What's your favourite resource

[Arrian]

Then again, given a choice of *only one* of iron, copper, horses or ivory, I'd probably pick iron or copper... and go get the others.

Cats + Axes/Swords (and spears if needed) is just as good (or close) as Cats & Elephants. But with copper or iron I can bypass archery (a tech I hate wasting beakers on in the early going) for a while. Without the metals, and assuming no horses, I gotta get archery to have any decent defense at all.

-Arrian

[Nugog]

Iron - Praetorians!

[Targonis]

For me, it's not about one resource that I prefer, but about what my starting civilization is and what era I am in.

Food is good in all periods of the game, but is more important for those with jungle all around them since it adds health.

In the early game, stone will help build walls as well as several early wonders.

Marble will be good for other wonders into the mid-game.

If the civ I am playing is focused on military, then going with copper or iron will be the best bet. In general, if you don't have access to copper or iron by the mid game, you are in trouble.

Ivory is good, but doesn't help in the early game because you can't make good use of it for military early on. In the late game, ivory goes back to only being a luxury item.

Fish and sea food fall into the regular food area, where you can grow a city and get money, but you don't end up getting productivity from these, so sea/coastal cities generally never end up as good production cities. The boost to science is good though.

[couerdelion]

I had thought about putting ivory somewhere near the top because of its multiple applications. But from a military standpoint, I think iron trumps it. Personally, I would not be happy going into a conflict with cats and jumbos because my units would be a little vulnerable. The defensive bonus for the foot soldiers makes Iron (Swords/Axes) a stronger play – I believe. I also think that swords do a better job of capturing cities.

I’m a little surprised that people seem to prefer health to happiness. Health only loses you 1f for each point of unhealthy while unhappiness causes the loss of whatever tile you could be working. Personally, I think happiness is worth 3-4 times as much as health.

Also health bonus and multipliers come earlier than happiness. You can improve just 4 happy resources with ancient techs and need classical, medieavel or modern techs for the rest – note that normally, you need iron working for gems. All the health resources come with ancient techs. You are also more likely to breach health limit when you have lots of food which seems an ideal place to whip infrastructure so here again, you’ll start running into happiness limits.

Gems, because they normally come with jungle would have to be below gold on my list although I would certainly not disagree that the starting gems in city radius without jungle is a big bonus.

Overall, I think I’m tending to go for corn

1) Lots of food – very important
2) Easy to improve
3) Early health multiplier which is also a MUST build.

Fish and Pigs, while beating corn on the tile value and easy of improvement, lose out because their multipliers are selective (harbours) or late (supermarkets)

[Ari Rahikkala]

Because it should have been a poll anyway: Banana!

[Diadem]

Originally posted by couerdelion
I’m a little surprised that people seem to prefer health to happiness. Health only loses you 1f for each point of unhealthy while unhappiness causes the loss of whatever tile you could be working. Personally, I think happiness is worth 3-4 times as much as health.

Yes but there are many other ways to boost happiness. Religions, temples, colosseums, several UBs, heriditary rule, representation, several other civics, cathedrals. Did I forget any?

For health resources are pretty much the only way to boost it. The aquaduct gives health, but that's about it for most of the game. Plus several buildings give unhealth. There's forests and fresh water, of course, but still... Happiness is usually easier to get then health.

[Quillan]

Oil. You can build destroyers and such with uranium, once you get Fission (in the Warlords expansion), but there is no substitute for oil when it comes to planes and tanks. I can live without iron if I have to. I'll build mostly the same units using copper. I can live without coal, if I have to. I don't use ironclads that much, and railroads are nice but I can deal with roads until I trade or capture some coal. However, if the game goes to the modern era, I can't live without oil. If I get there and I don't have oil, a war will ensue shortly.

[Swiss Pauli]

Originally posted by Diadem
Yes but there are many other ways to boost happiness. Religions, temples, colosseums, several UBs, heriditary rule, representation, several other civics, cathedrals. Did I forget any?

For health resources are pretty much the only way to boost it. The aquaduct gives health, but that's about it for most of the game. Plus several buildings give unhealth. There's forests and fresh water, of course, but still... Happiness is usually easier to get then health.

You forgot the culture slider...but I think the health/happiness equation flips over time: up to classical times then happiness is (generally) the main limiter, but as the game progress healthiness becomes more and more a pressing concern.

[couerdelion]

I guess my biggest counter to late game resources is that these are EASY to acquire because by then you would hope to be in a position to win. Even then, tanks should have a relatively low impact on the game simply because they arrive too late to have a significant impact on it.

Perhaps in other words, you might need tanks because you didn’t have iron

[rah]

Originally posted by Swiss Pauli

You forgot the culture slider...but I think the health/happiness equation flips over time: up to classical times then happiness is (generally) the main limiter, but as the game progress healthiness becomes more and more a pressing concern.

Agreed. Besides, if i have early unhappiness. Crack the whip. Later in the game each pop takes longer to replace so I don't whip as often. (usually only for emergencies)

[couerdelion]

But the problem here is that if you have the health resources, your whip will possibly just exacerbate your happiness problems. If you don't then the whip itself will not be very effective because you don't have enough food to generate the population growth needed to whip.

I know there is a balance but until the late game - late Rennaissance/Industrial, health should not be a great problem. Even then, a rebellious subject costs far more than the loss of one slice of bread

[Diadem]

Originally posted by couerdelion
I guess my biggest counter to late game resources is that these are EASY to acquire because by then you would hope to be in a position to win. Even then, tanks should have a relatively low impact on the game simply because they arrive too late to have a significant impact on it.

Oil is not so easy to acquire. Often there's very little oil on land. Offshore platforms don't come until very late in the game though, and are hard to protect against plunder, and costly to replace.

If you are far ahead already, it doesn't matter. But if things are very close (or maybe in multiplayer, but I never play that), a land-based oil resource is extremely valuable. You can't do anything without oil. It's far more essentional in the modern area than iron is in the ancient area.

[senowen]

For the very beginning of a game I like cows. Food, shields, health and easy to improve. Yeah, I know, no trade. However, if I was able to pick one, but only one, resource inside my first city it would be cows. Quickest way to get out that first settler that I know of.

[MasterDave]

Early in the game the most important resource is gold. If you have food to support it, a gold mine is instant research the equivalent of several cottages.

Overall, I think the most important resource is iron. Without Iron you get no swords, X-bows, Knights, or Pikemen. It is very limiting to try to run a military without those units before you get gunpowder.

Late game it's oil. If your enemies have oil and you do not, no tanks or planes, or even modern ships until you can use uranium. That is death in multiplayer.

[Blake]

Happiness is very useful to an extent - or to put it like this, if you have less than 5 happiness (preferably 6) then ANY happy resources are extremely valuable, however above that happy level of 6 (which is the easy settler whipping point) it's relatively easy to get more happy via advanced tech, but Health is harder to come by. Thus I consider up to about 5-6 happy being happy is good, and above that, health is more useful.

What I like to have is 2 camp or mine happy resources, so on Monarch I get my cities to happy 6 very fast.


Now to return to Ivory vs Iron. The advantage of Ivory is you know that it's there from the start - once I see Ivory, I know I can conquer anything else I need. When it comes to making use of the phants there is no gamble involved.

The other thing is the sheer value of raw strength in open land combat, lower strength units can be good when backed by Defense Bonuses or City Attack bonuses, but having a high raw base strength is just so useful for open land anti-stack combat. After a stack has been battered down by a couple of pults, the elephants will clean up ANYTHING in it, they have enough base strength to, when shock promoted especially, kill any pre-medieval stack, and even most medieval ones.

I'm quite fond of Crossbows+Pikemen, but Elephants are better at killing stacks because elephants don't have specific counters until Pikemen.

Elephant + Catapult stacks are particularly rude, because the catapults counter - the horse archer - is very badly schooled by elephants, as of Warlords 2.08 the spearman is too weak to kill a catapult, if you want to throw things at an elephant/pult stack you can't, unless you have Phalanxes or Praetorians or Elephants of your own.

The Warlords change of making catapults not damaged by collateral further reinforces the Elephants are good thing - 5 or 6str units are NOT good at polishing off catapults, they die to bad rolls quite often, only horse archers and elephants are really good at killing catapults, with the Elephant being much preferable since it counters all other mounted units and has the higher base strength.

Elephants have basically become progressively more useful due to various balance changes to units, having a high base strength just keeps counting more and more. And if you use my AI you're pretty much forced to fight in the open and kill the AI stacks before they can reach a city (or let them in the city and kill them in the city), since these stacks are too strong to defend against, you need to offend against them, and large stacks of elephants are perfect against the heavily mixed AI stacks. The contrast between what my AI does and what the 1.61/2.08 AI does is huge - my AI sticks together in stacks and breaks down cities, that's what it does. You need anti-stack options. In contrast the 1.61/2.08 AI's first instinct is always to split up and pillage, which makes it horribly vulnerable to specific counter units, which can usually achieve 80%-99% odds killing off the stupid pillaging units.

The one final factor is that Aggressive has more fun with Melee, this is true. Aggressive easily gets Shock Axemen and Formation Spearmen, which makes the melee armies so much more powerful and hard to counter. As such as aggressive I don't mind not having elephants, but if I'm not agg I really like having elephants to form a strong core for my army, adn even if I am agg I'll probably get some elephants since they help round out the stacks and go well with the slow mover agg stacks.