How can we make bonus resources worth while again?

[skodkim]

Hi

Long time fan of Civ - since Civ 1 actually.

Every time I play CiV I'm however irritated that bonus resources seem to have been reduced to merely a food/production bonus on a plot.

In my perspective this makes them quite inferior to luxuries and strategic resources. For the former number does matter as e.g. you can only have one swordsman per iron.

I mean its nice to place cities near wheat, cow and such but wheres the flavor in it? You can't even trade them and they don't give any extra advantages.

In civ IV they had the health system. While many people seem to dislike it I loved it as it actually meant something if you acquired a bonus resource.

To add to this in Civ IV you could trade that resource. You could even make buildings that e.g. increased gold output if you had access to the particular resource.

So the question I ask is how can we make bonus resources worth while again?

Deep Blue had an excellent little mod, named Food Economy http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=405052&highlight=food+trade. While it was not perfect (for example the AI had no idea on how to use this) it did actually give a little bit of flavor to the resources as you could trade them to the AI and If you (like I did) had enough discipline to not trade unless you had more than one you could even foll yourself into thinking you too had some kind of benefit from having access to that particular resource. Unfortunately I think this mod is broke with the latest patch.

So anyone have any ideas? I'm not the greatest modder out there and I would really like to have a discussion on how to make bonus resources matter more.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Every time I play CiV I'm however irritated that bonus resources seem to have been reduced to merely a food/production bonus on a plot.

I'm not sure how this qualifies as a "reduced to", since that's all they were in most of the previous games. The only real balance problem with them is that the extra yield you get for having one is often less than what you get from a Strategic or Luxury, but that's easy enough to fix; just make all of the Bonus resources be +2 instead of +1.

But you don't really need to. Look at the Granary; it adds +1 food for Deer, Bananas, and Wheat, which effectively makes these resources add +2 already. (Stone Works does the same for Stone.) The Lighthouse also adds +1 food to Fish; the Harbor and Seaport boost its production as well, but they apply to all sea resources so we won't count them here.

So just take it further, and boost the other Bonus resources. For instance, in my own mod I changed the Market so that instead of the flat +2 gold, it now gives +1 gold per Cow, Fish, or Wheat. Suddenly, there's a powerful reason to want those near a city...

While there are a few of these boosting strategics or luxuries (Forge, Stables, Stone Works for marble), you can use a system like this to make the Bonus resources generally more valuable for yields.

In civ IV they had the health system.

The problem was, Civ4's health system was basically just a -food system once you got to the late game where it started to matter. So adding +1 food to a bonus resource was functionally about the same as subtracting 1 from unhealthiness, except that the +food would often be more useful since it'd help in those earlier phases where unhealthiness was too low to matter. There's a local-vs-global aspect to this that you could play with, but the reason the health system was tossed was that it didn't really add any depth to the game; this is why most of the things that had previously added health (like the Hospital) were changed to add Food in Civ5.

 

[skodkim]

Ok, I get a lot of your points - maybe I'm just seeing limitations here instead of possibilities. I would however really like to see

• The quantity of a particular resource matter
• The posibility of trading bonus resources

Any ideas?

\Skodkim

 

[Spatzimaus]

There are a couple mods that toy with the whole "making quantities matter" bit. Having the second unit of a luxury add some token amount instead of currently being worthless except as a trade good/redundancy, giving some benefit for unused strategics, that sort of thing. So it's possible.

The problem is that changing bonus resources (and luxuries) into something that uses actual quantities (>1 unit per hex) requires a significant overhaul to AssignStartingPlots, which is not a very mod-friendly file. And using those extra units for anything, like the health system you liked, would require either some awkward Lua hacks or access to the DLL.
This unfortunately causes major AI issues; any Lua hack you make will be utterly foreign to the AI. He won't understand whatever mechanism you use to make the bonus resources more valuable, and that's a significant advantage to the player. This is true of nearly any Lua change you make; in my own mod I've tried very hard to only use Lua functions that are transparent to the user, so that the player won't gain a significant edge over the AI, and even there I ran into problems.

So I'd HIGHLY recommend the relatively simple XML solution of making bonus resources have higher tile yields than luxuries or strategics. No global benefit, just extra growth, production, etc. for whatever city has the local supply.