How rare is oil/coal supposed to be?

[Sascha77]

I just hit combustion in my current Japan-game and the resource-situation is pretty grim.

It's a standard-sized island map, I have nearly everything explored (minus some smaller patches near the poles) and so far, I've been able to only find 3 coal-tiles (luckily, one of which was within settling distance).

Oil however, is even worse. There's one oil-tile on land (which is in Vicky's territory) and the other is on a coast-tile right at the north pole (inaccessible to me, even if I wanted to settle on snow/ice, since it's within three tiles of a citiy-state). If I hadn't been able to buy Rockefeller, I would've had to play the rest of the game without any oil whatsoever.

Since I don't have a lot of late-game experience in Civ VI yet: Is there any building that does for oil what the recycling plant did for aluminium in Civ V?

If not, perhaps the map generation could use a bit of tweaking. Three coal-tiles and two oil-tiles (one of them useless) on a map with eight players is a bit weird ...


S.

 

[Cerilis]

Some of the late game resources could be hidden beneath other players cities/districts/wonders, you'd have to check their strategic resources to see if they got some (when they have the tech). Though they should fix them to also be viewable on the map.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

The strategic resources are supposed to be very rare...something between 1 and about the number of civs total sources on the map.

and they do need a "minimap lens" to find those strategic resources clearly.

 

[Siptah]

I think it's on purpose that some strategic resources are super rare. It makes the game more unpredictable (you have to use different unit types), encourages colonizing of otherwise uneconomic places, encourages trade. However, to me it seems very random which strategic resources are super rare. Sometimes it's iron, sometimes it's niter. In my games so far, coal and oil were never much of a problem, since I'm willing to settle at the edge of the map to get a strategic resource. I just plant the city and look to it that it doesn't grow more than pop 3 (which it usually can't because of snow/tundra/ocean).

And what Cerilis said, too. I always got Steel by luckily appearing under a wonder/district/city of mine.

 

[Tiger Genocide]

I have a Scythia game with only one oil on the entire map off the coastline, which also happens to be beyond the 4th tile row of a city I captured. This is the second time I have had a game with only 1 source of oil on the map and it was in water. From now on, I will keep selecting abundant resources. Without being able to turn my knights into tanks, just ruined this game and is basically not worth playing anymore, and I will just have to re-roll it. The standard settings are just terrible in general, but oil is worse than uranium so far. I also do not understand why oil does not have a bias for desert tiles or tundra anymore like Civ 5 did.

 

[Larsenex]

Really for a single player game it would be terrific to have the in game editor.

 

[Siptah]

I have a Scythia game with only one oil on the entire map off the coastline, which also happens to be beyond the 4th tile row of a city I captured. This is the second time I have had a game with only 1 source of oil on the map and it was in water. From now on, I will keep selecting abundant resources. Without being able to turn my knights into tanks, just ruined this game and is basically not worth playing anymore, and I will just have to re-roll it. The standard settings are just terrible in general, but oil is worse than uranium so far. I also do not understand why oil does not have a bias for desert tiles or tundra anymore like Civ 5 did.

IIRC someone looked in the code and saw that the number of strategic resources on a map is always around the same as the numbers of standard civs for that map, if you are choosing standard resource distribution instead of scarce or abundant.
What I don't get is that you can't see resources under cities and districts. Late game resources have a very high chance to be built over already. So we need a lense that shows all resource icons, no matter if something is built on them. That way, we can know which city to conquer for a resource. Oil might be a problem because it also occurs in the ocean - which means 3 or 4 of the 8 copies on the standard map might be hard to reach. But I didn't have much trouble finding at least one copy of it in every game so far without much conquering. Usually I was able to found a city near an oil spot. It just takes longer that way, especially since you might have to wait for oil platforms.
If you want to do some big conquering with tanks, try to get James Young (Great Scientist). He shows Oil earlier, so that you can plan better where to grab a copy from.
If you are really out of luck and can't get any oil, grab John D. Rockefeller. He grants a free copy of oil. In that stage of the game you probably have lots of Commercial Hubs. If it is a tight race, use district projects and rush buy.