No iron or a monopoly?

PhilBowles said:

I think this may vary with difficulty level, since I noticed the same at lower levels. At higher ones (I'm generally playing on King or Emperor) there seems to be less resource clustering generally, and in games where I've got a lot of iron, the enemy has too (I had 8, the Ottomans apparently more in my last game).

I think there's already an inbuilt fix of sorts in that it's very quick to tech up to Pikemen or Crossbowmen which are nearly as strong as iron-dependent equivalents. Iron has a short useful life as the dominant military resource between the development of Steel/Physics and the development of Gunpowder and Chemistry

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apocalypse105 said:

If you are playing marathon game thats a other story.

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I have to admit I haven't played on the non-standard settings, but I wouldn't expect resource distribution in the landscape to be balanced around marathon games - I don't know if it would be fixable without affecting standard play.

So you are saying the higher the diffulcty the more it is spread throughought the map?

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That's my experience so far - for example I'm much more likely to get several one-of luxuries around my starting location than multiples of a single resource, and I often won't have a monopoly (in my last game I was unable to trade after a while because both of the neighbouring civs had their own access to resources of which I had duplicates). To be honest I much prefer that; I've never been a fan of the resource-clustering approach purely because the original fun in Civ for me came from exploring and never knowing which resources would turn up nearby.

And on lower difficulties the game will put Some iron close to you?

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Not necessarily, but there seems to be less iron to go round generally at those levels - I haven't previously had games where everyone has access to multiple iron-hungry units. I think it's just a function of the apparent greater clustering of resources at lower levels - it's more likely that a player will have access to, say, the sole sources of dyes; same with iron. That player may or may not be you.

Haven't played vanilla in a while, but I remember iron being pretty important even in a standard-length game. Aren't swordsman a lot cheaper per muscle than pikemen?

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From memory this is true. I wouldn't say iron is unimportant earlier than Steel, it's just not critical. It will give you a discount rather than out-and-out better units. A Pikeman is a more or less even match for a Swordsman; a Crossbowman is stronger than a Catapult, it's just less effective against cities (but still good in quantity - although much more expensive). It's that slightly later stage where the player with iron has units that can (or could, if the AI could play well) reliably beat yours at a more-or-less equivalent tech level. Also, the UUs that use iron tend to be extremely good for their era, which can make the resource more important in those contexts. Sure a Pikeman is equal to a Swordsman, but without iron you can't get anything at an equivalent tech level that's a match for a Roman Legion (you can't with iron either, but the Swordsman can put up a better fight than a Pikeman, and iron also gives you access to ranged attacks that can actually do noticeable damage to Legions).

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