Question: Has anyone discovered the rhyme or reason to how new resources are discovered in normal mines?
The observations I've made thus far are somewhat limited, because this event doesn't happen often. Actually, I've only seen it occur in one of my games, and it happened THREE times before I was even halfway through the game. Yeah, ridiculously lucky, right? You don't even know the half of it. The first resource to pop was copper, on a hill in a city which already had copper. Next a gold mine appeared right next to my capital city, also adjacent to a river. Not three turns after that, silver was discovered near my snowy arctic city. The only common element behind all this seems to be that the mines were being worked by the city when the resources were discovered. This makes logical sense, since an empty mine isn't going to announce to the world that it has hidden mineral veins. However, I can't be sure that is the case... and if it's not the case, if mines can discover new resources without being worked, then it would behoove players to spam mines on every hill within their borders.
I figured this discussion might have taken place before on the forums, but I couldn't find any answers with a search, so here I present my query. Feedback, experiences, anecdotes and especially data from actual research would be great.
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EDIT: Ok I went and did a quick exercixe in the worldbuilder... Normal speed, made a city with all techs, 20 population and all 20 tiles grassland/mine, then ran through 500 turns to see what would appear. First was aluminum, which appeared in the first 20 turns. Gradually came copper, iron, gold, coal, another iron, then finally silver. So I got 7 new resources on 20 mines over the course of 500 turns. Roughly 0.07% chance per turn for a resource to pop on a mine if you just divide those numbers, but that math is wrong because a resource can't appear on top of an existing one, so adjust it upwards a little.... I'm guessing it's an even 0.1%. Which means if you mine one spot for, say, 100 turns, you've got a 9.5% chance that at some point it will discover something. For 200 turns it's about 18.1%, 300 turns is 25.9%, and 400 turns is 33%. A normal game is 460 turns, so you can't get much further than that. Just to toss some numbers around, let's say your main production city has 4 mined hills that don't already have resources. If you work these four spots for the vast majority of the game, and play until 20th century at least, you stand a very good chance of getting at least one new resource. Say you put in a total of 1000 mine-turns (working one mine for one turn = one mine-turn) in the game. The chances that something will pop in one of those mines is 63.2%. Now, that might be on the last turn or the first turn, but it's more likely than not to happen at some point. You just won't know when.
Empire-wide, it would seem that a game played to completion would almost guarantee something appears. If you put in 5000 mine-turns, you've got a 99.3% chance.
The observations I've made thus far are somewhat limited, because this event doesn't happen often. Actually, I've only seen it occur in one of my games, and it happened THREE times before I was even halfway through the game. Yeah, ridiculously lucky, right? You don't even know the half of it. The first resource to pop was copper, on a hill in a city which already had copper. Next a gold mine appeared right next to my capital city, also adjacent to a river. Not three turns after that, silver was discovered near my snowy arctic city. The only common element behind all this seems to be that the mines were being worked by the city when the resources were discovered. This makes logical sense, since an empty mine isn't going to announce to the world that it has hidden mineral veins. However, I can't be sure that is the case... and if it's not the case, if mines can discover new resources without being worked, then it would behoove players to spam mines on every hill within their borders.
I figured this discussion might have taken place before on the forums, but I couldn't find any answers with a search, so here I present my query. Feedback, experiences, anecdotes and especially data from actual research would be great.
===========================================
EDIT: Ok I went and did a quick exercixe in the worldbuilder... Normal speed, made a city with all techs, 20 population and all 20 tiles grassland/mine, then ran through 500 turns to see what would appear. First was aluminum, which appeared in the first 20 turns. Gradually came copper, iron, gold, coal, another iron, then finally silver. So I got 7 new resources on 20 mines over the course of 500 turns. Roughly 0.07% chance per turn for a resource to pop on a mine if you just divide those numbers, but that math is wrong because a resource can't appear on top of an existing one, so adjust it upwards a little.... I'm guessing it's an even 0.1%. Which means if you mine one spot for, say, 100 turns, you've got a 9.5% chance that at some point it will discover something. For 200 turns it's about 18.1%, 300 turns is 25.9%, and 400 turns is 33%. A normal game is 460 turns, so you can't get much further than that. Just to toss some numbers around, let's say your main production city has 4 mined hills that don't already have resources. If you work these four spots for the vast majority of the game, and play until 20th century at least, you stand a very good chance of getting at least one new resource. Say you put in a total of 1000 mine-turns (working one mine for one turn = one mine-turn) in the game. The chances that something will pop in one of those mines is 63.2%. Now, that might be on the last turn or the first turn, but it's more likely than not to happen at some point. You just won't know when.
Empire-wide, it would seem that a game played to completion would almost guarantee something appears. If you put in 5000 mine-turns, you've got a 99.3% chance.
