Resources Expanded - Potential Modmod or Integration

VCrakeV

Prince
Joined
Aug 22, 2014
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Hey everyone, I had a small idea that is slowly developing into a larger one. I brought it up in the ideas thread, and was suggested to make a dedicated thread. A fair warning: if I end up being the only one to work on this, it'll be mediocre; I only have experience with xml. In that case, it will probably be a modmod, but if others show interest and hop in, they can integrate it into the svn.

As for the expansion itself, there are a few generic things I want to outline before moving on to details. Firstly, I want to introduce uses for resources that currently don't have much/any use. Secondly, I want to introduce some new resources for resource/refinement. That brings me to my third idea, expanding refinement chains, and introducing chains where there were none, where I believe there should be.

I don't have everything planned yet, but I do have some examples. As I come up with new ideas, I will begin to work onbthe xml, and update this thread (and perhaps organize it). The first example I shared in the ideas thread. Currently, gunpowder units only require sulfur. I am planning on doing a couple of things here. First of all, irl, traditional (i.e non-modern) gunpowder was made with niter, sulfur, and charcoal. From what I've read, sulfur is extremely common irl, so I was going to replace sulfur with niter. Something like a gunpowder workshop would be needed for producing gunpowder, which would be needed for gunpowder units. The workshop itself would require niter and charcoal.

Modern gunpowder units (i.e those with repeating rifles) would require smokeless powder. This would also require a workshop; which itself would require niter, charcoal, and nitrocellulose. This resource would be made with another building, using cotton and nitrogenous waste (which would be provided by the animal and crop farm buildings already in game). I was thinking of perhaps making an and/or list for the cellulose in nitrocellulose; traditionally, cotton has been used for the source of cellulose, but other plants high in cellulose, like hemp, could work in theory. I'd like to here from the community on this; otherwise I'll only use cotton.

Currently, there is a building ingame, very early on, that provides hematite ore, with no use. Hematite has been used for millennia to create cave paintings with the well-known red pigment it creates. Hematite could then be used for the dye maker, or perhaps as a requirement for cave paintings, including the Lascaux wonder (which, IIRC, currently requires dye instead). Hematite is also the most abundant iron ore in the world, making up for a lot of iron production. It could be used to make iron ingots with iron working, but there would either have to be a malus for using it instead of iron (which I would rename magnetite, the ore richest in iron), or a bonus for using magnetite (like extra production from smelter and/or smith).

There is more I have thought about, but this post is getting lengthy, and my lunch break is wearing thin. I welcome all advice, suggestions, and other constructive criticism. If you have any ideas, or an opinion on one of the decisions I've yet to make (like the potential bonus for using iron/magnetite instead of hematite), please provide your input.
 
Before I expand on this anymore, I want to quickly address some things regarding my previous post. First of all, I've just recently learned that iron is sometimes found in its native form (i.e, not in the form of ore, a chemical compound of metal with another element, usually oxygen or sulfur). It is because iron is chemically bonded to, for example, oxygen, that hematite must be smelted (to break oxygen atoms off from the iron, leaving only iron). Native iron allows you to skip this step. As such, I think it would be fitting to change the map resource "iron" to "native iron", and allow one to build an iron smith with just native iron (and a forge). Hematite would require a "bloomery" smelter to create iron ingots (more precisely, wrought iron - more on that later), which would be an alternative requirement to native iron for the smith. This creates some incentive to procure native iron, as it allows you to not only avoid wasting turns to build a smelter, but also circumvent the pollution and fire hazard that comes with a smelter.

On nitrocellulose: after further research, I have found that cellulose is sometimes obtained from wood pulp. Hemp has even more cellulose than wood (though less than cotton), and probably hasn't been used for this purpose only because of legal reasons and how threatening hemp is to the oil industry. Because of this, and an attempt to prevent players from being "locked out" of modern gunpowder units by not having the appropriate resource, I would have nitrocellulose require either cotton, hemp, or prime timber.

Back to metals and ores. The chalcolithic, the transitional period between the neolithic and bronze age, is named after the ore chalcopyrite. Chalcopyrite is an abundant copper ore, and I believe it should work like hematite. That is, there should be a "building" to acquire it. One can then build a smelter for ingots, then a smith for wares. Similar to how I would handle iron, the current copper resource would be native copper, allowing one to skip building a smelter. If desired, I may create a terrain requirement for the chalcopyrite pit/mine (and hematite pit, if there aren't already requirements) that would reflect the irl location of the ores, but still be pretty lax so that most cities can build it. I would compare these buildings to the rock gatherer (a long list of "or requirements"; like "requires rocky or jagged or barren or peak...").

I would also like to expand on steel, and the intermediary iron products involved. As is, steel is mostly absent before the industrial era, which is not reflective of real life. In fact, there is even a tech, Crucible Steel, in the medieval era, that doesn't introduce any use for steel until later. A crucible is a simple smelting furnace, the first kind used in history/prehistory. It is basically a hut made of clay, stone, or anything else available that can withstand heat. Anyway, steel is nowadays made with blast furnaces, as it is much more difficult to do with a crucible. I plan on there being a complex chain to create steel with the Crucible Steel tech.

First, you need iron. If you're working with ores, you smelt iron ore in a crucible, and the resulting metal is called wrought iron. So, with hematite and charcoal, you could build a bloomery furnace to get wrought iron. Then, with hematite (or native iron; I'm not sure if this works, but it'd be best from a gameplay perspective) and charcoal, a blast furnace can be made. The blast furnace was developed after the bloomery, so it would probably be unlocked with a tech further down the tree than iron working (I'll look at this later). A blast furnace uses pressured air to "blast" the iron ore and charcoal. This mixes more carbon into the iron, making the carbon-rich pig iron. Lastly, a steel smelter can be made with wrought iron (or native iron) and pig iron; using only charcoal or coal, one can only create enough heat to melt pig iron. With both pig iron and wrought iron in a crucible, the pig iron melts, and mixes with the wrought iron. The result is crucible steel, distinguished by an interwoven pattern. This is because it is not a homogeneous mixture; the two types of iron don't completely mix, and you can pick the two out (see the difference) in the resulting product.

The blast furnace, irl, has also been used to create cast iron (effectively wrought iron, so we would just call it wrought iron, so there is no need for another resource; the difference in name is due to the effort required to make it... making iron with bloomeries was labor-intensive, making the iron heavily-worked, or "wrought"). Whether you get pig iron or wrought iron depends on the ratio of charcoal to iron ore. Because of this, the one blast furnace should be able to provide both pig iron and wrought iron. So, before you unlock blast furnaces, you build bloomery furnaces to create wrought iron for iron wares. When unlocked, you can replace bloomery furnaces with blast furnaces to provide wrought iron and pig iron as means to create crucible steel.

If you have crucible steel, the resource, you can build a "crucible steel armory" (or something along those lines), which gives certain units the "wootz steel" promotion. Wootz steel, as well as damascus steel, is a type of crucible steel. The random event currently associated with wootz steel would be removed.

More to come.
 
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I have been thinking on similar lines but for the various fibres and their uses. Currently we have hemp fibres, silk fibres and so on. However it may be more useful to have the fibres grouped by their usage. I can't find my notes at the moment but from memory it was something like
  • Course fibres
    • used from rope and matting
    • come from grass, bark, hemp, linen, banana (with Agricultural Machinery)
  • Cloth fibres
    • used for poor and common cloths, sails
    • from grass, hemp, silk, cotton, linen, banana (with Agricultural Machinery)
  • Fine Cloth fibres
    • used for rich people and fine furniture
    • silk, banana (with Agricultural Machinery), and if imported cotton, linen

I don't have everything planned yet, but I do have some examples. As I come up with new ideas, I will begin to work onbthe xml, and update this thread (and perhaps organize it). The first example I shared in the ideas thread. Currently, gunpowder units only require sulfur. I am planning on doing a couple of things here. First of all, irl, traditional (i.e non-modern) gunpowder was made with niter, sulfur, and charcoal. From what I've read, sulfur is extremely common irl, so I was going to replace sulfur with niter. Something like a gunpowder workshop would be needed for producing gunpowder, which would be needed for gunpowder units. The workshop itself would require niter and charcoal.
As I said on the other thread nitre is more common than sulphur. You find it where ever humans are. It is one of our waste products.

With charcoal we might better represent this with an improvement on forested plots. However the current Lumber Mill represents all the forms of forestry management but suggests the more destructive types. Perhaps we should change this a bit. Or not and just have them produce firewood, lumber and charcoal by documenting as doing so. The city could have a building Charcoal Burner which requires a Lumber Mill (or Lumber Jack) in the vicinity and it produces charcoal with a small amount of pollution. Charcoal would also be used by many art and scribe buildings.

Before I expand on this anymore, I want to quickly address some things regarding my previous post. First of all, I've just recently learned that iron is sometimes found in its native form (i.e, not in the form of ore, a chemical compound of metal with another element, usually oxygen or sulfur). It is because iron is chemically bonded to, for example, oxygen, that hematite must be smelted (to break oxygen atoms off from the iron, leaving only iron). Native iron allows you to skip this step. As such, I think it would be fitting to change the map resource "iron" to "native iron", and allow one to build an iron smith with just native iron (and a forge). Hematite would require a "bloomery" smelter to create iron ingots (more precisely, wrought iron - more on that later), which would be an alternative requirement to native iron for the smith. This creates some incentive to procure native iron, as it allows you to not only avoid wasting turns to build a smelter, but also circumvent the pollution and fire hazard that comes with a smelter.
This was discussed way back pre v10 :mischief:. There are many metals that can be found in their elemental (native) form. Many of these have been used to create great works of art long before metal working was even imagined. The only thing we could agree on was that there was no room on the maps for yet another map resource and that the current map resource represents all forms.

It could be possible to have an event that can happen to a city with iron near it that places a "Native Iron" in the city allowing the new and old building lines. Allowing this event to happen only before Iron Working would enable us to implement some of these wonderous works.

Alternatively we could, though I have no idea how, make the whole bonuses system adjust to map size.
 
Hematite is also the most abundant iron ore in the world, making up for a lot of iron production. It could be used to make iron ingots with iron working, but there would either have to be a malus for using it instead of iron (which I would rename magnetite, the ore richest in iron)

While magnetite has the richest iron percentage it is actually more cost effective to produce iron using hematite due to the fact that hematite bearing ore contains larger concentrations of the mineral hematite while magnetite bearing ore contains smaller amounts of the mineral magnetite. https://investingnews.com/daily/res...ting/types-of-iron-ore-hematite-vs-magnetite/
So honestly the current iron resource should in fact be hematite with the hematite resource from the mod being removed.
As for an iron resource produced by a building, instead I think it should be "bog iron" consisting of goethite or limonite as it was the most common source of iron that was used for tool and weapon smithing before the industrial revolution when higher quality ores became more commonly used. It would only require a swamp or peatbog feature nearby.

As such, I think it would be fitting to change the map resource "iron" to "native iron", and allow one to build an iron smith with just native iron (and a forge).

Native iron is way too rare to have it be considered the map resource. The only large deposit of it in the entire world is in Disko Bay Greenland. It used to exist in Kassel, Germany but has since been depleted with only a few tiny deposits scattered around the rest of the world. If it were to be used as the main iron map bonus, then you would only find between 1-3 deposits on the ENTIRE MAP I'm not even joking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telluric_iron
Pure iron is instead more common to be found as meteoric iron which again could be represented as a building that requires the crater feature.
 
While magnetite has the richest iron percentage it is actually more cost effective to produce iron using hematite due to the fact that hematite bearing ore contains larger concentrations of the mineral hematite while magnetite bearing ore contains smaller amounts of the mineral magnetite. https://investingnews.com/daily/res...ting/types-of-iron-ore-hematite-vs-magnetite/
So honestly the current iron resource should in fact be hematite with the hematite resource from the mod being removed.
As for an iron resource produced by a building, instead I think it should be "bog iron" consisting of goethite or limonite as it was the most common source of iron that was used for tool and weapon smithing before the industrial revolution when higher quality ores became more commonly used. It would only require a swamp or peatbog feature nearby.



Native iron is way too rare to have it be considered the map resource. The only large deposit of it in the entire world is in Disko Bay Greenland. It used to exist in Kassel, Germany but has since been depleted with only a few tiny deposits scattered around the rest of the world. If it were to be used as the main iron map bonus, then you would only find between 1-3 deposits on the ENTIRE MAP I'm not even joking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telluric_iron
Pure iron is instead more common to be found as meteoric iron which again could be represented as a building that requires the crater feature.

Thanks for the input. You make great points. I was going to mention bog iron later myself.
 
I have been thinking on similar lines but for the various fibres and their uses. Currently we have hemp fibres, silk fibres and so on. However it may be more useful to have the fibres grouped by their usage. I can't find my notes at the moment but from memory it was something like
  • Course fibres
    • used from rope and matting
    • come from grass, bark, hemp, linen, banana (with Agricultural Machinery)
  • Cloth fibres
    • used for poor and common cloths, sails
    • from grass, hemp, silk, cotton, linen, banana (with Agricultural Machinery)
  • Fine Cloth fibres
    • used for rich people and fine furniture
    • silk, banana (with Agricultural Machinery), and if imported cotton, linen


As I said on the other thread nitre is more common than sulphur. You find it where ever humans are. It is one of our waste products.

With charcoal we might better represent this with an improvement on forested plots. However the current Lumber Mill represents all the forms of forestry management but suggests the more destructive types. Perhaps we should change this a bit. Or not and just have them produce firewood, lumber and charcoal by documenting as doing so. The city could have a building Charcoal Burner which requires a Lumber Mill (or Lumber Jack) in the vicinity and it produces charcoal with a small amount of pollution. Charcoal would also be used by many art and scribe buildings.


This was discussed way back pre v10 :mischief:. There are many metals that can be found in their elemental (native) form. Many of these have been used to create great works of art long before metal working was even imagined. The only thing we could agree on was that there was no room on the maps for yet another map resource and that the current map resource represents all forms.

It could be possible to have an event that can happen to a city with iron near it that places a "Native Iron" in the city allowing the new and old building lines. Allowing this event to happen only before Iron Working would enable us to implement some of these wonderous works.

Alternatively we could, though I have no idea how, make the whole bonuses system adjust to map size.

Niter is not a human waste product, though it is a waste product of bats and sea birds. Still, it isn't exactly abundant. The British Empire, for example, colonized small islands for the niter found in the waste of birds who called those islands home. Niter was also mined as ore. It wasn't abundant though; colonists would often destroy the cave ecosystems from which they took niter. It served as nutrition for animals that lived in them, and even structural support for the caves... they couldn't get a whole lot in a sustainable manner.

By the way, I'm pretty sure there is already a charcoal burner...
 
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Thanks to Joij21 for suggesting the implementation of bog iron. I already had a few ideas on it, so I'll briefly go over them. First of all, the requirements to build a bog iron "mine", or gatherer. I think requiring only either peat bog or swamp would be good, as has been suggested.

There are a couple of decisions to be made though. Should bog iron provide any bonuses over hematite, or should it only be an alternative? Bog iron has less impurities than hematite ore, like how hematite ore has more hematite than magnetite ore has magnetite. This makes it easier to work, so perhaps the iron smelter could be built faster (or provide more production) with bog iron.

After learning about the rarity of native metals, I understand these ought not to be implemented (except perhaps as a building resource through the crater feature, as Dancing Hoskuld has suggested, if desired). Still, with how common hematite and chalcopyrite are irl, I believe one of two things should be done; either these two resources should be from buildings like the rock gatherer (lenient terrain/feature requirements), or their occurrence on the map should be more common. Not only are the ores so common irl, but they are very important ingame, so they should be fairly accessible. I'm more interested in the first option, because it leaves more room on the map for other resources. However, I'd like to know what others think.
 
If we ever manage to implement volumetric resources then we could have an event that provides x amount of a native metal as a one time bonus, e.g. event trigger on crater with small change and says something along the line as "settlers from the nearby crater has discovered native iron. 5 Iron bonuses added to stockpile.
 
If we ever manage to implement volumetric resources then we could have an event that provides x amount of a native metal as a one time bonus, e.g. event trigger on crater with small change and says something along the line as "settlers from the nearby crater has discovered native iron. 5 Iron bonuses added to stockpile.

I was thinking about such a feature myself, lately. It is one of the few things that I think makes Civ 6 a good game, compared to C2C. You would actually have to obtain more than one copy of a resource, at least under certain circumstances. I think it would compliment the idea of easily accessible copper and iron; you have to work hard and expand to increase the number of units you can pump out per turn, but at the very least you'll have some copper and iron... you can't get "locked out" of copper/bronze and iron units, but you still have incentive to get more copper/iron.
 
Hemp is another resource I want to expand. Firstly, I think it should be a source of (hemp) oil, with an appropriate building (e.g hemp oil maker). This is not THC/CBD oil, but a fatty oil obtained by grounding hemp seeds. It would be an alternative to fish/whale/ghee oil, for arsonists and oil lamps. Further down the tech tree, hemp oil can be used to create biofuel and bioplastics. The latter might just be plastic (the current resource in-game) but created by a building with hemp oil instead of petroleum (and with less/no pollution). Alternatively, bioplastics could be a new resource, serving as an alternative to plastic. Biofuel could be used with a new building to generate power. The creation of oil, and the creation of biofuel from that oil, can be extend to corn. Corn oil can also be used to make biofuel, but I'm not sure about plastic.

I find it quite odd how long it takes for coal to arrive on the scene. It has been used for millennia, though it was limited to deposits close to the surface. I believe it could be unlocked with mining, but there would be different types of coal, with new ones becoming available further down the tech tree. With Mining, you can see coal and build a mine over it. Then you need a building, "surface coal mine", which provides Lignite (a low grade coal, found closer to the surface). It could provide a production bonus to smelters, and perhaps provide other options.

With Hydraulic Mining, you can build a hydraulic coal mine, providing bituminous coal. This could provide bonuses similar to lignite. It could also be used to build a Coking Furnace (and further down the tech, a Coking Factory). Coal is heated in a sealed furnace to produce coke, which is mostly carbon, and burns hotter than coal (which itself burns hotter than charcoal). Because of this, it can be used to melt iron ore, so you can create steel straight from hematite with the appropriate smelter and smith, skipping wrought iron and pig iron.

I'm not quite sure which tech would unlock it, but at some point you'd be able to build a shaft coal mine, providing anthracite, the highest grade of coal. It would probably just be more production bonuses from buildings that use coal/charcoal for heating/power. I'd be open to more uses for it, but I don't have any ideas myself.
 
There are "plastics" or biopolymers made from corn/potato starch so "plastics" from corn are possible.
 
Hemp is another resource I want to expand.

I'm not quite sure which tech would unlock it, but at some point you'd be able to build a shaft coal mine, providing anthracite, the highest grade of coal. It would probably just be more production bonuses from buildings that use coal/charcoal for heating/power. I'd be open to more uses for it, but I don't have any ideas myself.
Not all hemps are equal. There are three main species. One is great for rope and cloth but not very good for drug use, one is great for drug use but not so much for rope and cloth.

Similarly flax can either be used for fibres for cloth etc or it can be used for its seeds which are used for oil and food.

Perhaps you get to choose which use your crop is being grown for by allowing just one of the three use buildings in the city.
There are "plastics" or biopolymers made from corn/potato starch so "plastics" from corn are possible.
Sugar (cane) can also be used to make biodegradable plastics.
 
And pineapple is used to make something like leather for vegans for example.
 
There has been some interest, in this thread and elsewhere, in volumetric resources (i.e sources of resource provide additional resources per turn, but they must be spent on various buildings and/or units. For example, a bronze smelter can create 1 bronze ingot per turn, and a bronze smith could produce 1 bronze wares per turn at the cost of 1 bronze ingot per turn (numbers are arbitrary here; whatever is thought to be balanced would be selected).

This is perhaps not the best idea, but if no one else has thought of a method to implement this feature, here is a thought. What if we use an already volumetric feature, properties? There's a lot of room in the UI for resources under the properties tab in city screen. We already have buildings that provide +/- x property per turn, so we could create a property for each resource. This would also localize resources, so you actually have to build units where the resources are.

This introduces a slight problem. If a city has no coal, for example, it can't build a coal plant, even if you have coal elsewhere. One solution to this is to have buildings that allow the construction of new trader units. The building, in this example, would cost x coal property per turn, while the coal trader unit would have +x coal property per turn (in city). These units would likely have a low limit. Say, the building might cost 3 coal per turn, with a limit of 3 units that produce one coal per turn.

I just wanted to get this out there, and see if there are better ideas (can this be done more easily without properties?). I'll hopefully get back to discussing the increase in variety of resources and applications of them soon. Soon after that, I hope to get started on the actual modding (though before doing so, I plan to see how high in difficulty I can go... currently playing an immortal game).
 
There has been some interest, in this thread and elsewhere, in volumetric resources (i.e sources of resource provide additional resources per turn, but they must be spent on various buildings and/or units. For example, a bronze smelter can create 1 bronze ingot per turn, and a bronze smith could produce 1 bronze wares per turn at the cost of 1 bronze ingot per turn (numbers are arbitrary here; whatever is thought to be balanced would be selected).

This is perhaps not the best idea, but if no one else has thought of a method to implement this feature, here is a thought. What if we use an already volumetric feature, properties? There's a lot of room in the UI for resources under the properties tab in city screen. We already have buildings that provide +/- x property per turn, so we could create a property for each resource. This would also localize resources, so you actually have to build units where the resources are.

This introduces a slight problem. If a city has no coal, for example, it can't build a coal plant, even if you have coal elsewhere. One solution to this is to have buildings that allow the construction of new trader units. The building, in this example, would cost x coal property per turn, while the coal trader unit would have +x coal property per turn (in city). These units would likely have a low limit. Say, the building might cost 3 coal per turn, with a limit of 3 units that produce one coal per turn.

I just wanted to get this out there, and see if there are better ideas (can this be done more easily without properties?). I'll hopefully get back to discussing the increase in variety of resources and applications of them soon. Soon after that, I hope to get started on the actual modding (though before doing so, I plan to see how high in difficulty I can go... currently playing an immortal game).
I really do want to do volumetric resources and NOT through properties but a more dedicated system for it. But priorities... I want to see how taxing some other things are on the memory before we go there. Multimaps and the Ideas project and some core Nomadic concepts that may all be fairly memory intensive are more important to me and perhaps we can do this in a simpler way than I'm envisioning right now.
 
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