Civ3 style "colony" on resources outside culture

[Jezz]

Long time Civ3 player that picked up Civ4 during the steam holiday sale.
Trying very hard to break my old Civ3 habits in my first Civ4 game.

Is there a way to "capture" strategic/bonus resources that are off in the tundra/desert without having to build a city so that it is inside my cultural borders?

In Civ3, I modded my game so you can't build cities in tundra, forest, or hills, so a lot of the resources in far away tundra tiles were only available via worker created colonies. So I had lots of long lonely roads out to little resource "camps" guarded by several military units. It made for interesting strategy and was often one of the first things the AI and I would fight over in a war.

I thought the whole point of Civ4 was to limit ICS/REX, so the lack of worker created resource colonies seems like a drastic oversight ...

 

[lymond]

It really about analyzing the land in the area of tundra or desert. You don't need every tile to be workable for a city to be useful. In tundra, I look for food (seafood, deer or something on the outskirts and rivers). As long as you have that, some forest tundra, and hills you can make the city work. Desert is similar. Look for oases and settle on the perimeter of larger desert group tiles.

However if you have cities that border tundra and your borders will expand over it and its resources, you can use forts and roads to connect the resources - as long as they are within your cultural borders

edit: By the way, there's a recent thread a few below this one with a discussion on marginal tile types. You might find some interesting info in there.