Ahh interesting. So you are talking about the disappearance ratio and appearance right? Great... im gonna have to do some serious research as for me thats one of the hardest topics in the game. This stuff just wasnt in the game manual.
Precisely. Look here for an explanation to the editor plus a helpful link.
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=5161452&postcount=5
City folks often don't think about rural life. In fact even in the country, farmer's kids get teased as farming was and is considered some dated occupation. But in any post-apoc mod, or even in films, the realities of the importance to controlling natural resources cannot be overstated.
People are very unaware of how these are harvested and don't think about acorns as a historical food source, as well as the wood from the trees. They're two seperate things, but in a post-apoc collapse without trucking and organization, understanding how to harvest firewood (and season it), and how to remove the tannins from the acorns so they're edible (two main methods), and how to actually use the lumber from the wood, these are vital types of technology. Things that if unknown to survivors, then they'll end up dying.
Something as simple as grass seed might save a huge number of people as long as they understand ergot concerns. A lot of the nonnative species in America were introduced to America by immigrants who wanted them as food, and yet they grow wild now, ready to be harvested by smart folks.
There's a lot of clever ways resources could be utilized to not only make better military units, but to enable other technologies, be a cash crop for certain civilizations, and cause wars.
Say a resource is a "cache" of material found, and not a harvested natural resource. That civ has a bounty of found materials to exploit. As the AI is dumb, they might sell it as a trade item unless you make it a bonus resource that adds to local shield production.
It's a chance to write something in the Civipedia to tell a story about some resource X and maybe this is a way to offer clues over time, but only for the people who bother to try to discern its usefulness.
We think about the pioneers simply hunting/trapping for food, but with no management (as there weren't hunting laws), then that "game" disappeared by extinction. This meant moving to other hunting grounds, and the disappearance ratio can be utilized to exhaust something like this, forcing the civs to search for them to exploit and this means intentional encroachment on to another civ's perceived territory near their borders.
The map editor's ability to place these resources specifically and to time them somewhat offers a way to nudge civilizations to do certain things, but the carrot has to be pretty big to entice them.
Because a resource can be used coupled with tech and with an improvement to create a unit, but since the AI is dumb, then sometimes if conditions are right with those interconnected things, then it's smarter to spawn a unit based upon say 30 turns instead of thinking the AI will make them.
One thing I tried was to make Armies of various levels spawn every 30 turns such that the AI was smarter about defending and attacking.
People think of resources as having a set value. While that might be partially true in the postmodern world, under stressed conditions like wartime (shortages due to demand) or during a post-apoc event, then something as simple as coffee would have premium price and would be an extreme luxury item. Or say it's an earlier time of abundance within the game and you want to boost income but not directly. If you make lots of initial resources with a set value, then a vibrant trade situation will happen.
The reason one civ knows that another civ is present, and the natural resources that are there is by exploration. But this can take a lot of time as scouts and settlers and units traverse the terrain. But if you use the editor to preplace some units closer to the territory of another, then those units know of those resources and earlier trade could be established as well as contact and relations by that simple process.
