Mountains (No Roads) and Resources?

[SayHayKid]

Like several others, I have made most combat units in my mod wheeled. I made Mountains, Jungles, and Marshes impassable to wheeled. I want to either have no roads on mountains or not have roads until later. My first thought was to allow roads on Mountains, but not until the Middle Ages. I made Workers wheeled and then had them upgrade to Serfs at Feudalims who were not wheeled. I wasn't thinking it through and that plan backfired. Iron often appears on mountains and there was no way to get to it, severely nerfing Civs unless you happened to have Iron on a hill.

So, my next thought was to make workers not wheeled again, but give Mountains no commerce bonus so roads couldn't be built, but workers could work mountain tiles. Then like a dummy, I remembered that if you can't build a road to the iron it's of no use. Doh! Am I missing an alternative? Is there a way to remove roads from mountains, but still access iron? Outside of making it not available on mountains and making it available to a different terrain (in addition to hills) instead?

 

[tjs282]

Am I missing an alternative? Is there a way to remove roads from mountains, but still access iron?

If the neighbouring terrain allows a continuous road back to a friendly town, then technically a Colony could be planted on a resource-bearing Mountain to gain access to it. A Colony comes with a "built-in" road, which is left in place after someone's Cultural borders expand over that tile.

The problem with that 'solution' is that Colonies can only be founded outside Cultural borders, and although the AI knows where all the resources are from Turn1 (and founds towns accordingly), it would likely not be smart enough to know that it should (Road To +) Colonise a resource-Mountain, before planting a town nearby.

Conversely, a human player who was 'lucky' enough to roll a spawn-point sufficiently close to an Iron-Mountain for it to be already within their borders when they discover IronWorking, would then be able to see that Iron, but never access it.

 

[Ceithernach]

This might be too late to be of any help, but you could reframe the problem: Ancient iron is really used to build swordsmen and their UU equivalents, no ancient access to iron removes these units with major effects.

So, remove the requirement of iron to build them. Save iron requirements for ships and railroads. In real history iron was way more plentiful and easy to access than tin. Game explanation wise:- ancient units can meet their iron requirements with common small deposits. Railways and Ships need huge deposits, and this is what the iron resource represents in game.
You can still have the strategic supply element by attacking sources of horses, which are arguably more important since they lead to Cavalry. And ivory for Statue of Zeus. The AI has enough trouble hooking up early resources anyway. May as well at least let them build the basic ancient attacker freely.

If you use the cool C3X patch/mod you could maybe make swordsmen require a barracks or a foundry of something to build, so the AI has to make some sort of investment to get the swordsmen??

 

[Civinator]

I see no problems with worker building roads on mountain, jungle and marsh terrain. Restricting features in Civ 3 must be reflected well, as it can have consequences on quite a different side of the game that was not taken into consideration: Here per example not allowing to build roads on mountains besides the resource connection problem can severly hamper the expansion of civilizations. Even if settlers will not have the wheeled flag, they have no defense when passing mountains if all combat units have the wheeled flag. This can also lead to some mysterious freezes in the games.

 

[timerover51]

Like several others, I have made most combat units in my mod wheeled. I made Mountains, Jungles, and Marshes impassable to wheeled. I want to either have no roads on mountains or not have roads until later. My first thought was to allow roads on Mountains, but not until the Middle Ages. I made Workers wheeled and then had them upgrade to Serfs at Feudalims who were not wheeled. I wasn't thinking it through and that plan backfired. Iron often appears on mountains and there was no way to get to it, severely nerfing Civs unless you happened to have Iron on a hill.

So, my next thought was to make workers not wheeled again, but give Mountains no commerce bonus so roads couldn't be built, but workers could work mountain tiles. Then like a dummy, I remembered that if you can't build a road to the iron it's of no use. Doh! Am I missing an alternative? Is there a way to remove roads from mountains, but still access iron? Outside of making it not available on mountains and making it available to a different terrain (in addition to hills) instead?

I will play around with a couple of ideas that I have. One is having two different types of Iron, one for Ancient Age units, and one for more modern units.

 

[Android Assembly]

Moving it to exclusively hills would work well, since I think the game tries to ensure the same amount of resources spawn no matter what.

Otherwise, having roads over mountain is only an advantage for the defender... You don't get the benefit from your opponent's roads anyway.