Having City Improvements producing resources

[Optimizer]

Allowing city improvements to produce a resource would add enormous possibilities to the game.

Examples:
Stud farm - requires Horses, produces Horses. (We get rid of that classical problem: "Sire, whe still haven't manage to breed the horses that we have bought from the English during the last 1000 years!")
Fuel Plant - requires Coal, produces Oil. (The Germans were dependent of such installations during WWII. Of course the Allies tried to bomb them.)

For balance, these buildings would have to be expensive or just supplying their own cities.

A really ambitious modder could create entire production chains which would make global trade very interesting.

Please, do it!

[Optimizer]

I'm happy enough with the possibility to edit units to this property. They don't need to add any new original buildings.

[Optimizer]

Hey! I just managed to rate my own thread! Isn't that cheating?

[Carver]

Sounds logical, but could radically change the game. I say, if implemented, you should only be able to have one of each type of improvement. It should supply that city only and would not be tradeable. This would be realistic, as even non oil-producing nations facing an oil embargo manage to smuggle in a small amount of petro. So even with no oil, you could have one city trickling out tanks... sounds allright.

[Optimizer]

At least someone who believes in my idea!

[candybo]

I've always thought the "city-produced" resource was a good idea. The best example I have is from the classic "Capitalization": Factory 1 (Washington) has petroleum, builds refinery/processing plant, producing petrochemicals, i.e. plastics. Taking that plastic, factory 2 (New York) builds something else, (SS Parts, Supercomputers?), and so on....



Could make inter-city trade within your Civ more interesting, no?


edited for addition

[Adagio]

I like the idea

[Tiberius]

I like the idea.

For balancing purposes I think it should be a small wonder that produces a resource and only under certain circumstances, because otherwise resources would become too common and too easy to obtain (no more trading, etc).

I imagine it working aprox. like the Iron Works: you have 2 types of resources, build a small wonder and obtain from it a third type of resource.

What do you think?

[Bleyn]

That has potential. Though, I must say, I would prefer it to be a setup where you merely require possesion of the resources and not close proximity to each other.

I understand why they limited Iron Works the way they did. Could have potential to be very unbalancing if you could pick exactly where to plant it, and be sure of having it in almost every game.

But for a resource converter, requiring proximity to one resource would be fine, but please not two.

[Tiberius]

Oh, I'm sorry, I wasn't clear enough. I've said I imagine it working aproximately like the Iron Works but not exactly like it, but I haven't detailed what the differences would be.
I perfectly agree with you that requiring proximity to two resources would be unbalancing. I was thinking in terms of two available resources, not for the city with the small wonder but for the civ. Not proximity, just availability.

[Palaiologos]

The idea is good, but in the late game where your cities have more or less all the improvements, trade will become obsolete.That is if it is implemented as an improvement for all cities to built.

Being a very expensive improvement or an improvement that requires resources in the city proximity would somewhat balance it.

It should only supply one city,though.

And only horses,oil and aluminium should be available via this method.

But is a good idea.

P.S. I think Germans were dependant on Rumanian oil if anywhere else.

[Galvatron]

It's a very good idea so we can simulate international trade and even build monopolies on some goods and perhaps manufacturing trade goods out of the resources.

Would be a very important addition to the game.

[DrFell]

Not sure about manufacturing the raw material resources in cities, but manufacturing new ones (both luxury and strategic, or maybe only luxury) might be a neat way to cut down on the power of ICS. Thing is, at the moment the more of the map you control the more resources you will likely control. This just screams for an infinite expansion type strategy. But if new resources can be manufacture out of old ones (like the oil->petroleum example earlier, dye+silk->some type of clothing, horses-> horsemeat etc) you could build expensive plants to manufacture the goods, likely beginning in the industrial age. This could give small civs with control of only a few resources a fighting chance in trading with bigger empires, if they focused on trade (think the dutch or the phonecians, amongst others). Would be better than the current "only the big or very lucky empires win" type situation which occurs in civ3 right now.

[Optimizer]

Thank you all for your ideas! Resource production could have some really interesting applications - for instance, some small rich countries could buy cheap raw materials from the poor ones and sell them advanced stuff at a high price.

[Panag]

hi ,

it sounds intresting , but we should use something complicated as a resource , ....

oil and minerals make plastic , plastic is needed to build unit X , or building y , something like that would be great , ....

have a nice day