disappearing iron (the sequel)

[foodguy]

finally had time to sit down and finish the game (for those who haven't committed all posts to memory: i had iron in a mined mountain just outside the city, with roads going through it, a citizen working it ... yet no iron showed up in the resources box). nothing i did seemed to work. but here's the best part: about halfway through the evening, i got hte little sign warning "this resource has been exhausted"! i almost fell out of my chair.

it did make for an interesting game, though, since without iron (and, as it turned out, also without oil and uranium), i had to be on my very best behavior with everyone in order to keep trade available. so i played an entire game without a single war. and then, as soon as it was available, i hurriedly built the united nations and won a diplo in 1820. playing without iron is one thing, playing without oil was even more so. but trying to fend off 7 other civilizations without iron, oil and uranium was more challenge than i was up for.

 

[Catt]

Did you ever try to reload the game and see if the iron bug fixed itself?

 

[foodguy]

yes, i reloaded it twice. i also had a worker build a fort on it just to see if that would knock something loose (you can tell, i'm not a programmer). just a weird bug, i guess (even weirder since when i reloaded an earlier date, the iron showed up in the resource box!). this is the first bug i've run into with civ, so i guess i'm lucky.

 

[foodguy]

And one more thing: despite not fighting any wars, i culturally assimilated (flipped) 7 cities. weird game.

 

[Zouave]

All of which is not very realistic or historical.

No civilization in history found itself for any length of time without iron. Never happened.

Edit those resource appearance rates UP.

 

[Sullla]

Originally posted by Zouave
No civilization in history found itself for any length of time without iron. Never happened.

As I understand it, the Hittites and Assyrians were able to conquer most of Mesopotamia around roughly 1000BC for one reason: they had iron weapons, and no one else did. I also seem to recall reading that one of the reasons the Romans conquered most of Europe's Celtic population was that the Celts lacked knowledge of how to use iron for weapons and other things. And ditto for the Aztecs in the New World versus the Spanish. Now it's true that as knowledge of iron working was disseminated, every culture eventually learned how to use iron, but this is represented in Civ3 by the fact that iron is eventually no longer needed for units. Others can debate this interpretation of the game(and will, I'm sure ) but to claim that no civilization in history ever was without iron is not justified by the facts.

 

[TheNiceOne]

Originally posted by Zouave
All of which is not very realistic or historical.

No civilization in history found itself for any length of time without iron. Never happened.

Edit those resource appearance rates UP.

Zouave, why do you even bother?
Civilization has never been about trying to be very realistic or historical. If I was to make a list of unhistorical/unrealistic features in civ, the limiting factor would be my time, not the number of such features.

Fortunately, most of those features makes the game fun. Some of my greatest CIV 3 memories are from games where I lacked an important resource (usually oil), and had to overcome that obstacle (by trade, or more likely, by war).

foodguy had an interesting game that played quite differently than his normal games due to his lack of resources. It's good for you that you can edit the resource appearance rate according to your taste, but I think you're making each game more similar (and less interesting) by doing this.

 

[LKendter]

The resource / luxury battle is one of the things that makes Civ3 better then Civ2.

I have started wars because the small country next to me had a critical resource. The settler rush to get key luxuries - I have built weak location cities to secure a clump of 4 or 5 luxuries. Every square counts - the only reason I had oil in a recent game - I was the first to populate a crappy island with 2 cities, then flipped both of the English cities on the island. That was my ONLY oil source for quite a while. If I didn't settle a junk jungle city - I would have had ZERO coal. It was quite a few turns later before I secured a second source.


As for the Historical argument - WHO CARES - It's a high-level strategy game. Most grand level games are weak on historical.


Want historical accurate - play advanced squad leader - a.k.a. - advanced rules lawyer.

 

[foodguy]

didn't mean to start a thread that went in this direction. but i have to agree with lktender and The Nice One. I don't play Civ3 to replicate world history (come to think about it: if the game was COMPLETELY accurate in every variable, there would be only one possible outcome!). And for me, the thing that makes the game so goddamned compulsively replayable is the fine balance firaxis struck between realism (as opposed to historical accuracy) and simplicity. I'm old enough to remember the avalon hill games, which started out brilliantly but then, for me, reached some kind of point of ridiculousness with 1914, which had incredibly complicated rules for a game in which nothing every happened (trench warfare in a board game is even more boring than trench warfare in real life).

 

[ETO_Peregrine]

Originally posted by Sullla

...to claim that no civilization in history ever was without iron is not justified by the facts.

The Hittites were fearsome in their time not because they had iron within their borders, but they were one of the first societies that developed the industrial technology to mass produce high quality iron weapons. Iron forging requires extreme heat and fine control over the combination of iron and carbon (all forged iron is more or less steel). The simpler techniques of bronze forging had been fine tuned by the time the Hittites were in their own. Iron using civilizations gained superiority over less developed metalworkers not because of a lack of raw material, but technological advantage. Iron is actually more abundant than the ingredients for bronze, but for millennia no one was able to forge iron into anything useful.

In Civ III, spearmen (using bronze weapons) require no resources, while swordsmen (iron weapons) require a strategic resource. In my opinion, this is an attempt to force the historical conflict of metalworking civilizations using an unhistorical mechanism. Try again, Firaxis.

 

[Papa Lazarou]

a bit OT but im just playing a game where i had just 1 saltpeter in my borders and i got the dreaded 'resource depleted' message had a heart attack and then saw that it had respawned on the tile next to it! and this was on a standard size map, phew!

oh and if i want to play a historically accurate game i play EU2 but i do agree civ3 could be made a bit more realistic (especially in regards to diplomacy)