I expect that it'll be very difficult to achieve some kind of fix to the resources issue which Rezca brought up in Civ IV without significant changes, and it's been indicated to me that RoM AND wants to retain the basic Civ IV concepts.
The resource depletion concept appealed to me initially, but I found it very frustrating when all of a sudden with no warning all six of my iron mines 'expired' one turn. Not being able to manage stock levels, nor even <i>monitor</i> them in some way, makes the whole depletion thing feel like a pure game of luck.
Instead of trying to manage resources to limit unit-building, I'd love to see more building requirements applied to units. E.g. building a big modern ship should require a big modern naval construction yard, and building a tank would require steel, a factory and/or industrial park and/or manufacturing whatever, and also power. Then you really would have to build up an industrial base to use modern units (or import them). As was pointed out recently here somewhere (in relation to tech' diffusion), DRCongo does have modern weapons - but I bet they don't build many of them themselves.
Is it possible for units to require the presence of one building somewhere in the Civ? I'm thinking the 3D studio building could enable certain late-era units, which would be a more interesting perk for that building (and tech') than just an economic boost.
Back to the topic of some of the preceding posts... Is it even possible for a building to consume ONE unit of a resource (as noyyau suggested above)? I'd like to see the factory, perhaps, consume one unit of steel, the manufacturing plant consume one aluminium (say), and so forth. That way you'd actually have a reason to build multiple steel mills / oil refineries, etc..., or import things you can't make yourself. This would, to me, make the game feel much more as though I was actually developing an inter-connected industrial empire (not to say that the same concepts couldn't work pre-industrial-era!).
I'm with Ipex on the "1 resource, 1 city" model: i.e. against it. Resources <i>were</i> often traded long distances. Didn't Britain get it's name because it was a source of tin throughout Europe? But I also don't like the Cathedral mechanic, because it's hard to know how many of something you can build until you actually reach the (weird and arbitrary) limit. If the resource-consumption I talked about in the previous paragraph works, neither of these two limiting mechanism would probably be needed.
Just ideas... Love this mod.
A.
