continents map, I was on a large continent (four civs) that had no Coal. As in zero Coal. On the other continent, Ottomans were running a handy Coal surplus, so I manage to trade for seven and get factories up and running in some of my cities. I was then running on -7 coal for the rest of the game.
The problem about Coal is that it's super important and becomes visible exactly at the same time as you get access to the one thing only that you need it for, namely Factories (the luxury of Ironclads is nice, but I can't remember when I last build an Ironclad in an unmodded game). That makes for some quite tedious gambling issues. Lack of Coal has been one of the things that I have been known to rage-quit over in previous Civ instalments, but I do find it easier to capture it in Civ5 than previous games.
VainoValkea
Emperor
So... if the coal is not mined yet, you can pay them to mine it even if they don't see it, and you get the coal. But if it's mined already, and they can't see it, you can't get it or even pay to get it?
That sounds like a bug...
SammyKhalifa
Deity
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Are you sure? In this game I befriended a CS that already had a mine on a coal spot and didn't get it for what felt like 20 turns later. The "Ugrade Resource" icon was greyed out.
To clarify the problem with resources from CS...
There are 3 possible situations:
1) CS has no improvements over coal or has improvements other than mine
Just pay them 200 gold for a mine and the coal is yours. It's the best case scenario.
2) CS already has a mine over coal
In this case, all you can do is to wait because CS need "technology" to discover the simple fact that in the little mine of theirs there's some black stuff and it burns nice. It's a bad scenario and you will have to wait quite some time to get your coal.
3. The resource is right outside CS's borders
The worst case scenario. You are literally screwed because you'll have to wait for proper "technology", border expansion (which can take forever for a CS in BNW) and finally, you either need to pay the 200g or wait for a worker to take care of it.
There are 3 possible situations:
1) CS has no improvements over coal or has improvements other than mine
Just pay them 200 gold for a mine and the coal is yours. It's the best case scenario.
2) CS already has a mine over coal
In this case, all you can do is to wait because CS need "technology" to discover the simple fact that in the little mine of theirs there's some black stuff and it burns nice. It's a bad scenario and you will have to wait quite some time to get your coal.
3. The resource is right outside CS's borders
The worst case scenario. You are literally screwed because you'll have to wait for proper "technology", border expansion (which can take forever for a CS in BNW) and finally, you either need to pay the 200g or wait for a worker to take care of it.
kaspergm
Deity
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Pretty sure all that is handled through the AssignStartingPlots.lua, and there are no changes with regards to strategic resources in this file - I checked it myself. Only thing that has changed is some new special conditions for civs that must have coastal start (not just favor it, but must have) - supposedly Venice would fit in this category, although I didn't look that particular bit up.
Ekmek
on steam: ekmek_e
I think they have it backwards. coal should be more common and oil should be the harder one
VainoValkea
Emperor
Coal is relatively less scarce though, since you can only build so many factories anyway and coal is needed for little else. If you have a lot of cities you could run out before having factories in each but more cities means more area means more likely to have more coal deposits.
Oil, on the other hand, is always scarce. There's always use for an extra bomber or five new battleships, so you always need new oil deposits to keep the war machine going!
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