Should resources be more valuable?

Onionsoilder

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One of the things I have always found interesting in Civilization is how petty most resources are. Strategic resources such as Iron or Oil always have immense value and players rush to connect these resources, sometimes even waging war over them, but others are either common or petty enough nobody really bothers with them unless they have the time and spare resources to develop them. Even then, nobody ever goes to war for them.

In the history books you read about civilizations going to war over gold, silver and spices. Countries protected their secrets of silk, dye and other luxuries better then they protected their military tactics. The new world was settled and colonized to gain the vast amounts of resources that could be harvested, both new exotic ones like chocolate and valuable ones from the old world like sugar.

Civilization IV has hardly any of this. You can find some gold lying around your borders and think "Oh, that's nice." The commerce boost is nice in the mid-game, but villages and towns can be just as good if not better, and can be built anywhere. The same goes for pretty much any nonstrategic resource. Some players may push to obtain at least 1 for the happiness or health, but outside of corporations see no difference from owning 1 or 10.

I'm not exactly sure how this could be changed, but I have some ideas. For one, owning multiple resources needs to provide some benefit, though not as great as owning several different ones. Resources should effect trade routes between cities and civilizations, and obtaining a brand new resource on another continent should provide a much larger commerce bonus then simply +1 happiness and a few commerce on the tile.
 
Don’t forget that all these resource contribute to Happiness and Health.
Your cities at some point become unhealthy and unhappy so every resource counts.

You can also trade your excess resources for those you don’t have for additional Happiness and Health.

This has a major impact on the growth and production of your cities…
 
I'd say a way to fix this would be to attach value to having multiple of a particular resource. This way, it could be represented that they are not as rare and precious as, say, iron and oil, but would mean that there would be the added value of having more and more of them, making each individual resource more important.
 
I think that resources should have some sort of relative value.

The most obvious example would be silver vs. gold. While it would be game breaking to have gold generate 50 time more commerce (as it does in the real world - $6 per ownce vs. $300 per ounce), in game terms, it would be reasonable for gold to generate twice as much as silver.
 
That assumes that each mine produces the exact same quantity of metal. The prices are like that because gold is rarer, meaning that a gold mine will produce less gold than a silver mine will produce silver. So much so that, they will generally end up with roughly the same overall revenue, such as in the game.
 
That assumes that each mine produces the exact same quantity of metal. The prices are like that because gold is rarer, meaning that a gold mine will produce less gold than a silver mine will produce silver. QUOTE]

I'm not certain that your statement is completely accurate. Speculation, perception, wars and politics all contribute to a resources value - not just raw supply and demand.

However, in game terms that can be fixed simply by changing the code so that gold only appears on random maps say 50% as often as silver. All other factors remaining constant, that would balance out the total commerce inequity.
 
Well, yeah, sure, but for the simplicity of the games economics, that's roughly the reason, or at least justification, for it.
 
Well, yeah, sure, but for the simplicity of the games economics, that's roughly the reason, or at least justification, for it.

I'm not trying to beat a dead horse here, but going back to the original motivation for making relative values, on a civ by civ basis, it would make a difference and provide a motivation for seeking it out and protecting it once found. (versus silver which may not be worth expending resources to locate or starting wars over).

Personally, I would like to see the game become more complex (within reason), and avoid moving toward greater and greater simplicity.
 
The idea of quantitative resources would also increase the desire to have more than 1 of a resource. Only being able to build 1(or however many is balanced) unit(s) that need a resource ie you can only build 2 swordsmen at a time with access to 1 iron. Or a source of oil allows only a few ships/planes to operate. Only so many units of population can be made happy/healthy by access to a resource. Having resources expire would also increase the desire to have access to more sources. New technologies could make a single source of a resource more efficient, the precedent from reality would be:
New mining techniques allow increased extraction, (construction, gun powder, steam engine)
New refining techniques increase efficiency, (steel, industrialisation, scientific method)
New farming techniques increase harvests, (biology, ecology (maybe decreases(organic)), genetics)
There are plenty of other ways you can explain things
 
This could be a possibility, but to incrementally increase the output of such improvements, as you suggested, would mean that to start of, they would hardly produce any hammers/food.
 
If the same scale as Civ IV is used, but lets say that for every hammer in Civ IV 10 hammers are in Civ V, everything costs 10 times as much and everything produces 10 times as much, this would represent no difference, until you start altering the values when you can get much smaller increments.

I am not actually suggesting that the number of hammers the mine produces should change, only the number of units you can construct/maintain from one mine/well/source.
 
I really feel strongly that Resources should be more important in Civ 5. Some ideas:

1) Horse: Horses have driven civilization. Just read “Guns, Germs and Steel”, if you don't believe me. I think that acquiring Horses should be close to game changing. They should increase food yield as they make farms more productive. They should increase the range of scouts/explorers as they would be mounted, and obviously allow for cavalry units. Etc. Not having horses should be a major disadvantage in the game, just like real life.
2) Copper/Iron: Should be much scarcer. (They also should be more spaced out on the tech tree.). It’s too easy to find one or the other.
3) Spice and Silk should be much more valuable since they were so sought after by Western Europe. Controlling these should generate lots of commerce.

I also think controlling lots of an resource should be more significant. For instance, I think there should be a cap on how many iron-based units you can build per iron resource. Alternatively, multiple iron resources could lower the cost of unit. Either way, Civs will be constantly searching for additional resources.

Wonders should also REQUIRE specific resources instead of having “double production speed”. Some already require it but I would implement this much more. Statue of Zeus-gold & ivory, Parthenon-Marble, Pyramids-stone etc. This would also make building Wonders harder (which is a good thing) and make acquiring resources more important.
 
You also see in history books about trade routes. Pirates, privateers, and U-Boats were all initially used to intercept ships carrying resources. In Civ3 and civ4, you aquire a resource, you automatically get it. There is no wait for supplies and there is no danger of losing them.
 
Yeah, I agree that something needs to be done about this, although I think a one turn wait would unrealistically long (at least 1 year, in modern times). Perhaps a system whereby you do get an instantaneous benefit, but must have any further resources shipped (taking about two turns over a medium sized ocean, i.e. long enough to be sunk or captured).
 
But in the game you can trade resources that you really need. Owning two gold means you can sell it to an AI for gold per turn or you can trade it for other resources. And the 'going to the new world to claim resources' part is also covered in the game because you will want to settle as much land as possible as soon as possible.

The thread general idea is fine, but this is already in the game. If you can claim two gold mines you will do this, right? Trading resources around is valuable if you have some extra ones lying aound, right? The value of having multiple sources lie therefore not in the resource itself but in the value of the resource on the world market. This is how it should be in my opinion. Adding a benefit to owning 10 gold seems liek a waste te me because in the game the benefit of having multiple gold is already quite big.

The OP also foregoes the fact that with corporations multiple resources already matter, or at least the OP claims this is something that should be corrected. It does however reflect reality somewhat in the sense that these corporations and the global position they hold only appeared recently in human history. That these benefits would only exist since recent times is therefore a good representation of how it should be.

In my opinion the idea is good in the sense that multiple resources should provide a bonus, but the form of the bonus is bad. Right now resources add trade value. This advantage is quite enough to make resources quite valuable in my book. Adding even more bonusses is not needed.
 
'Going to the new world to claim resources' won't do you any good if all of your ships carrying them to your main cities are captured.
 
'Going to the new world to claim resources' won't do you any good if all of your ships carrying them to your main cities are captured.
Privateers are in the game. Even though resoures are not actually moved with ships in the game there is a way to 'pirate' on another civ's income.
 
Not luxury or strategic income. Britain AND Japan were almost defeated by submarines cutting off supplies. In Britain's case, twice. What I mean is, it would be much more realistic if you had to ship (or fly, or carry, and so on...) your materiel gains through potentially dangerous territory.
 
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