Mining...

So the tooltip for mining says "small chance of discovering ..." and then gives a list of the resources you know about that require mining to be added to your resource pool. My question (and it'll probably take someone looking deeply behind the scenes) is if I take a random hill and mine it and then switch to a windmill and then mine it again and then switch to a windmill again and then... is there a chance each time I put a mine there that a resource will be discovered in the mine, or did they just word the tooltip badly?

Basically, in every game I've played so far, either coal or aluminium had exactly ONE spot in the world where it was available, and since coal is important to railroads (whatever happened to diesel trains?), and aluminium is important to modern tanks (which require COMPOSITES to unlock, so why do I need aluminium?); I want to be able to get some in my territory without having to fight for it.

 

No, you have to actively use that hill as a mine. Each turn you have a person working it in the city, there is a very small chance of it being discovered.

What you are suggesting doing is the technique that has the least chance of discovering a new resource.

 

The 'small chance' is every turn there is a mine on the square and worked, not when the mine is completed.

The only time it happened to me (so far) the mine had been in existance for over 100 turns when some silver popped up. It was an extra hammer and 5 gold so I am not complaining

edit: beaten to it

 

I played a game where I mined a hill early - in the middle of the game I was told that "you have discovered Iron near blahblah city". So I think that building a mine sets it up so that later you can discover a new resource. Kinda like civ 3 where every once in a great while a resource magically appeared(or disappeared) within your borders. ps it was long after Iron originally appeared.

 

There is about a 0.01% chance of a mine discovering a resource each turn it is being worked. It is too rare to plan for, and you can't really boost your chances to a significant level. It's only happenened to me twice in nearly 5 complete games.

 

Its got to be higher than that, in the RB1- Cuban Isolationist thread in Succession Games forum here, Sirian and Sullla had about 4, possibly 5 pops int he same game.

of course, that game was ludicrisly tipped in there favor once they nailed 6 of the 7 religions. Last I saw, they were upto 50 million citizens, and that was before the late game rush towards domination

Excellent read if you havent seen it already, and topical too

 

Also, as to the OP's original thought. If it did work like that, Im sure many MANY people wopuld consider it an exploit and ban its use, then call for it to be fixed in a patch

 

@Runriot, then I can only say you've been incredibly lucky. I mine every hill available and I'm not surprised if I don't get any in a game. Presumably there's a file somewhere which would tell you the exact percentage, but I doubt it's much higher than 0.01%.

 

It happend today in a game for me.A gold resource was discovered in a mine built 50 turns earlier just outside the capital

 

Someone posted the exact chance in another thread, can't remember it offhand though. It's definitely in one of the xml files though.