Prepatch Mod and the Oil Bug

[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. I'm starting to suspect the Prepatch Mod, which added oil to the coast terrain rules, is the problem. Although the oil resource still appears in the desert, plains and tundra terrain rules, as it should, in the game it's appearing EXCLUSIVELY in the coast terrains. I've changed the setting, but that makes no difference now that it's already there.

Until I see a better option, I'm going to take the oil requirement out of every advanced unit and just let the world wars escalate without it.

Love to hear comments on this phenomenon.

 

[Colonel Kurtz]

Well, there's an awful lot of coastal tiles in civ3 because of the amount of ocean, so you could go into the editor and remove the oil resource from coastal squares.

That way the game doesn't put the vast majority (or all) the oil in coastal squares where you can't reach it, but on land, where you can.

(edit)just tried a few random maps in the editor and it seemed to work - with oil on coasts, little to none on land, take it off coastal, plenty of oil to go around. (/edit)

 

[Magellan]

I've had zero problems in a dozen games or more with oil. Tends to be by coasts, but no problem running roads to the coasts or the tundra areas where it exists. If you can't get it easily, you're running into a short-term anomaly and shouldn't change the rules.

 

[JeffNebraska]

Magellan,

I'm confused by your post. It's impossible to run a road to a coast sqaure. I'm not talking about a plains, tundra or desert square that borders the ocean. I'm talking about the terrain identified by the game as "coast" which is a shallow water square on which no roads can be run.

Based on reading other posts around this board, this is IMO definitely a commonly encountered flaw with the prepatch mod and I would encourage everyone to turn off oil on the coasts before you too have a game where no nation can secure a source of oil.

Incidentally, I tried reloading my game before refining was developed and changing the setting so oil wouldn't appear on the coasts. It did anyway. This implies that the location of all the resources is determined when the map is newly created, which makes sense. Therefore, unless you start a game with no oil allowed on the coasts, it will appear there.

Lastly, my solution to this bug was to turn off the requirement for oil on every unit that requires it. Of course, next time I'll turn the requirement back on and prohibit oil from appearing on the coasts, but for this game at least, it was a fix I could live with.

The link to the prepatch mod seems to be gone from the completed mods page, but I hope its author makes this change before it is downloaded again.

 

[cph]

I haven't seen shelf-oil before, but a guess I have is that a city with a harbor and encompassing the oil in its boundaries might be able to drill for it.

 

[MagiK]

I played a game all the way to the year 2006 and never had any coal show up anywhere on a large map, I checked very carefully everywhere there was no coal on the entire planet thus none of the Ai's or I ever developed coal related techs or industry