Can I trade my last resource?

If I trade the last of a particular resource when negotiating trades in the Diplomacy screen, do I lose the benefits of having that resource?

Yes. It adds more flexibility in your trade negotiations. Like trading away your copper when you get iron, or trading your last luxury resources when your civ has excess happiness.

haha funny story, i once actully traded my copper for his metal working or whatever it is that gets you iron, then i traded him a luxury for his only iron

Traded a resource for a tech eh; hilarious

Next dumb question: with luxury and food resources, what am I actually losing? I understand what happens if I trade away my last copper or my last coal, but not what happens if I trade away my last gem or corn.

If you trade away your last corn, pigs, etc., you lose health, which will reduce the productivity of your bigger cities. Things like corn make one person healthy, and there are bonus effects from some buidlings, like granaries. If you trade away your last luxury, you lose happiness in the same way.

Luxury resources give every your city connected to them +1

Food resources give every your city connected to them +1 health.

If you sell either of them, you'll lose it's benefits.

Well..
As with most things in civ4, you can hold your mouse over the resource in the trade-window, to see what benefits it gives you.
Knowing this gets you a long way, for starters =)

Holbek said:

Well..
As with most things in civ4, you can hold your mouse over the resource in the trade-window, to see what benefits it gives you.
Knowing this gets you a long way, for starters =)

Click to expand...

Yes, but I wasn't sure what that meant exactly. Did that mean 1x to every city? To one city picked at random?

The happiness and health effects of being connected to a luxury affect all of your cities. But note that in the early game, you may have more luxuries than you can use. For example, if your cities all have 6 or 7 population, and for some reason you wound up with a whole bunch of luxury items, you might be able to trade your last one away for awhile without harming your happiness. Later you might want to cancel those trades when your people start to become unhappy.

Got Civ4 for Christmas and I'm still trying to understand some of the key points of the game, so please forgive me if I appear dumb.

On trading, I am struggling to understand whether trading a resource which shows (1 of 1) in the resource section is good or bad. I have made the mistake of getting some useful techs offered by the AI players for my Iron(1 of 1) resource early in the game only to find that my cities "cannot continue to produce swordmen". On the next turn I try to cancel the trade (which the AI won't let me do for about six turns).

So, I guess my questions are:
- is a (1 of 1) resource a spare resource to trade with or your only resource of that type in your civ
- if it is the latter, then why does it appear in the trade window?
- what kind of circumstances would you ever consider trading a (1 of 1) resource if you only have one of them?
- trying to play GOTM2 at Prince level and most AI's seem to have (1 of 2) reources to trade with whereas I only ever seem to have (1 of 1). Is there anyway to increase a (1 of 1) resource with workers in your civ?

Thanks for reading this!
Nik

1 of 1 in the trade screen means you have only farmed/mined/wineried/plantated/fish boated 1 of those particular
resources.

when you traded the AI your 1 of 1 iron you lost your lone supply. 1 of 2 and you would have been alright. the only way to get more of a resoruce(1 of 2 and upwards) without trading is to have your workers "work" another tile(and connect it with your domestic trade route) with that resource on it within your cultural boundaries, or force an opponent to give you any they might have.

Nik0906 said:

- what kind of circumstances would you ever consider trading a (1 of 1) resource if you only have one of them?

Click to expand...

Sometimes early in the game, you have lots of health resources, and few happiness resources. If most of my cities are at 6-6 happiness and 9-6 health, I wouldn't hesitate to trade my only cows for someone's gold, for example.

Another specialized situation is when you are going for a cultural win. If you have the culture slider above 50%, happiness is not going to be an issue at all, so trading every happiness resource you can (except those that indirectly provide health from a grocer) for health resources makes sense. It can also make sense to gift the resources to someone if you need to improve relations.

And yet another specialized situation - in a recent game (also cultural) I needed to build 2 cathedrals (in 3 cities - so 6 total buildings) that were 900 base shields, but production was doubled with copper. I didn't have copper. So I made a gold + iron (my only source) for someone else's copper. Looks like a bad trade, except it saved me 2700 total shields of production. I could see doing the same thing for certain late wonders that use copper.

Always remember that you can cancel trade later if your situation changes.

Another advantage of being able to trade your last resource is in OCC or Cultural Victory games. With OCC, once you build the Globe Theatre, you don't have anymore unhappiness and with Cultural Victories, once you start pushing the culture slider up, your theatres and colliseums give you all the happiness you'll need.

Once that happens, things like Silk and Gold are useless to you, so you may as well trade them away and get some health resources so your cities don't have to worry about that and you have some extra protection if one of the civs you're trading with for resources gets his pillaged in a war.

Thanks for the replies guys you've helped me lose some of that frustration here.

Not_Bob said:

haha funny story, i once actully traded my copper for his metal working or whatever it is that gets you iron, then i traded him a luxury for his only iron

Click to expand...

How did you do this? I can only trade techs for techs or cash, and resources for resources or cash (and strategics seem to only be able to be traded for other strategics, in my experience).

Harry Haller said:

The happiness and health effects of being connected to a luxury affect all of your cities.

Click to expand...

I didn't realise this.

So... if I had a fish resource in one city, and connected it to three other cities by a road, I would get +1 health to all four cities? And if I put a harbor in each city I would get +2 to each city?

I had assumed for other cities to get the health benefits of the fish in city#1, I would have to build a harbour, so City #1 could have +2 to health (fish + harbor) and the other cities could only have 1 (harbor).

Also, how do you connect cities other than by roads? What about sea-trade routes (i.e. how would those be determined)?

That is correct, if you have, say, corn in your cultural borders (doesn't even have to be in a city radius) and you have built a farm/road on it, any cities connected to that road will have access to corn and the +1 health it gives. If any of those cities have a granery, it'll be +2 health. All connected resources go to all connected cities.

Trading over coastal tiles is enabled with Sailing. A very good reason to research it early on, as you can trade with other civs before you build a road to them. On large maps when they're very far away this is a godsend. Note though, that this only enables trading over COASTAL tiles. To get past Ocean tiles and start trading with civs on other continents, you need Astronomy.

The same rules apply to your cities; A new city on an island in the middle of the ocean will have none of your civs' resources until you discover Astronomy.

Note: You don't need a harbor in any city to start coastal/ocean trading. Harbor's only increase health and improve trade route money. Think of a harbor as an 'improved' port. If you build a coastal city, the founding city members build a primitive port that can trade and bring in your civ's resources, and the harbor improvement is just building a big new fancy one.