Thoughts on our Endless Resources

[HappyBuilder]

Certainly not the first to think these thoughts, but couldn't find a thread that discussed it:

Resources

The thread on uranium got me thinking about this - why should I be able to nuke with abandon and instantly get back my uranium once I detonate the bomb? Once it blows, it ought to be gone, right?

Therefore, should resources deplete as the game goes on? There's only so much gold in a gold mine, so much stone in a quarry, so much oil in the ground even with proper management. Eventually, they get abandoned.

More sustainable resources - plantations and herds, forests - could continue indefinitely, although it would be interesting to have an option where you could push them hard and deplete them or choosing a sustainable path but at a cost of output.

It goes against the simplification efforts of Civ V, but it's not unreasonable and it would add some exciting new dynamics.

HB

 

[dexters]

It's an abstraction but still superior to what we had. It used to be that you only need to connect 1 (one) resource and you could build infinite units of that type.

In Civ3, all you had to do was road over a resource, not even a tile improvement.

We've come a long way. And I find the Civ5 system and 1upt really expresses 'resource limitations' well.

Quantifying resources may be in the future of Civ, but probably not in this version.

 

[Cpt. Calavera]

It's an abstraction but still superior to what we had. It used to be that you only need to connect 1 (one) resource and you could build infinite units of that type.

I only realized this had changed in Civ5 on my second game.

 

[Babri]

The thread on uranium got me thinking about this - why should I be able to nuke with abandon and instantly get back my uranium once I detonate the bomb? Once it blows, it ought to be gone, right?

As far as I know Nukes use up uranium permanently in ciV.

 

[elister]

Quantifying resources may be in the future of Civ, but probably not in this version.

AI which settles a new city in a tile which is inferior than a tile selected by a six month old clicking randomly, I think it's a long way to go (than next version) for CiV AI

 

[bcaiko]

I only realized this had changed in Civ5 on my second game.

It took me a while to realize that I didn't need to build a road to resources.

 

[qemist]

As far as I know Nukes use up uranium permanently in ciV.

Your knowledge is something else. It's the same as iron. When your longsword gets killed somehow his armor is instantly recycled.

Most mineral resources take a long time to exhaust, so that aspect is not too unrealistic. The limiting factor for production is how fast you can extract (mine/refine etc) the resource. That suggests there should be 2 factors associated with a resource instead of just one. The stockpile of resource available for production and the number of units of mining active for that resource. You could build a unit that requires iron only when your iron stockpile was at least the iron required for that unit. As long as you controlled iron mines a trickle of iron would be added to your iron stockpile. The more units of mining, the faster the trickle. When you expend the unit the resources that went into building it are just gone.

This would make buying and selling resources much more realistic too. At the moment you don't so much buy resources as lease them.