@Yakk
Unless you enforce something like the Balanced option in Civ IV as mandatory, some civs will surely get screwed by the distribution of resources by pure randomness. Not mentioning that they can be in close range, but inacessible ( say, with inacessible tiles on the way or in a island offshore ). Then what? Or you force civs to die just because they didn't started in the right place with early resources ( or failed to grab them in usable time ) or you need to create a group of resourceless units to give those guys a chance ( like it was done in all the previous civ versions ) and, by definition, resourceless units can't be bound to a certain X units per resource
. This does not happen in the games you quoted: all of the big players start with oil and such from turn 0 on, not mentioning that you don't have to tech anything to know where those resources are in the map and that you start with a standing army...
Imagine if there is a resource that can be used to build a military unit in the ancient era every, say, 12 tiles.
Capital cities might come with a free resource (to give you an initial unit), and twice the resource density nearby.
The average city controls 19 tiles. A capital plus 3 other cities then comes to an average of 9 military resources, just using their "fat cross". Even settling blind, this civilisation would have ~4 to ~14 military resources 19 times out of 20 statistically.
Add in the ability to settle not-blind, and a civilisation being completely resourceless becomes less likely.
Now, if you have a group of resourcessless units combined with a group of resource constricted units, what will happen?
Having an uncapped type of unit breaks the game.
If you must have that kind of unit, you can cap it by civilisation, by city (imagine if each city can support 1 militia unit), by era, or economically (make it cost lots to support).
Other argument I could develop is that capping units to resources heavily favours bigger empires and coumpound even more the hard-to-erase "big empire trumps small" and the "expand fast and kill everyone in reach ( aka early rushes )" logics that Firaxis has been trying unsucessfully to get rid off for a long time. A bigger empire means almost necessarily more resources, that means a bigger army ... so the best thing to do is to get big fast and to use being big to get bigger
That would definitely be a drawback from Civ IV, where even in OCC you would still have a chance of winning a war...
Bigger empires might run into economic problems, like in Civ4. It isn't hard to imagine a system that doesn't "break down" in the iron age period (in civ4, coinage + courthouse is sufficient to break the high-difficulty effective population cap).
Fielding troops far from supply might run into problems.
Together with big, far flung empires running into economic problems, that would prevent an early game "super-rush" from dominating: you could grow to some controlled size in a given era, growing any further renders you economically weak and likely to be dominated in later eras (as far-away empires who stay smaller out tech you).
The "ideal size" of an empire could grow as the game progresses. The AI could be aware of this, and try to grow to such an ideal size (with the winners expanding, and the losers being swallowed up as eras pass).
Players would then engage in multiple eras worth of wars of conquest -- an ancient one against your local opponents, then a iron age one to grow in that age. In each era, as your social infrastructure improves, so does your ideal imperial size. Until in the modern era, it becomes economically feasible to engage in world war...
To be fair, the only reasonable way I can see of using resources to cap the military in a game like Civ is to not cap the units to the resources you have, but to decrease heavily their efficiency if the resource is scarce ( worse metal, bad horses, bad quality gas that kills the engines more than makes them run... ).
That still produces "oceans of units".
With 1 unit per tile, spammable units make the game silly, because you get oceans of them...
Of course, you can just have the resource the oceans use being gold.
Note that I'm not contradicting any of what you said in your later post. There are a lot of good ideas there. But that does not change the facts I stated above: capping units to resource numbers makes early rushes more appealing and to be minimally effective it has to be complete ( otherwise people will still spam resourceless units ), a thing that screwes civs by random ("no copper? Regen..." ). That is why I think it is a bad idea.
You are basing this off of civ 4 resource density.
No copper happens pretty often in civ 4, because if you have 15 civs, there are about 15 copper on the entire planet. Placed randomly.
If, instead, there is (say) 80+ copper on the planet, even placed randomly, then the chance that you have
no copper drops massively. You might only have 2 or 3, while a neighbour might have 5 or 6 -- but there will be some copper.
I had at least the beginnings of a good way to address this concern.
