Oil Trouble

[jdecourcey]

I have played a couple of games now and in every one I have not been able to get any oil. In fact the AI cannot either. There are no land tiles with oil, but there are plenty of oil tiles in the sea. How to I access them so that I can build the units that need oil.
I have checked over the whole map looking (using CTRL-SHIFT-M) to no avail. Help!

 

[Alphidius]

Oil resource is only found in desert, plains or tundra if I'm not wrong are you sure the resource is in the sea???

 

[Stuie]

Obvious questions:

Have you gotten the Refining tech advance? This is what makes the oil resources visible on the map.

Are you sure those aren't whales/fish you are seeing in the ocean?

 

[JeffNebraska]

I am having a great game and am into the 1800's after wiping out the Chinese and English and most of the French on Warlord. The problem? No accessible oil anywhere!

There are splotches of oil all over the coast tiles, but you can't run a road to them and don't get them in your strategic resource list any other way. Neither myself, nor any other nation has oil in our list, and we all have refining developed.

I have seen others on this board complaing about it, but am yet to see a solution. Has anyone worked out a setting change or other fix for this apparent bug.

 

[Reibisch]

There was a mod/pre-patch floating around a few days/weeks ago; in it, the author allowed oil to be placed on coastal tiles. Have you heard of it? If so, did you install it? Or have you yourself created an edited civ3mod.bic?

It's unfortunate, but the author failed to take a simple fact into consideration. By allowing coastal tiles to be populated with oil, these same tiles are almost assured as being the only sources of oil in the game. Why? Because there are many, many more coastal tiles on a map than there are desert or plain tiles. Because Civ doesn't create nice, pretty, square islands, but rather oblong, ugly things, the tiles inside more often come close to equaling the number of coastal tiles, and since only about 20% of the inner tiles will be capable of holding oil (based on an average island, 4 billion years old, etc), your chances of actually having oil as a usable resource pretty low. Your chances are decreased further if you increase the map size without increasing the number of players. On a huge map with 4 civs you result in as few as 4 tiles with oil - try it in the editor.

To make matters even worse, each type of tile is allocated a number of resources it can spawn. Since oil can only appear in coastal, desert, or plains tiles, and since coastal tiles have only two types of resources that can appear (fish and oil) compared to deserts 3 (incense, oil and saltpeter), and plains 7, the chance that an average coastal tile spawns oil is mucher higher than the others. And as I said just a minute ago, since the number of strategic resources on a given map is at least equal to (but seldom greater than) the number of players on a map, there is less than a 20% chance that oil will appear in a tile that you can access with roads (SNS with a small #'s of civs can really hurt here, too).

To be fair, the author of said patch did increase the frequency that oil appeared (if I remember correctly), but that solved the problem in only 1 of 6 tests I ran even on on a small random map.

Whew, I can't believe I talked so much on such a simple topic. Sorry guys

 

[jdecourcey]

Yep I am sure. I have refining. The fish are still there. Some of the oil is within my city limits but I am not able to use it, I imagine because it is in the sea. I searched everywhere. All of the land is uncovered, still nothing.

 

[runaway]

Wow, maybe you need an offshore platform built?
That would be bizzare though since I've never heard of that being a prerequisite.

 

[Knight-Dragon]

Maybe the oil tiles are hidden under something else, an improvement or a city? Once I captured this city, then found I got one luxury resource but couldn't find it anywhere within my territory. In the end, found it's actually sitting on that city square itself. The bloody AI built a city on the luxury resource.

 

[Zico]

That is bizarre, because my current game is swimming in oil. You can hardly move three tiles before coming across a fresh reserve of the stuff...