Progressive transfer of production from mines to industries

[os79]

Are there units at the end of the tech tree that can be built without any mine/quarry resource? If no, you're creating a situation where instead of reaching for the stars, everyone will be necessarily go back to fighting with pointy sticks. I'm dubious about solar power, but at the least there should be a series of 'solar-powered' non-resource requiring units. Or some form of recycling (maybe national wonders?) that provide most of those resources late in the game.

Honestly, we shouldn't ever run out of stone, and we can get salt just by letting sea water evaporate. And if we ever literally ran out of iron or copper underground, some one would start digging up landfills. Uranium is more problematic, but we use less of it any given time-I don't think I've ever seen concern expressed that we might burn through the worlds radioactive materials. And there are experiments not that demonstrate we can produce oil by subjecting biological waste (inedible chicken parts, but I think any such material would work) to heat and pressure.

Yeah, but the oil is what is causing Global Warming in this day and age. So, I doubt strongly that humanity would even want to produce more oil synthetically after they figure out the technology for an effective green energy.

 

[Afforess]

Are there units at the end of the tech tree that can be built without any mine/quarry resource? If no, you're creating a situation where instead of reaching for the stars, everyone will be necessarily go back to fighting with pointy sticks. I'm dubious about solar power, but at the least there should be a series of 'solar-powered' non-resource requiring units. Or some form of recycling (maybe national wonders?) that provide most of those resources late in the game.

Honestly, we shouldn't ever run out of stone, and we can get salt just by letting sea water evaporate. And if we ever literally ran out of iron or copper underground, some one would start digging up landfills. Uranium is more problematic, but we use less of it any given time-I don't think I've ever seen concern expressed that we might burn through the worlds radioactive materials. And there are experiments not that demonstrate we can produce oil by subjecting biological waste (inedible chicken parts, but I think any such material would work) to heat and pressure.

Your exaggerating the issue. You would only ever see this situation if your purposely created it, by playing on a map with very low resources and few hills. Then, basically, you would be playing on a resource-scarce world, which would require some frugality on your part. I'm playing a game right now in the highlands (lots of hills), and in the modern era, only about 1/5 are depleted. I just stick windmills on those.

As for salt, I suppose there should be a desalination plant somewhere, if not, I'm sure I can add it. Stone is possible to run out of, if the world was not volcanically active, no new stone would be created, and it would slowly turn into a dust covered world. As for iron and copper, remember, you are NOT playing on the planet Earth. This random planet that each custom game is could have potentially only a tiny amount of metals, or a large amount. Keep that in mind.

 

[civ_king]

Your exaggerating the issue. You would only ever see this situation if your purposely created it, by playing on a map with very low resources and few hills. Then, basically, you would be playing on a resource-scarce world, which would require some frugality on your part. I'm playing a game right now in the highlands (lots of hills), and in the modern era, only about 1/5 are depleted. I just stick windmills on those.

As for salt, I suppose there should be a desalination plant somewhere, if not, I'm sure I can add it. Stone is possible to run out of, if the world was not volcanically active, no new stone would be created, and it would slowly turn into a dust covered world. As for iron and copper, remember, you are NOT playing on the planet Earth. This random planet that each custom game is could have potentially only a tiny amount of metals, or a large amount. Keep that in mind.

maybe desal with electricity?

 

[Retrospect]

This is really going to make wars for resources even more frequent, something that can only be a good thing. If only there was some way of guaging (roughly) how much of a particular type of resource you had left, then that would make things even more interesting.

 

[Killtech]

[...] Stone is possible to run out of, if the world was not volcanically active, no new stone would be created, and it would slowly turn into a dust covered world. As for iron and copper, remember, you are NOT playing on the planet Earth. This random planet that each custom game is could have potentially only a tiny amount of metals, or a large amount. Keep that in mind.

lol, silicium (all rocks consist primarly of silicates) and iron are one of the most frequent elements in the univers... just after all the gases which most of the universe conists of. iron is even the most stable element thus it'll probably be the most frequent when all the suns burn out. so realitically when we are playing on a solid planet (i.e. not a gas giant) we defintivly can't ever run out of these resouces. if you dig deep enough into the planet's crust you'll find some.

Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron#Occurrence
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crust_(geology)#Composition_of_the_continental_crust
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geology_of_Mars

 

[Cyrusfan]

Global Warming silliness aside (as it is still in interesting game mechanic if nothing else) synthetic fossil fuels was a sufficiently likely future tech to make its way into SMAC and is currently being researched since we'll need something to put in our cars for the foreseeable future.

Afforess, I'm considering the very late game, when we'd be in the transhuman era tech wise. On pangaea maps, I usually see all territory claimed before a third of turns are up, so I think it's likely all hills and all initially available quarry resources will be gone by the time you're two thirds of the way through, so it depends just at what point you start mining the mountains. As building solutions go, I think there is a desalinization plant that provide clean water already, so adding the salt resource to it solves one issue. We already recycle aluminum, so a National Recycling program that provides one aluminum and requires aluminum to build would cover that. Similar structures might be made available for other resources used by late game units. Mainly I was suggesting a concern for playtesters to check, though.

 

[civ_king]

Climate change is PoS in Civ4 but is true in RL

 

[Cyrusfan]

Climate change is PoS in Civ4 but is true in RL

It's a proven fraud (see the Climategate emails). But even if there were any legitimate basis for the theory, the concern would have to be about returning the global climate to the state it was in when all kinds of life was sufficiently plentiful to sustain the dinosaurs, a huge improvement from where we are today. Under those assumptions, synthetic fossil fuels of the sort I described would still be desirable as carbon neutral (I think that's the pop culture term, anyway) because any carbon dioxide released by their burning has recently been in the atmosphere.

 

[Afforess]

lol, silicium (all rocks consist primarily of silicates) and iron are one of the most frequent elements in the universe... just after all the gases which most of the universe consists of. iron is even the most stable element thus it'll probably be the most frequent when all the suns burn out. so realistically when we are playing on a solid planet (i.e. not a gas giant) we definitively can't ever run out of these resources. if you dig deep enough into the planet's crust you'll find some.

Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron#Occurrence
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crust_(geology)#Composition_of_the_continental_crust
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geology_of_Mars

I doubt we know enough about other planets to definitively decide what is and isn't possible from our limited experience with our Solar System. If this mod component really bothers you, tweak it yourself.

Climate change is PoS in Civ4 but is true in RL

It's a proven fraud (see the Climategate emails). But even if there were any legitimate basis for the theory, the concern would have to be about returning the global climate to the state it was in when all kinds of life was sufficiently plentiful to sustain the dinosaurs, a huge improvement from where we are today. Under those assumptions, synthetic fossil fuels of the sort I described would still be desirable as carbon neutral (I think that's the pop culture term, anyway) because any carbon dioxide released by their burning has recently been in the atmosphere.

Please, Please stay on topic. This is not a political thread. Leave it as such. Thank you.

 

[Killtech]

I doubt we know enough about other planets to definitively decide what is and isn't possible from our limited experience with our Solar System. If this mod component really bothers you, tweak it yourself.

No, but we certainly can explain why iron and silicium is so common in the universe since we know how all elements were created in funsion processes in suns. thus we can say a vast majority of rocks in the universe will be composed of these light elements. the links i sent were just examples to show how large the deposits are, but not a general proof.


I just don't see why so many important resources should disappear. it's only realistic for the oil or coal maybe... resoucres that we burn. but iron, copper or even stone? this might render some corporations useless. despite i'm not the only one who is reservered about that idea of all mineral resources disappering in the late game.

thus i'll suggest we concentrate on a model where some deposits deplete and some remain. so how about adding additional terreain types like flood plains: 'surface mineral deposits', 'submontane mineral deposits', and 'deep mineral deposits'. default antice mines could only mine 'surface minearal deposits'. you'd need better mines types to get deeper deposits. every time a depletion event is triggered the terrain type changes one catagory down (surface->submontane, submontane->deep) or disappears completely. however a deep deposit should never deplete. with this method we have at least that one third of the mineral resources would not disappear at all.

 

[Cyrusfan]

Afforess, the thread is already off topic. The original topic was about the excessive production value given to mines relative to factory improvements, and now we're talking about modeling resources, which has no bearing on most mines. The basic issue I intended to discuss remains-if in fact resources were outright disappearing, in RL, someone would be looking into a workaround.

As to the original topic, it seems to me that the function of the factory overlooks the fact that factories make stuff from other stuff. I think it might be more realistic to move some of the production bonus from mines with resources to the factory improvements based on resource availability at the factories' city.

 

[Civ Fuehrer]

Afforess, the thread is already off topic. The original topic was about the excessive production value given to mines relative to factory improvements, and now we're talking about modeling resources, which has no bearing on most mines. The basic issue I intended to discuss remains-if in fact resources were outright disappearing, in RL, someone would be looking into a workaround.

As to the original topic, it seems to me that the function of the factory overlooks the fact that factories make stuff from other stuff. I think it might be more realistic to move some of the production bonus from mines with resources to the factory improvements based on resource availability at the factories' city.

Don't sweat it, people hijack threads all the time and change the topic.

As for Killtech's idea, it's actually quite possible. Three ways to do it, two of which would run smoothly, in which both of them would require the same amount of time doing it... You could:

A. make two new types of resources for each depletable resource and have one replace the other which would require a more expensive mine each time. i.e. Iron was depleted however you can 'build' a better mine to dig down deeper or wait until it changes to a shaft mine to keep mining Iron, then when it depletes a second time you'll need advanced mining to get the deposit that is much deeper in the crust. The bad thing about this is that you'd have to make everything that required the original resource also require the two new 'types' as an OR list.

B. The other way of going about this is going through the SDK and adding a depth counter to a plot's resource whenever the depletion event occurs. This would also require an XML tag to mines for a 'depth' counter that would allow a particular mine to retrieve a resource with that particular depth count or shallower.

 

[Afforess]

No, but we certainly can explain why iron and silicium is so common in the universe since we know how all elements were created in funsion processes in suns. thus we can say a vast majority of rocks in the universe will be composed of these light elements. the links i sent were just examples to show how large the deposits are, but not a general proof.


I just don't see why so many important resources should disappear. it's only realistic for the oil or coal maybe... resoucres that we burn. but iron, copper or even stone? this might render some corporations useless. despite i'm not the only one who is reservered about that idea of all mineral resources disappering in the late game.

thus i'll suggest we concentrate on a model where some deposits deplete and some remain. so how about adding additional terreain types like flood plains: 'surface mineral deposits', 'submontane mineral deposits', and 'deep mineral deposits'. default antice mines could only mine 'surface minearal deposits'. you'd need better mines types to get deeper deposits. every time a depletion event is triggered the terrain type changes one catagory down (surface->submontane, submontane->deep) or disappears completely. however a deep deposit should never deplete. with this method we have at least that one third of the mineral resources would not disappear at all.

Afforess, the thread is already off topic. The original topic was about the excessive production value given to mines relative to factory improvements, and now we're talking about modeling resources, which has no bearing on most mines. The basic issue I intended to discuss remains-if in fact resources were outright disappearing, in RL, someone would be looking into a workaround.

As to the original topic, it seems to me that the function of the factory overlooks the fact that factories make stuff from other stuff. I think it might be more realistic to move some of the production bonus from mines with resources to the factory improvements based on resource availability at the factories' city.

Don't sweat it, people hijack threads all the time and change the topic.

As for Killtech's idea, it's actually quite possible. Three ways to do it, two of which would run smoothly, in which both of them would require the same amount of time doing it... You could:

A. make two new types of resources for each depletable resource and have one replace the other which would require a more expensive mine each time. i.e. Iron was depleted however you can 'build' a better mine to dig down deeper or wait until it changes to a shaft mine to keep mining Iron, then when it depletes a second time you'll need advanced mining to get the deposit that is much deeper in the crust. The bad thing about this is that you'd have to make everything that required the original resource also require the two new 'types' as an OR list.

B. The other way of going about this is going through the SDK and adding a depth counter to a plot's resource whenever the depletion event occurs. This would also require an XML tag to mines for a 'depth' counter that would allow a particular mine to retrieve a resource with that particular depth count or shallower.

I love your ideas, but in Civ complexity does not always mean a better game. A simpler system that works 95% of the time correctly is better than an extremely complex one that works 99.9% of the time. I know that I don't want to have to micromanage my mines to make sure that I am getting the maximum potential. The way I have it set up now avoids adjusting the AI at all, since it is completely random. These suggestions all would involve a total or partial re-write of worker AI (Worker AI that Jdog just finally got working nicely, I might add).

My point is that more complex and in-depth features are not always good. (Case in Point, in Age of Empires I & II, collecting resources sucked. When they simplified it in III, it made it a much better game). I'm pulling out my trump card here, and using my artistic license to say that I quite like it the way it is now. If you feel very strongly about this, I urge you to learn some C and code it to your liking. If not, get off my lawn.

 

[Killtech]

hehe, to be honest i don't have any problem with how mines work now either. even if that's not completely realistic, it makes a good game play for now. however if we talk about adding a new optional feature (which might add complexity for those who are willing to use it) that changes that i think it should be done carefully. i see no sense in just adding something that depletes all mineral resources in the late game because i think the game will just lose many aspects through this - so such a feature wouldn't be worth a try for me. at the other hand, if this feature is crafted in a well balanced way the additional complexity and micro-management add an additional challenge for an old Civ veteran.

So my point is this: either make a feature slow and good in such a way that it works well with the game or leave it out for later and concentrate on other mod components that the majority of people uses. you know quality is better than quantity. i personally think this feature can wait for now.

@Civ Fuehrer:
wouldn't it be possible to make it directly as i described? adding new terrain type 'sufrace mineral desposits' (short SMD) analogue to 'flood plains'. now it would only be possible to build a (normal) mine or query directly on SMD, nowhere else - even if there's a hill or mountain: no SMD, no mine. so now when a depletion event is triggered the SMD is converted randomly into SmMD (submontane mineral deposits) or default terrain (no mineral deposits). on SmMD a normal mine grants no boni and don't give access to the resouce anymore if present (alternatively the mine could just disapper.. it's the same except for the optics). effectivly the tile has no improvement anymore (in case of a normal mine and SmMD). so you either build a shaft mine or something else.

if we say that after shaft mines become available normal mines turn automatically into shaft mines if worked (so just as it is now, except that they can't turn form start on) there wouldn't be much micro involved. and since a depleted mine tiles would count as tiles without improvement i think worker AI shouldn't have a problem with that.

 

[konradcabral]

Afforess, this thread generated the awesome Depletion Mod, but it wasn't the original goal of it.

Do you agree that mines should be less powerful in the late game, in order to make industries relatively stronger?

 

[Afforess]

Afforess, this thread generated the awesome Depletion Mod, but it wasn't the original goal of it.

Do you agree that mines should be less powerful in the late game, in order to make industries relatively stronger?

Mines are less powerful late game already. You can build industry on plains, and mines can deplete. By the late game, mines would have already depleted many of the good mining sites.

Why, what else where you thinking about?