Continent without resources

[Merkurius]

How are you other players handle a game like this:
I´ve been playing for maybe an hour, building cities, roads and so on. I live on a pretty perfect sized continent, but.. there are no resources? Absolutely no coal, no oil, not even a single piece of iron.

Should I just start a new game or should I continue to struggle and dealing and fighting other civs?

I don´t really want to wait with the city-building and running around the whole continent looking for iron?

Any advice?

 

[Bartleby]

If you have gotten all the way to refining and have no Iron, Coal or Oil, then if you can't trade for them I would say start again. If you don't want to abandon the game, and if you have Horses & Saltpeter you could build a stack of Cavalry and help yourself to the AI's resources.

Are you using only a limited number of AI? If you use a full slate of AI it's very unlikely that you'll be missing all of those resources.

 

[Merkurius]

Aha.. so the amount of resources depends on the number of AI opponents? I thought it depended on the size of the map(world). Thanks!

 

[Turner]

Indeed, it does. While the map size may be a factor, I've found that number of AI overrides it, or has a larger chunck of the equation.

Actually, it can work in your favor if it turns out that you have the resource the AI needs....

 

[Aabraxan]

. . . I´ve been playing for maybe an hour, building cities, roads and so on. I live on a pretty perfect sized continent, but.. there are no resources? Absolutely no coal, no oil, not even a single piece of iron.

If you've only been playing for an hour, I'm not surprised that you don't see any coal or oil. The techs that make them visible come later in the game, but you can see iron much earlier. Where are you in the tech tree? Do you have the techs to see the resources?

Also, check your F2 screen to make sure that you really don't have them. If you're building swords, you have iron, but if you built a city on top of it, you won't see it.

 

[Mirc]

Just to make clear what everyone is saying:
You need to discover a certain tech to be able to see a certain resource. You can't see Iron until you discover Iron Working. You can't see coal until you discover Steam Engine. You can't even see horses from the start, you have to discover The Wheel. When you discover a tech that enables a resource, you can see it. When the AI discovers a tech that enables a resource, they can see it, but you can't.
And if you can't see it, it acts like if it wasn't there at all. All resources are randomly placed at the beginning of the game (though the disapear and reappear sometimes), but you won't see any of the strategic resources from the beginning.

 

[Redrake]

When the AI discovers a tech that enables a resource, they can see it, but you can't.

No they don't. They can see it from the start.
Perhaps you meant "they can use it".

 

[Mirc]

No, I meant what I said. Below Monarch, they don't use any of the bonuses they have.

 

[MAS]

I´ve been playing for maybe an hour, building cities, roads and so on.

Its a turn based game, like chess, you could just as well have spend 1 hour on your first turn as far as we know.

The real life time you spend playing is irrelevant to your in-game progress.