Divine Gift?

[jstop]

So I'm playing along, prince difficulty as the Jappers, concentrating on research and commerce. I've managed to get ahead of all the other civ's by a significant margin by focusing purely on economical advancement. I've got a fair amount of land, but unfortunately I have no metal resources whatsoever (which is partially why I went the economic/research route, no metal for war). A few of my friendly neighbors have some extra iron, but they want Rice Wheat Cow Deer Gold Gems Clam Fish and 40 gold a turn to trade for it. My plan is to rush to crossbowmen so at least I have a decent anti-melee unit if someone tries something. Unfortunately, I learned the hard way that crossbowmen require iron. This is where I panic a bit and try to get to longbowman since I am convinced someone is going to notice all I got is archers defending my cities.

Halfway through researching the longbowman tech, bing! You have discovered a source of iron near Home Base! (my first city) At this point I basically stop what every city is doing, mass produce Samurai for 20 turns, and destroy my two closest neighbors.

I thought this was kind of odd since the resource appeared on a hill where a mine had been built 50 turns ago. It was like the computer realized I was screwed without any source of metal and decided to help me out. Has anyone else noticed any crucial resources appearing out of thin air?

 

[MattJek]

This happens quite frequently for me... its one of the feature of the game. You'll notice that when you build a mine you'll have a message telling you that the is an x% chance of finding gold, iron or any other metal on that square. This can happen at anytime in the game, not only when the mine is complete.

 

[mitsho]

You can see on the tooltip that every worked mine has a little chance of finding a resource. That adds up a bit for 50 turns, so it isn't quite a surprise. That you got iron on the other hand is pure luck...
But I got one more question: Did you only produce 20 samurais and nothing else? And on what difficulty level was this?

mitsho

 

[Olie]

Da da dum dum da dum (X-Files theme)

Don't think I've ever experienced anything like this, at first I thought it could be the game's laggy text alert system, but if you couldn't build Swordsmen etc. before you got the message this probably isn't the case.

I know there's a certain chance that whenever a mine is built a metal resource is found, does anyone know if this only applies to the turn the mine is built, or does it continue on afterwords? edit - MattJek and Mitsho allready answered this question, even as I typed this reply.

Well, that didn't really help at all, does it?

 

[MattJek]

In my last game I discovered three seperate sources of silver within my borders with this feature.

 

[jstop]

prince difficulty

i threw in a couple war elephants and some catapults for good measure but the samurais did most of the heavy lifting. Coming out of town with the 1 star auto upgrade (japan) + 2 more upgrades from civics/barracks gave me plenty of bonuses to whip up on the defending cities

 

[High_Elf_Lord-M]

i hate the game slaggy text update system i got told i had researched the apollo program 1 day before i won the space race lol, anyways i hate the rescource system in this version i always have evey resource and the ai always needs uranium from you for a crappy 2 per turn i haavent had a cash trade in this gam,e above 10 a turn)

 

[mitsho]

@jstop thanks, that's a fairly high level, you didn't use catapults at all? ok, that seems to me that either you have "weird" (unusual) game settings or the game concept of "you-need-different-units" isn't quite working... (I normally play builder or cultural aggression games and when military, I never started a medieval war up till now)

@high_elf_lord-M I suggest a higher level then, as the game favours you below noble and the AI above noble. Or you might as well just be playing with unusual settings... (for example with 'balanced' which more or less gives you most resources)

m

 

[henrycccc]

I got iron that way once too. The enemy just took out my source and I got another one.

 

[slothman]

I don't know if a mine is required but I do know that you
have to have the city put a citizen worker on it.

 

[panzooka]

i was lucky like that too
but instead, i got iron, but at the border with an aggressive civ.
then that civ declare war on me and pillaged my iron mine.
in the same turn, i discovered iron elsewhere