Once again: Hidden Specials

[Elephant]

Originally posted by ramses II.
And there are still some questions left - can you predict the type of a hidden special ?
You can mine a field (silk, pheasant) - or you can transform it and then mine (wine, coal).
I'm sometimes very surprised to get a special far away from the next pattern

Go into MapEditor and create a single large continent will all Plains. You will see the relationship of the Specials to each other, and their relationship to Huts as well. There are two Special "classes", call them Whale-class and Fish-class, because they correspond to what is "underneath" the land when you paint it in the Editor. Wheat corresponds to Whales, and Buffalo corresponds to Fish. There is no way you can change that once you have started a game, but you can "mine" Buffalo into Pheasant or Wheat into Silk. Someone did a nice one-page chart a while back that shows what can be made into what with how much Settler/Engineer effort. I just use a three column page.

Another thing to try in MapEditor is changing the Resource Seed. With your Plains continent, type S and put in a number greater than 1. Watch what happens to the arrangement of the Specials and Huts. The same pattern is followed, just shifted over on the map. But for each multiple of 16 the grouping of Specials changes. Using the "classes" and the Resource Seeds you should be able to set up a test map to mimic any random map you are facing. I think other people have said they need at least three Specials or two Specials and a Hut to know exactly which pattern is being used. No more wandering for Huts...

[ramses II.]

Thank you, folks!
Thank you, Apolyton - where the civ experts meet.

[Straybow]

Specials, conversion times

Look at the terrain specs in rules.txt which shows the two separate groupings of specials. I never thought of them as "fish" and "whales" groups but rather "Pheasant/Buffalo" and "Silk" groups because of the conversions possible with Settlers.

"Fish" or "Pheasant/Buffalo" group:
Game, Oasis, Buffalo, Pheasant (also Coal, Peat, Gems, Ivory, Gold, Fish)

"Whale" or "Silk" group:
Furs, Oil, Wheat, Silk (also Wine, Spice, Fruit, Oil, Iron, Whale)

In the first group mining makes Pheasant, and unless the food is desperately needed I'll get around to changing it to Buffalo for an extra shield and an arrow.

It takes [edit] 10/2 turns for an Engr to mine hidden Silk, 20/2 turns to transform hidden Wine + 10/2 more to mine. For the extra effort you get 1 additional shield and arrow, which is worthwhile. If you already have Silk or Wheat you have to transform to grass first (20/2 turns), then 20/2 turns with no special bonus while transforming to Wine. Not worth it.

It is definitely worth transforming Iron to Wine, Glacier Oil to Furs, Coal to Buffalo, and Game to Oasis. Trade is king. In many cases Desert Oil is in the midst of more desert, in which case Wheat is better.

[Elephant]

The other thing to remember is that some Specials you cannot go back to, such as Mountain (Gold!), Jungle (Gems), and Swamp (Spice). But it is nice to know what they will turn into and how long it will take. I love the Wheat/Silk pair - extra food early to get going, more shields and trade for later. The only thing that makes it better is for a river to run through it. Too bad they did not put canal-building into CIV2!

I gather what you are referring to as "Game" is Musk Ox (on Tundra)?

[Elephant]

Here's my terrain conversion/upgrade chart. It's based on something I saw once that Nethog got from Gastrifitis. The original had movement costs and defense bonuses, but I do not know where to get it anymore. Didn't like the arrangement of boxes, either. It won't display correctly (it uses tabs), so I'm making it a downloadable:

Download TERRAIN.ZIP (MSWord6/WordPad format)