Finite Resources - a question...?

The feature of Finite Resources is one of the things that I DO like that was announced for Civ V. However, I still have a question... So far, we have seen Horses, Iron, etc referenced for examples of how Finite Resources works. however, these resources have traditionally been referred to as Strategic Resources. My question, therefore, is how will this feature factor in for the other types of resources... namely Food and Luxory?

Any ideas?

Thorburne said:

The feature of Finite Resources is one of the things that I DO like that was announced for Civ V. However, I still have a question... So far, we have seen Horses, Iron, etc referenced for examples of how Finite Resources works. however, these resources have traditionally been referred to as Strategic Resources. My question, therefore, is how will this feature factor in for the other types of resources... namely Food and Luxory?

Any ideas?

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From the IGN preview (from Bite's compilation of information thread that is stickied.)

Sadly, luxury resources will not function the same.

One hex of a given luxury resource is now good enough to improve happiness across your entire civ now as well, which should also encourage more trading among civilizations. If you've got two marble and two dye, there's no reason to avoid trading one of each away if you can get access to ivory or spice.

Strategic resources are handled differently. There the quantity is very important. One iron deposit, for instance, will only grant you the right to build and maintain, say, five iron-based units. You can't build any more than that until one of those units dies (or is disbanded) or you get access to more iron. You will be allowed to keep those units in the field if your resource is pillaged, but there's an additional maintenance burden and you won't be able to replace them if they're lost.

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That kinda sucks! I guess I could live with the luxory part, though, as long as Food resources have some sort of benefit for having multiple sources. In Civ IV (and earlier) it always seemed like that is the one that I have always had a lot of, but nothing to do with it.

This is going to be one of the things that either I'm going to try & mod or-failing that-beg one of the modders (like Dale) to mod for me (assuming the info in that magazine was accurate).
As I've said elsewhere, there are two perfectly acceptable approaches which can be used-neither of which is mutually exclusive.

Option 1: A single *copy* of a luxury or food resource will only provide happiness/health for X number of cities. If you exceed X cities, then all happiness/health benefits will be lost. e.g. You currently have 2 corn resources, which provides +1 health for 6 cities. You build a 7th city, so lose the +1 health bonus for corn across all your current cities-unless you can secure a 3rd corn resource.

Option 2: Each copy of a luxury/food/strategic resource provides bonus yields &/or commerces for X cities. If you exceed X cities, then the bonus gets halved (& halved again etc etc). e.g. you have 3 Ivory Resources-providing your 9 cities with +3 Culture & +2 Gold per city. If you build a 10th city, then this will drop to +2 culture & +1 gold per city.

Now obviously these numbers are just examples, & would need to be balanced for game-play balance. Also, certain social policies should increase/decrease the bonuses received. Hope that all makes sense.

Aussie.

One hex of a given luxury resource is now good enough to improve happiness across your entire civ now as well, which should also encourage more trading among civilizations. If you've got two marble and two dye, there's no reason to avoid trading one of each away if you can get access to ivory or spice.

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Isn't this exactly how luxury resources work in Civ4 though? It always made me mad that even if I have multiple sources of incense or dyes I'd still only get one extra happy face in each city. Especially since those resources are usually in bunches.

weekend_warrior said:

Isn't this exactly how luxury resources work in Civ4 though? It always made me mad that even if I have multiple sources of incense or dyes I'd still only get one extra happy face in each city. Especially since those resources are usually in bunches.

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The announcement does sound odd, doesn't it? What do they mean "now" one unit is good enough? There's no "now" about it! It's always been that way!

Aussie, your second model for luxury/health resource sounds a bit like corporations, and I like it. A weakness of was, as weekend_warrior said, multiple sources didn't add any benefits. This weakened gameplay because you have only 2 options, trade excess resources (which isn't always an option) or if the resource node is in a BFC, you could setup an improvement other than that resource's extraction construct in order to get better yields out of the tile (like farming a banana or cottaging a jumbo).

That second model you propose would create options and thus more decisions, hence enhancing game-play. In general, limiting the supply ability of strategic resources is an improvement in my book. Especially things like oil.

Woodreaux said:

...trade excess resources (which isn't always an option...

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I get the impression that trading excess resources is something that will be encouraged (for want of a better term) with the diplomacy changes.

cf_nz said:

I get the impression that trading excess resources is something that will be encouraged (for want of a better term) with the diplomacy changes.

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There really needs to be an alternative use for excess resources, though.

I mean, I've had maybe 1 in 4 games where I bothered with any form of diplomacy beyond shooing foreign leaders away or demanding tribute (and then nuking them anyway). So encouraging trade is good and all, but there needs to be alternate uses that do not force a specific method of play - corporations, for example, would give a reward for having several of a certain resource... problem was, they were about as fickle as religions and often ended up costing too much in gold and time to bother with for me. The 'corporations' effect needs to be a passive option throughout the game.

Well, one idea is to process raw materials into different sorts of processed or manufactured resources. That's something else that could be done with excess resources. Iron into tools and whatnot, for instance.

Maybe you could even process some natural resources into ersatz versions of other natural resources - for instance, process 2 or 3 coal into one unit of oil, to simulate hydrocracked oil and fuels. Corn, too - like ethanol and corn-based lubricants.

cf_nz said:

I get the impression that trading excess resources is something that will be encouraged (for want of a better term) with the diplomacy changes.

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Well, limiting the resources will help make trade more important and make players' decisions more logical. In Civ IV (and earlier), it just seemed that trading resources was just a tack-on... in other words, you did it to try and improve relations, but it never really stuck because the other civ's had plenty of access to the same resources and there was nothing holding the bind togother. More so, only the strategic resources became anything worth trading.

What if you modded in a building that uses the luxury resource. Say for every 1 spice you can build 4 spice related buildings in your empire that perform a specific function and only provide a bonus as long as you have a spice to run them with?

As I've said before; its weird doing this with health and happy resources, because of the non-continuous nations of their benefit function.

As long as you are below the happy/health cap in a particular city, then adding an extra resource has a marginal benefit of zero. So *which* cities get the bonus can have widely varying impact.

So, which cities would a limited number of resources be spread across? The largest? Those closest to their cap? Would this be automated or would you have to micromanage it? If micromanage, then its tedious. If automated, then potentially confusing; I might have one city A that is below happy cap, with lots of bonus resources, and then something happens in one of my other cities B (eg it grows in population, or builds a structure that causes unhappiness, or has an event or whatever) changes the allocation of the bonus resources and makes A unhappy. This makes it hard to plan for A, and whether or not it need construct more happiness buildings or not.

It starts getting pretty confusing for the player, when whether or not a particular city stays happy or not depends on actions going on entirely external to that city, or when you have to micromanage (potentially turn by turn) an allocation of luxury/health resources across your cities.

*edit*

What if you modded in a building that uses the luxury resource. Say for every 1 spice you can build 4 spice related buildings in your empire that perform a specific function and only provide a bonus as long as you have a spice to run them with?

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This seems relatively harmless to me (and I hope this kind of mechanic does exist for some strategic resources, like coal), but the main point about the core happiness impact of luxury goods still applies.

frekk said:

Well, one idea is to process raw materials into different sorts of processed or manufactured resources. That's something else that could be done with excess resources. Iron into tools and whatnot, for instance.

Maybe you could even process some natural resources into ersatz versions of other natural resources - for instance, process 2 or 3 coal into one unit of oil, to simulate hydrocracked oil and fuels. Corn, too - like ethanol and corn-based lubricants.

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That´s what I aways wanted on civ.

"What if you modded in a building that uses the luxury resource. Say for every 1 spice you can build 4 spice related buildings in your empire that perform a specific function and only provide a bonus as long as you have a spice to run them with?"

I like this idea, too. Resembles how you need x number of churches to build a cathedral.

Ahriman said:

So, which cities would a limited number of resources be spread across? The largest? Those closest to their cap?

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The most logical approach would be the cities that are the closest to the resource. That would eliminate any sort of micromanagement as well. If a city already has one of the same resources, then it would just pass along to next closest automatically. Once all of your cities have a particular resource, then anything else becomes surplus and can be traded. It wouldn't have to be any different than the way trade routes currently work. We don't decide those either.

As Civ 4 stands, there sort of ARE resource-specific buildings (for example harbors, which provide +1 health in conjunction with each seafood resource you have). If this element carries over into Civ 5, you wouldn't even necessarily have to design brand-new buildings for each resource.

The most logical approach would be the cities that are the closest to the resource.

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Still pretty confusing. I have to keep track of a resource and its location and count tiles to figure out which cities will benefit? Is a city fewer tiles away but on a separate island "closer"?

What about ties (equal distance cities)? What if I build a new city that is closer; that sucks the resource away from one of my existing cities?

What if the cities nearby are small and are well below happy cap, and my large cities are further away; that means I don't get to benefit from the resource?

Trade routes are optimized to maximize commerce, and you don't really care which cities they're trading with, all you care about is the commerce yield. And there aren't any threshold effects like the happiness capacity level.

Not so simple with a happiness good.

The simplest approach is leaving them universal.

As Civ 4 stands, there sort of ARE resource-specific buildings (for example harbors, which provide +1 health in conjunction with each seafood resource you have). If this element carries over into Civ 5, you wouldn't even necessarily have to design brand-new buildings for each resource.

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There is a big difference between a spice trader buildnig that requires a spice resource (or a factory that requires a coal resource) vs a harbor building that doesn't require anything, and happens to give a small extra bonus if you have fish or clams or crabs.

Should you be unable to build a harbor without a fish resource? That seems odd.

Ahriman said:

There is a big difference between a spice trader buildnig that requires a spice resource (or a factory that requires a coal resource) ...

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I would love to see that in Civ 5. While it wasn't really a big part of Civ 3, it could be modded in that you could build something that required a resource within the BFC. I was rather disappointed that this didn't make it over to Civ 4. It would lead to much more individualized cities.

frekk said:

Well, one idea is to process raw materials into different sorts of processed or manufactured resources. That's something else that could be done with excess resources. Iron into tools and whatnot, for instance.

Maybe you could even process some natural resources into ersatz versions of other natural resources - for instance, process 2 or 3 coal into one unit of oil, to simulate hydrocracked oil and fuels. Corn, too - like ethanol and corn-based lubricants.

Click to expand...

This, also. I don't know how many of y'all have had the pleasure of playing RailRoads!... but this is an aspect of that game, and I believe it could in Civilization for great justice. In RR, you could stimulate the growth of cities by supplying then with the resources they demanded and harvest commodities they produced. This could become an awesome component of the trade route system Civilization.