Strategic resources in Civ 6

Status
Not open for further replies.
If the strategic resources are truly rare then the current civ 6 system might actually work. If strategic resources are as common as in civ 5 then they don't really serve a function since every decent civ will get the numbers they need to produce anything.

I would love to see the strategic resources clustered so if you're lucky you might have some to trade while your neighbours are envious of you. They can either hope to get a good deal with you or go to war with you to grab some resources for themselves.

What I would like to see is that strategic resources is something you can't hope to get all of in every game. You should get some, but you need to trade or make war your way to the others or try to deal with not having them.

Some of the Youtube games are quite promising since e. g. iron seems to be quite scarce on the map. So no swordsmen for some players. That would also make the unique units more valuable since they can be built without strategic resources.

It should probably be set so that sources on the map=1/3-2/3 number of civs on the map (2/3 for early resources like Iron and Horses, 1/3 for late ones like Uranium... because civs expand and eliminate other civs as time goes on.
 
Coming a bit late to the discussion, but this (requiring only one or two resource copies) is a design decision that makes absolutely no sense to me. I had thought that Civ V's system was an unambiguous improvement from Civ IV (and unlike most of Civ V's changes, I wasn't aware that there was any significant disagreement on this point). The most obvious benefit to Civ V's system (beyond realism, which is admittedly debatable in such an abstracted system) is that competition for resources is simply more interesting when you have an incentive to acquire more than one or two copies of a resource. Even more important, however, is that it allows for intermediates states between unlimited access to a unit type and total exclusion from that unit type. This intermediate space encourages more variation in army competition, and it allows for a much more gradual variation between haves and have-nots.

In Civ V, it's possible for one civ to lack iron entirely, for instance, while a second has enough to build a small force of elite swordsmen and a third can build an entire army of nothing but swordsmen. Now in this case, the second player has an advantage over the third and the third over the second, but it's a relatively small one. The third player has a much larger advantage over the first but (unless she came by this advantage simply by nature of having a larger empire) is almost certain to be behind when it comes to some other resource. In Civ IV and VI, however, a single iron tile can make the difference between an army entirely upgraded to swordsmen and an army entirely lacking them and, as a single tile, is far less likely to be correlated with any future resource's distribution. Similarly it's possible in Civ V for a player to have the capacity to build two nukes but to be limited to conventional arms once these are expended. This has the potential to create very interesting gameplay if both the player and his opponent know this, but this situation cannot not arise in Civ IV or VI, where a player with Uranium can build as many nukes as production and funding permit.

This isn't to say that Civ V's system was perfect but, I'd argue that its flaws were in execution rather than in theory. Resourceless ranged units dramatically limited the utility of resource based units and, as astute readers may already have noted, the option to rush buy nukes makes the situation i describe very rare. Notably, however, I think the system's greatest failures were where it strayed closest to the Civ IV/VI model. A single 6 iron tile came far closer than it should have to supporting an entire army, and the dramatic difference between 2 factories and 3 (not that it was actually possible to have less than 3 coal) meant that the most important distinction with regards to coal was effectively a binary one. I think that addressing tuning issues like these would truly have made Civ V's resource system shine, and I'm disappointed that it won't have the opportunity to do so in Civ VI.
 
Coming a bit late to the discussion, but this (requiring only one or two resource copies) is a design decision that makes absolutely no sense to me. I had thought that Civ V's system was an unambiguous improvement from Civ IV (and unlike most of Civ V's changes, I wasn't aware that there was any significant disagreement on this point). The most obvious benefit to Civ V's system (beyond realism, which is admittedly debatable in such an abstracted system) is that competition for resources is simply more interesting when you have an incentive to acquire more than one or two copies of a resource. Even more important, however, is that it allows for intermediates states between unlimited access to a unit type and total exclusion from that unit type. This intermediate space encourages more variation in army competition, and it allows for a much more gradual variation between haves and have-nots.
You need 1 resource to build units in encampments, 2 resources to build units anywhere, 3+ resources allow trade. This means you actually want more than 1 resource.

And they are rare on the map. For example, in Marbozir's let's play he managed to get Iron normally, but didn't pay enough attention to Horses and both nearby sources were settled by other civs. Also, Spain revealed Niter earlier than Marbozir and stolen his only nearby source as well.

So it looks like very active game to get resources.
 
Last edited:
Do we know if there are resource loss penalties? If I trade England my iron, they have none, they build swordsmen, and then we go to war and they lose the iron, will the swordsmen be weaker or anything?
 
Do we know if there are resource loss penalties? If I trade England my iron, they have none, they build swordsmen, and then we go to war and they lose the iron, will the swordsmen be weaker or anything?
No reason why they should either.... you only need the resource to Make the unit, not have them.
 
Well, you could make the argument that you can't properly upkeep the equipment. After all, I can't think of a single Strategic Resource that would only be used in the construction and not the maintenance of the unit.

Of course, that might be more appropriately rendered as an upkeep cost increase, but there are ways of viewing it in the flavor.
 
Honestly, I think this is fine as long as they dialed back a bit the number of Strategic Resources on the map, you might actually get some interesting resource wars this time round.
 
The important part is that *more resources means something*. In the Civ4 and earlier systems, you only ever needed to acquire 1 copy. In Civ5...you still sorta only needed one copy, because the most important part was the difference between 0 of a unit and some units.

With this new system, 1 copy is much more valuable than 0 copies, and 2 copies are still significantly more valuable than 1 (build in all cities, not just encampments). I hope they have something significant for 3-5 copies in the future (+50% production time, +4 combat strength, +xp).
 
Taking a stab in the dark, I figure that their reasoning for this change to Strategic Resources is so that there needs to be fewer resource nodes on the map. Fewer resource nodes = fewer mines/pastures on tiles = more room for districts & wonders on the map.
 
Taking a stab in the dark, I figure that their reasoning for this change to Strategic Resources is so that there needs to be fewer resource nodes on the map. Fewer resource nodes = fewer mines/pastures on tiles = more room for districts & wonders on the map.

you could still have fewer nodes on the map, if you need more resources you don't need to add more nodes just make them have more (and effectively they have done that.. instead of ~20 nodes of 2 Iron and ~5 nodes of 6, they have 5 nodes of effectively infinite Iron..but the extra copies are untradable)
 
I think the new system seems quite good. You avoid the map getting full of resource tiles, and there's still a significant advantage for each new copy of a resource you get. Simple, neat and smart. But let's see how the AI will value strategic resources in trade.
 
Come to think of it, do we know what happens if you discover a strategic resource under a wonder? I think we know that districts still give you access to resources that spawn under them, not sure about the wonders.
 
Come to think of it, do we know what happens if you discover a strategic resource under a wonder? I think we know that districts still give you access to resources that spawn under them, not sure about the wonders.
It was also confirmed that Wonders connect resources that pop up under them.
 
Lol, yeah I guess potensially having to tear down the Ruhr Valley to access uranium is worse than a uranium-yielding Maracana stadium
 
Why does modern armor require uranium? Are there really nuclear-powered tanks around?
Also, I think some units should require multiple resources, for example, knights requiring both iron and horses. Then again, I also think it's weird for unique units not to require resources across the board. I do think though that basic units should not require resources so that you can always at least make some units even if you lack resources or they've been pillaged, which is why I don't like the niter resource, taking away the basic unit for that era.
I know this is a very old post...in modern (US, and others after us) armor, depleted uranium is used in the penetrator of the armor-piercing ammunition. It is more dense (more mass) than any other metal.
 
Moderator Action: Please refrain from reviving old threads, particularly those (like this one) discussing game mechanics that have undergone significant changes. Thread closed.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top Bottom