Revising strategic resource usage

Awesome idea.

None at all for me. The CO2 emissions for just having a unit are insane. Just from having one Ironclad sleeping in a port you can become the worst polluting member, getting diplo malus at a period of time when no one cared about coal pollution, but complained about horsesh*t in the streets.

Agree!

Yes, but if you decrease the amount to 40 strat. resource they will offer the same price. So do it.

 

Yeah, I have often wished they would triple all oil, and make maintenance costs from 1-3.

 

I feel like they want to avoid a situation where every space on the map has a unit occupying it. Both from a tedious perspective (imagine moving that many units around) and a computing power perspective (AI moves would take forever). So I feel the current implementation is a reflection on that, strategic resources exist to severely limit the amount of units in the game. With that in mind the only other constraint you can really play around with is gold maintenance to do the job of restricting the amount of units on the map, but there's so much gold in the game I don't see that as a viable route.

It certainly feels weird that there is a point in the game where you are reducing your "effective army" size voluntarily.

Depleting resources (on the map) and revealing more of a resource (Research Iron Working you reveal 33% of all Iron, Iron smelting you reveal 67%, Iron Manufacturing 100%) is a move I'd like to see them make in civ 7.

 

People trying to make this way too convoluted. This isnt iron hearts 4 and thank good for that.

Keep the resources simple. They are just there to enable and control certain unit types from being massed.

 

It worked in Civ 4 with a maintenance cost depending on the total number of units you had + on the number you had outside of your borders (and this really could criple your economy).

But I also enjoy the way it is now.

 

I want to talk about your last point of granularity. I feel the early game has issues with this even with science and culture and faith and gold and GP points. Having some tiles with just a science or culture early game is completely game changing. It seems like that effect should be toned down a touch.

 

I find the idea of depleting resources interesting, but maybe offset it by being able to discover new sources as technology improves? For eg, bronze working reveals 'surface' iron ore, while apprenticeship reveals 'deeper' ore? I definitely feel like certain resources should be more common as time goes on.

 

Very good ideas altogether in this thread. It would be great if Firaxis did a general strategic resource overhaul, just as they did with the luxury resources.

 

Yes, I would welcome that. But they didn't make an overhaul for luxury resources explicitly, they simply made them more useful with Industries/Corporations/Monopolies. The expansion to other resource types could take place without noticeable differences between the resource types.

But still, it's nice to see Luxuries shifting away from the trap of "improve them and forget them" to being more useful and something you have to (a little bit) plan for in order to establish Corporations/Monopolies. It's the best Mode we got so far, and a really good one, and the tourism Issue is sure to be fixed soon.

I think they didn't include Strategic resources into the Industry Mode, because they built the Mode arround the Tourism Bonus, which can't be applied to strategic resources (nor bonus resources), but Luxuries only. Nonetheless, we might get an Update sometime, which include strategic resources without them adding to the tourism Bonus.

 

What is needed, as has been touched on already, is a general overhaul of ALL resources.
First, recognize that the Bonus, Strategic, and Luxury/Amenity division is utterly artificial. All resources should be identical in that you need amounts of them depending on what they are being used for, you need increasingly higher technology to find more of them, and with certain technologies some Resources can be substituted for others, and some (mostly Luxury) become Obsolete late in the game.

Example:
Copper - now a Bonus resource and so only useful to add some effect to a tile. In fact, 90 - 95% of all bronze is copper, so it is a requirement for your first really useful metal tools and weapons. And, in turn, bronze saws may be a requirement for the Wheel, since stone or copper tools do not work to saw planks for solid wooden wheels (which appear in several places around 3500 BCE, but in every instance appear where bronze tools have also appeared).
So, Copper is both a Production enhancer, a Eureka material, and a Strategic resource. As a tool material, you need even more of it than you will need for weapons, because all those bronze saws, adzes, blades, hammers, etc are going to Wear Out as you use them to chop wood, saw planks (it will provide a nice Eureka for advanced boat building also) and chisel stone into statues and pillars (and Wonders)

But later, Copper is also a requirement for electrical wiring, so will be need in even greater quantities in the late Industrial Era for Amenity uses like lights, street lights, home appliances, telephone, telegraph (and therefore, to run your Railroads) and production uses to build electric motors to run everything from Power Generation to hand tools.

Like most Resources, you will need it from one end of the game to the other, and in Quantities that will require you to keep looking for it.

Which brings up resource Depletion.
It's not at all difficult to come up with a 3-tier technology increase in Resource Exploitation. Plant resources like grains, spices, Cotton, Silk, can be increased through Irrigation, Field Rotation, Hybridization or Plant Genetics, and Mechanized Agriculture, technologies ranging in time from the Ancient/Classical Era (Irrigation) to the Modern Era (Mechanized Agriculture) and later. Deposit (metals and other ores) Resources start with Surface Deposits and Shallow Mines, then Deep Pit Mines in the Medieval Era, and finally Open Pit Mining in the Modern and Atomic Eras, which essentially can remove entire mountains or hills and create tile-wide craters that can be seen from orbit .

And also, all resources come in two flavors: Normal and Industrial Quantity. You always need Food in Industrial Quantity - even a small (10,000 people) Ancient City needs, after all, 25 - 40 tons of food a day, and Rome at its Imperial height needed a 1500 ton capacity freighter docking every other day to keep its population supplied. Before the Industrial Era, most other resources are 'Normal' - 100 pounds of spices will make you rich, 100 pounds of Iron will equip several soldiers and 100 tons of iron will arm, armor and equip and entire Roman Legion.
But, in the Industrial Era suddenly you need 100 tons of Iron to build a single kilometer of railroad track, not including the engine, cars, and other infrastructure to make it work. A single Ironclad will require several thousand tons of Iron - heck, a single Frigate carries over 100 tons of iron cannon on average. That means that the increased ability to get resources through Deep Mines (with Steam Pumps at the very beginning of the Industrial Era) will match your increased Need.

As for Strategic Requirements, Horses remain a Strategic resource until well into the Atomic Era. As noted, the German Army required horses throughout WWII. In fact, throughout the war they had more horses than motor vehicles, but only the USA and Britain of all the belligerents in WWII did not use any quantity of horses - but then, they had large truck-producing industries and more importantly, access to virtually unlimited supplies of Oil.
As a footnote, the second-larges Cavalry Force in history was in the Soviet Army, which in April 1943 had over 230,000 mounted men in its cavalry arm. Only the Mongols ever fielded any larger mounted force.

Just another note, after Oil and Horses, the two most requiredStrategic Maintenance Resources in the Modern and early Atomic Eras are Cotton and Iron. Why? Because approximately 1/4 to 1/3 of the industrial capacity of all the major combatants went to producing ammunition for all those artillery pieces, AA and AT guns, tanks, ships, and aircraft - and they used up the stuff by the 100s or 1000s of tons a day, and virtually all the explosives were based on Cotton as a major component and Steel for shell casings.

We aren't likely to see a thorough rethink of Resources in Civ VI, but the entire Resource System needs to be overhauled for Civ VII.

 

I’d like to see all units nerfed to about 66-75% of their current power and have any strategic requirements removed. Then have any city be able to use 20 iron/horses/aluminium etc to produce a strategic cache that boosts it up to 125-150% of normal and maybe a specific boost. A Strategic Horse cache civilian unit (similar to a builder with 1 one charge) can be used on a melee unit to give it faster healing (representing faster logistics) vs +1 movement on a Light Cavalry (representing horses bred for speed). Encampments can then make these caches faster or using less resources. Maybe have the boosts available against specific era u it’s: a power boost from a Horse cache trained in the ancient era is only useful against Ancient era units and half as effective against Classic era, and not ineffective against Mediavel+ units.

Everyone can produce what they want and not have their UU locked behind something you can’t access easily, but for them to be truly powerful you need the boost from strategic resources.

 

I would not overthink this. The goal of resources for this game's purposes should be to limit a certain type of unit...typically the more powerful ones...not all of them.

I think what Civilization 5 did was ideal: control more resource tiles, build more units needing resources. I don't know why that was ever changed.