Resource creation questions

[Hrnac]

I have been experimenting with adding Wood and Stone as strategic resources. My question concerns the spawn and disappearance rates. In the editor help section it mentions that a spawn setting of 150 will produce about 2 resources on a standard map with 7 Civs. Is there an equation that is used to determine how resources spawn? For timber and stone, I would like to make them fairly plentiful, but have them disappear quicker. I have started with a 150 spawn setting and a 100 disappearance setting. These seem a bit off. Any thoughts before I randomly start experimenting with values.

-Hrnac

[Willem]

The higher the number, the more frequent the resource. However there's a number limit of 300. As for the disappearance ratio the number 100 means there's a 1/100 chance every turn that the resource will disappear. So your numbers would give you a rare resource that disappears very quickly. Or at least has the potential to.

And keep in mind that the game wasn't designed to accomodate more strategic resources. In your city view window, there's only room for 8 since it doesn't scroll. So if you have more than that, the chances are the game will crash everytime you open up the city screen. So you'll have to drop 2 of the existing ones. I haven't been willing to put that to the test myself, though I have had some other problems with adding more. After I stuck with just the 8, everything has been working fine.

[Hrnac]

Thanks Willem.

I dropped the Whale and Dye resources to make room for the two additional ones. This way I can see what impact they have on the game. I figure that wood would be required for all the ancient ships and stone would be required for city walls, acqueducts, and possibly some other city improvements. I currently have wood appearing at the beginning of the game and stone appearing with the discovery of Masonry. Wood only appears in forest squares and stone in hills and mountains. I am hoping to add a lumbermill and a quarry city improvement to allow for the use of these resources.

I will change my settings to 250 and 500 and see how they work.

-Hrnac

[Willem]

Originally posted by Hrnac
Thanks Willem.

I dropped the Whale and Dye resources to make room for the two additional ones. This way I can see what impact they have on the game. I figure that wood would be required for all the ancient ships and stone would be required for city walls, acqueducts, and possibly some other city improvements. I currently have wood appearing at the beginning of the game and stone appearing with the discovery of Masonry. Wood only appears in forest squares and stone in hills and mountains. I am hoping to add a lumbermill and a quarry city improvement to allow for the use of these resources.

I will change my settings to 250 and 500 and see how they work.

-Hrnac

I'm confused, Whale is a bonus resource, Dye is a luxury. If these are just bonus resources you're adding, the game won't recognize them as a building requirement. It only recognizes Luxury or Strategic. Also keep in mind that Wood, Timber in my game, and especially stone don't generally disappear all that quickly in real life. And if you have stone as a requirement for buildngs and it disappears on you, you could be screwed.

And thanks for the lumbermill idea, I hadn't thought of that. I could have it as a type of factory boosting production. One idea, select the "Must Be Near River" tag. Rivers have always been used to float the logs to the mills. Still do in some areas here in Canada, if the terrain's really rugged.

[Hrnac]

what I did to add Wood/Timber and stone was to first remove the Whale and Dye icon from the pcx file. I then inserted the graphic for wood and stone.

In the editor I renamed Whale to Wood and renamed Dyes to Stone. I also changed their setting to Strategic resource. The game has been generating these just fine although I did have a sound freeze problem which was probably unrelated to this.

I played two seperate games for a short while late last night and was able to view the city screen with no problems. The resources also appeared up top on the city display. I did not access the 3d city view as there was no reason to do so.

I am also pondering adding one more strategic resource. Perhaps copper. Any thoughts?

-Hrnac

[Willem]

Well like I said before, you'll probably have a problem if you have any more than 8 Strategic resources. And by my count you now have 10, with only 7 Luxury, unless you've added one you haven't mentioned. So you're probably going to have to dump 2 of the others if you want to include them.

What I've done is convert Horses to a luxury, and then set my goody huts Money Resource to Horses. What this does is create a Horse herd everytime you go into a hut and get some money from it, as opposed to a tech etc. Plus I have my Horses set so they appear right away. It works out fairly well. Sometimes I can get them right away, some times I have scout around for quite awhile. Though after eventually there's herds all over the place so they're not really useful for trade.

As for Copper, I've added it to my game and it works out. It's rather limited early on since Iron Working usually comes up pretty quick, but I have it as a requirement for things later on, like Hydro Plant etc. And of course the Colosuss. But I wouldn't suggest you use it for your Spearman though. It will unbalance the game if you or another civ can't seem to find any. What I've done is copy the Hoplite and created a Phalanx unit instead. It's the same as the Spearman but it has an attack number of 2 instead of 1.

BTW, there's room on the resources.pcx file for 2 more icons. After that, for some reason, the game won't recognize them. And it looks like there's no limit to how many bonus resources you can have. I'm up to about 20 I think. But you don't get anything more appearing on the map, it just spreads them around more. And quite nicely I think. I'm getting a nice variety on my maps.

Also, you might occasionaly run into a conflict with resources. What I think is that the game tries to put 2 on the same square, which crashes the game. My problem was when I added some Sheep to my Hills, but it cleared up after I turned Gold to a Luxury.

[Hrnac]

I just figured out what you meant when you mentioned the 8 resource display limit. Perhaps Firaxis will allow us to add more than 8 in the future. For now, I will keep my testing to the ancient portion of the game and work on balance isues.

If I have to remove any resources, Saltpeter and horses will most likely go until a better solution is found.

Thanks for your input and advice Willem.

-Hrnac

[Willem]

Yeah, it would be great if they would allow that window to scroll so we can add as many Strategic resources as we wanted to. I'd still like to get a couple more in there myself. I started out adding stone as well, though I called it Limestone, but I decided to make it a bonus resource instead. But I now have Timber and Copper, though I had to drop the Rubber and do that Horse thing I mentioned.

[MonsterMan]

Does anyone actually know that more than 8 strategic resources will cause problems? You say so Willem, but you also admits you haven't tested your theory. I'm hopeful because the game doesn't have a problem with my 10 strat resources anywhere else. I'll have to figure out how to make civilopedia icons for them, sure, but that's the only problem I've encountered.

Chances are the ninth strategic resource will just be invisible. And if the player wants to see it, I'll mention in my readme file that he should destroy all tile improvements on outdated resources. Both Iron, Saltpeter and Horses go out of date, probably Coal too but I haven't gotten that far to be sure.

By the way, in response to Hmac, I'd like to mention that when a resource disappears, it always plop up in some other part of the world. If you've seen the pop-up "we've found a new source of [x]" that means another civ lost that resource to you. Maybe u knew that, I just woke up :P

[s3d]

I have 12 strategic resources, all visible. What I did I use the same icon for fish and whales and for game and cattle.

[Willem]

Originally posted by s3d
I have 12 strategic resources, all visible. What I did I use the same icon for fish and whales and for game and cattle.

But have you had all 12 of them active in a game at once? If so, did you have any problems in the city screen?

[s3d]

Yes I had them all. The only problem was that last were hidden behinde the window title, their presence were indicated only by buildable units menu.

[Willem]

Originally posted by s3d
Yes I had them all. The only problem was that last were hidden behinde the window title, their presence were indicated only by buildable units menu.

Alright! Thanks for the info! I didn't want to risk trying it because I wanted to get through the end of the game and didn't want to take the chance of crashing it later on. That changes everything!