A potential mod to make non-strategic resources more interesting.

[Aussie_Lurker]

Hi guys. Haven't got the game yet (only just came out today in Australia), but am very keen to start modding as soon as possible.

My Mod idea is to make Luxury & Bonus resources more interesting by having them work in a similar fashion to how they worked when you had corporations in BtS.
This Mod would consist of several parts:

(1) Have bonus & luxury resources appear as units-like strategic resources.

(2) Each unit of a bonus, strategic or luxury resource-after the first-grants you a bonus to the yields in all your cities.

As an example, say you have 6 units of dyes (1 size 2 & 1 size 4). These dyes will grant you +5 happiness, but will also grant you +2.5 Gold & +1.25 culture per city

The bonuses would be capped at-say-a maximum of 8 to 10 units, thus giving strong incentives to trade any resources in excess of the cap. It would also create greater opportunities to trade bonus & luxury resources-as a civilization would still gain benefit from a resource even if they already had a copy in their empire.

(3) Another thing I'm hoping to do is this: If a city has a resource in its borders, then it increases the value of any trade route it has-even more so if that luxury is being traded to a foreign nation & more so again if the foreign nation is overseas.

As an example. Lets say a city has spices within its radius, & it has a trade route. This trade route will be increased in value due to the presence of the resource. If you're trading spices to another Civilization, then cities with spices in their radius get an even *bigger* boost to their trade routes-& larger again if said empire is overseas

So I'm thinking that I'll have to make some significant SDK changes in the files relating to resources, as well as changing the AI behaviour so that they'll recognize the value of bonus & luxury resources (in particular) & assign an appropriate trade value to them in the Diplomacy Screen. I'd also need to make changes to trade route income.

So I guess my question is for anyone that has had access to the full modding tools already (I'm looking at you Kael). Can this be done?

Aussie.

 

[Szpilman]

I second your idea and would love to help. However I think it would still miss the most awesome concept of Corporations: focusing on a given resource type/group and collecting as many of them as possible. I think some such flavor would foster trade better than simply giving an empire wide bonus, because if both Dye and Silk give the same bonus than why would I bother trading? However, if I've built a Weavery or something at my city, I'd want as many Silk as I can get a hold of. Just my 2 cents

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

I second your idea and would love to help. However I think it would still miss the most awesome concept of Corporations: focusing on a given resource type/group and collecting as many of them as possible. I think some such flavor would foster trade better than simply giving an empire wide bonus, because if both Dye and Silk give the same bonus than why would I bother trading? However, if I've built a Weavery or something at my city, I'd want as many Silk as I can get a hold of. Just my 2 cents

....and a good 2c it is. That is definitely an option for making multiple copies of a resource more important, but I like my idea too .
I think an important thing to prevent what you're talking about is to have resources with as little overlap as possible. So whilst dyes & silks might both boost culture, dyes would grant a secondary boost to gold, whilst silks might give a secondary boost to production.
Just a thought.

Aussie.

 

[Pegasos]

I was just thinking that could there be buildings that could convert resources to other resources? Like coal to oil, which was prevalent in pre-Cold War Germany. Also some kind of resource refining, like the Arabs' bazaar, could add some depth to the now existing you-get-five-smilies-per-resource system.