How players/resources get placed

, open, arable, fresHere's some tips for making decisions for the first few turns of the game in GEM. This information is useful when deciding which policy tree to pursue, or when to build our second city, even if we haven't discovered any other players yet. (Important if we get a culture goodie hut!)


If you start near lots of fantastic land like grassland, plains, and especially rivers:

• Expect close neighbors.
• The likelihood of an AI rush is high.
• You'll probably have few barbarian troubles in the game.
• There will likely be a small number of large-sized strategic resource deposits.
• City sites will probably have a high quality overall, but you won't have much room to expand.

If you're surrounded by flat/dry tundra or desert:

• Expect more open space around your capital.
• AIs are less likely to rush you.
• Barbarians will likely swarm you.
• Strategic resource deposits will probably be numerous, with a lower size per deposit.
• Your cities will likely favor quantity over quality, with lots of room to expand.

And here's the reason why!



Civ divides the map into territories (circled) with a capital near the center of each (dots). Notice how the land area of the southwest territory is somewhat larger than the land of the south-center territory. This is because the southwest territory has lots of desert and tundra, while the south-center territory is primarily grassland, plains, and hills.

In GEM each territory contains exactly 4 units of horses, 5 iron, 3 coal, 3 oil, and so on (-33% lower with the scarce resource option, +66% higher with abundant option). This means the territory (and player) can typically support 4 horsemen and 4 swordsmen. The quantity per territory is always the same between territories and games. Within individual territories, resources are placed based on terrain types they favor:


Citystates are placed after territory division, favor territories with few luxury resources, and are placed near good city sites around decent yields and resources. Citystates place 1 luxury resource, a few bonus resources, but do not place strategic resources. They do tend to appear near strategics because those are usually good city sites. This means some of the strategic resources in your territory might require allying with or conquering a citystate to acquire.


How it works

The territory division is part of why Civ 5 start locations are generally more balanced than Civ 1-4. Sirian from the Civ community did most of it, with some help from Ed Beach (I think Ed is Firaxis employee but the documentation doesn't say). Sirian's code divides the map into territories based on the "fertility" score of the tiles. Each territory's total fertility is nearly identical. This means areas of low fertility get a larger territory and vice versa. Players with poor land (tundra/desert) get more room to expand since the frequency of good city sites is lower.

These are the fertility values for each terrain and feature type in GEM:

Mountain, Ice, Oasis, FloodPlain tiles = -2, -1, 5, 5 and do not count anything else.

Rest of the tiles add up values of tile traits.
Terrain: Grass 5, Plains 5, Tundra 1, Coast 2, Desert 0, Snow -1
Features: Hill +1, Forest +1, Jungle 0, FreshWater +1, River +3, Marsh -1

Click to expand...

In vanilla this territorial division is used for almost everything... except strategic resources!

One of the big changes from vanilla to GEM is strategic resources are placed per-territory so each player has about the same amount. In vanilla strategics are scattered randomly without analyzing player density or terrain quality. This inevitably results in too few or too many strategics, which makes it fundamentally impossible to balance strategic-using units in vanilla.

i wonder how does mod's resource placement system interact with that of mapscripts (i like the PerfectWorld3), which has higher priority?

also, i wonder why is fertility scores of forest and jungle same? I personally like forests (especially with lumbermills) and almost always chop down jungles.

It basically goes like this:

1. Default game
2. TBM overrides #1, the default
3. Maps override #2, the new default

2 - Hill
11 - Plains
11 - Forest

2 - Grassland
2 - Jungle

In earlier version of Civ jungles were always bad, but in Civ 5 features basically are transformers. Jungles turn plains into grassland. Forests do the opposite, turning grassland or hills into plains.

Chopping turns that "grassland" back into plains. This is sometimes useful, but often it's valuable to drop a village there instead and wait for the + jungles get later in the game. A jungle village is better than a grassland village, and not chopping the jungle saves worker time.

So the intended/default playstyle in TBC mid-2011 is to leave jungles unchopped for the science boost? At least that's how I understood you: chopping it is an alternative if you urgently need the production from plains, but doesn't pay off in the long run?

[And for those who remember me: Yes, I'm back after half a year. Stupid new job is not that stressful during summer. Let's see how long I manage to pinch of time for a timesink like civ... ]

It's good to see the smurf back!

Yes, that's how jungles work in both vanilla and the mod.

I seem to get confounded a lot by resources in TBC. Both iron and horses, I tend to find few of ... there are generally only 1 or 2 1-resource deposits of iron or horses in my territory (and in some cases, none of either) on a Normal-sized map and I wind up having to out-expand the AI, and place cities on the far side of them to get just a little bit more, and look to coast-accessible islands as well.

Each player's territory can support 9 strategic resource units in the early game, and once we conquer an opponent it raises to 18. These numbers are the same for every player in every game.

As you pointed out it's usually easy to get 2-4 of these units right away. The other deposits are typically in citystate borders or sometimes under a citystate itself. When we're playing a peaceful game we can ally with these citystates if we need the resources. In conquest games we can capture the citystates.

My classical-era army composition is usually something like:

• 3 swordsmen
• 2 catapults
• 2 chariots
• 1 horsemen
• 3 archers
• 2 spearmen
• 2 scouts

~15 units total

Any more units and the map usually gets overcrowded. Combined arms is the way to go - it's more powerful and strategically challenging than spamming one or two unit types. In a conquest game my initial build order is scout/scout/worker or scout/scout/warrior. Scouts are great Medics in this mod since they're stronger, cheap, and can upgrade to the useful Militia. I try to get at least one scout to the Medic promotion from fighting barbarians. I also have 1 scout garrisoned in every city for Military Caste and fending off barbarians.

I then add archers and spears to capture the first city:

• 3 archers
• 2 spearmen
• 2 scouts

The 2nd city captured usually has walls:

• 2 catapults
• 3 archers
• 2 spearmen
• 2 scouts

After that I add the strategic units for early-medieval warfare:

• 3 swordsmen
• 2 chariots
• 1 horsemen
• 2 catapults
• 3 archers
• 2 spearmen
• 2 scouts

Once ready to upgrade to medieval units at least three or four cities are conquered. I often stop a while at this point to let happiness catch up. As you can see, we can build lots of units in a combined-arms force, with strategic units as the core elite of our army. This army only requires 3 horses and 3 iron, which is a portion of the resources available in our territory (4 horses and 5 iron).

I know that this is pretty old, and there might be a thread that explains this better now, or maybe I'm just stupid, BUT, are the resources and what-not made more abundant if you add more players, or are there the same amount of resources and territories no matter what?

As I understand it, there is one territory per player, so yes, adding more players adds more resources.

Edit: /delete - Nevermind, my question is answered in the OP after re-reading.

What was your question? I might be able to clarify the OP answer if it was worded strangely or placed in a bad spot.