Small chance of discovering metals when mining

to put it in civ terms. The odds are 10x greater then that the AI will use a Nuke.

 

I've never had it happen in my entire Civ IV career (15 games)

 

I play Monarch, large map, normal speed, almost every game and it seems I get 2-3 to pop/game. I am a total mining whore though so that might explain the higher than expected frequency. Just got gold and gems within 10 turns of each other in the early 20th century. I had them both already but the trade bait and commerce bonus are always welcome.

 

I nearly always play Marathon and am yet to go through a whole game and not see at least 1 resource pop.... often a lot more!

It can be annoying to some degree when your main production city starts spewing out gems or gold though! I do however, always like it when copper or iron appears in *any* city!

 

I played a highlands (epic, noble) game with raging barbarians a week or two ago. I didn't have any copper or iron (or horse for that matter) anywhere near my capital and had trouble keeping the barbarian axemen and swordsmen at bay with nothing but archers.

There was one iron that I could see and had a chance of getting before the AI but I had to pretty much kill my whole economy to get it as I needed at least three more cities to get it without leaving big culture gaps between them. I slowly worked my way nearer and eventually managed to get there and what do I see one turn later? "You have discovered a source of iron near Athens."

Yay!


Also I noticed just how good archers are when you use them to the fullest. Stick an archer with guerilla I on top of a hill/forest. After winning one battle he is a guerilla II and can even beat unpromoted swordsmen pretty easily. At 10xp give him the extra strike promotion and watch him laugh at everything that comes to him. The bonuses he gets are: 25% from a five turn fortification, 25% from the hill and 50% from the forest, 25% from the natural archer hill bonus, 20% from guerilla I and 30% more from guerilla II. That's (if I got everything right) a 175% bonus for a strenght 3 unit making him effectively a strenght 8.25 unit Add to that the first strike archers have and that one extra first strike chance he gets at 10xp (drill I) and he's one fantastic barb killer and incredibly cheap too!

Also noticed just how stupid the barbarians are. If they had just gone around these guys that I had just outside my borders they could have pillaged me to death. Instead they all decided it was more worth it to suicide themselves against my super-archers. Ah well...

Edit: I didn't lose more than five guys against the barbarians the whole game even though they were raging and I played without resources for at least a couple of hundred turns and on top of that one front was always open to attacks as the AI didn't build any cities there.

 

Something else I thought about: resources can likely spawn that you can't even see yet. So if it's in the first half of the game and Aluminum or Coal pops, you'll never know it happened.

 

Possible but somehow I don't think that's how it works.

 

No, this is wrong.

If you have 20 mines, and each one has a 1/10000 chance of producing a resource, then the probability of discovering something in any given turn is not 20 * 1/10000 = 1/500. By your logic, if you have 10000 mines, then you should produce a resource with certainty each turn, which is obviously not true.

Of course, the correct figure is: 1 - 0.9999^20 = 0.002 ( = 1/500).

Assuming an average game lasts 300 turns, then the probability of popping at least one metal in a game (making the approximating assumption that each turn you have 20 mines) is: 1 - 0.9999^(20*300) = 0.45.

 

I'm SO glad they got rid of that "feature" from Civ3. Nothing quite like seeing your only Oil disappear, and then reappear next to the enemy's capital.

Current game, Noble/Marathon, I've "popped" two resources by ~1200AD. One Iron next to my capital, and one Silver next to Mansa Musa's former capital....

 

Seriously. Things like that always seemed like the results of an ultimate super-spy mission. "We have stolen your oil fields! Hahahahaaaa!" =o.@=

 

Wow, it must be a rarity then when I popped a gems spot before the Middle Ages!

Anyone know where the XML control for the probability figure is, by the way?

 

In the last game I'd swear the AI was trying to save its own neck. I had an entire continent, but I get to building railroads only to discover I have no coal!! I was trying to play a peaceful game, but that's enough to make me snap. I look over at the next continent and the Chinese are sitting on some very easily obtainable coal (low defenses due to a drawn-out war with Mansa), so I amass an invading army. Literally the turn I load my transports and get them within striking distance, one of my hills pops Coal. Shame Qin had to die anyways (I also had no Uranium!!). Weird to control a good 1/3 of the map and not have coal or uranium, and only one aluminum. It's really his own fault for sitting on my resources.

 

Yes, I got lucky a few times. Basically, you don't discover the resource right away....the more mines you build the more chance gold or silver will appear later on one of those mines. I thought that was pretty cool...because silver did give my people a happy face.

 

I had it happen once before. It didn't even pop up right after I built the mine, but probably 50 turns or so later. I just remember all of a sudden, out of nowhere it stating that a source of gold was discovered near my cities. Pretty nice surprise I say!

 

Usually happens to me about 2-3 times per game on epic speed, large Pangaea. Most common one by far that ive uncovered is copper, followed by iron, and then gold and silver roughly equal. I've only ever uncovered one new gems source though.

 

If you've got 15 mines (i.e. 15 mines that aren't already mining a resource) in your empire the probability of discovery per turn is (really, really close to) 3/2000, so the probably of NOT discovering ANY new minerals in any of your mines in a 450 turn standard game is (1997/2000)^450 or about 51%. So the odds of discovering AT LEAST one new mineral source in one of your mines is half. I'll bet they adjust the odds depending on both map size and game length.

In other words, 10000 seems about right.

 

This has happened to me exactly once so far in my dozen or so games. So I never count on it. But it sure was nice to discover Copper in the Classical Age, about 50 turns after building my second mine of the game, on an archipelago map where I had no other strategic resources within sight.

 

Current game, Noble, Pangaea, doing Future Tech in 1954. Message appears "You have discovered a source of Coal !". So it isn't only metals that pop up - someone above got Gems, too. But I don't believe that any resource can pop up in your territory before you have the necessary tech. I emphasise "you" and "in your territory", because I suppose it possible that, say, Uranium could appear in your lands and be visible to an advanced AI civ but not to you if you don't have Physics; of course this is much more probable to be one of the resources pre-seeded around the map rather than a true pop-up one.

 

I always play marothon games and I'd say I see this happen, on average, once or twice a game. It happens more often on larger worlds, probably because I work more mines on larger worlds.

My current game, I had Gold pop-up during the Ancient era (just after starting to mine it with city #2. VERY nice boost to research and cash flow.

I also remember a game where I was about to send a settler far off away from my capital (and eat more maintenance cost than I'd prefer) to secure some Iron. Just then, Iron popped up on one of my working mines. So I was able to settle in a cheaper location.

Anyway, I treat the event like that of a goodie hut. Yeah!!