resource revealing techs

They reveal a set amount of resources. You're not missing anything if you research early.

In fact, if you build your second town near a gold mine (or your first town has one!) and then research the techs, if you're lucky you can get a town with 2 or even 3 gold mines. Then put all your gildar production in that town.

i set amount based around your already established cities?  that i can live with.  where did you get that info? 

I got it from playing the game a lot First resource tech(kingdom) gives exactly one gold mine, second exactly two food resources, etc. every single time i researched it. Makes sense researching them early, while you only have one city, that way you can hit all the resources with one enhancing improvement and don't have to build, say, marketplaces all over the kingdom.

I might be completely wrong here, but they seem to be resource spawning techs instead or global revealing techs. Even when I research them mid to late game I only ever seem to get one of each resource spawned (I do not know if it is the same for empires) (1 gold, then 1 bees and 1 fruit, then 1 gold, 1 of the better metal, and finally 1 crystals).

If the techs simply reveal new resources you might have just had bad luck (there are games where I can only find on food tile in my starting region as well).

 However if these techs spawn new resources near our cities then it does not really matter when they are researched provided there is enough room to place the new resource;and that is the one caveat I would add, if the player researches these techs before their area of influence expands sufficiently then no resource appears at all.

That is the only way I see it penalizing early research, personally I try to get these techs (at least the food and gold) early enough to turn my first city my gold/food center. I usually end up with about 50 food by the time I have reached 6 or 7 decent sized cities and by the time my first city reaches level five it is usually generating 100-150 gold. It helps out small kingdoms alot.

regards,

ct

I abused that in my last game. I researched the adv tech that gives two food sources, but i held off founding new cities so they spawned right next to the capital. That gave me 3 food sources and from there i funneled all caravans to the capital. Its currently producing 336 food ... (more than 100 to spare)

Here's the list:

Kingdom
first reveal: gold mine
second reveal: orchard, apiary

Empire
first reveal: gold mine
second reveal: gold mine

Hope that helps.

It would be interesting if it did both things.

In addition to having all the randomly spawned readily accessible resources, also spawn a small number of randomly placed concealed resources revealed by the techs. But also have those techs spawn a fixed number of resources within existing city limits.

Why? To add variety, depth and strategy to the game. Having additional resources revealed outside the city limits will create new points on the map of strategic value. Once you get the techs you will see lots of new places where it will be worthwhile founding new cities. You may also see that there are clusters of highly useful resources in enemy territory... And the enemy might not even be aware of it yet... Making those enemy cities your own before they realise their value would be a tactical priority.

Why continue to spawn a fixed number within city limits? Well the nature of random maps is to be slightly unbalanced for someone eventually. You can't roll even numbers every time. Even if no hidden resources turn up near you at least spending the time researching the techs still provide an immediate benefit.

The key of course is balancing the resource distribution so that the number or regularly spawned resources, hidden resources, and locally created resources don't overwhelm the map, making having them redundant.

exactly. this is the problem. why should adventure techs reward you for staying at home? the purpose of these line of technologies is to help you choose good city locations, which you have to balance against developing a military or infrastructure. or at least should be.

For that matter, adventure tech is about the exploration side of 4X.

Well in that case it is rewarding us for not expanding our infrastructure early, that does not mean the player is not exploring, merely that the player is not settling the land they are exploring (though I imagine it is open to abuse).

regards,

ct

I think it was meant to trick us into expanding but fell short due to our superior Intelignce ability. I recommend they change the tech to still give us more resources but in a global fashion that reveals actual hidden resources across the map regardless of player position as the description led many if us to believe.

I think they should change the system so that extra resources are placed on the map, but they start invisible. Once you research the appropriate level of tech, it reveals all of the hidden resources on the map. For gold mines there would be 2 levels of invisibility, one for the first upgrade and one for the empire-only second upgrade.

the one problem is that you could unknowingly build on top of one such hidden location, in which case it should randomly teleport to a nearby location thats not blocked by anything.

This way the world becomes richer for those who research these technologies, but its still random and not exploitable.

So like in Civ IV? I actually like that, but I also like the "sure finding" inside your borders...

What I was thinking is that each level (or at least the lower ones) should give you an "owned" resource AND a chance of other resources spawning in other remote areas of the map. This would, incidentally, do a lot to give value to maps in general, since being Elemental economy and production totally detatched from any "standard" tile bonus and intead relying on "special" tiles, you usually end with huge swat of terrain where no one wants to settle because, there's just no resources there.

Also, each of the adventure sub-line has some drawback, why should this one be different? The risk of spawning resources for your opponents could be a nice trade-off IMHO!

(sorry for my english, no time to double check)

At the same time, one that wants to focus more on adventure than in city spamming, needs to get easy access to new resources for his few cities and not need to be forced to create new ones.

...and there's the problem, unfortunately.  I also prefer hidden resources that you uncover, but then you could build on them wrongly:-(  The replace location on build idea seems good, until you consider this: you've researched a hidden technology, and know where it is, but the person near it hasn't, and builds over it - you see the jumping resources.  Not cool:-(  Not to mention, what if you had just started a war for that city?

Yay... you have found an argument against city spamming in this game

Another option: Show all resources, but mark the ones you don't know about as a shadowed unknown resource.

Reveal and allow usage of that resource only after the relevant tech is discovered.

That way, it also solves the problem of revealing resources for enemies.

Should someone take your city with resources, for him it will still be an unknown resource.

Good idea!

Actually its an argument FOR city spamming. Because surplus food is useless since i dont get a benefit from it, but i can just randomly found cities and all upgrade em to level 5 because i have so much food.

oops...ignore

That's a fantastic idea!

You need to hold off first and then spam. Then it should be too late to city spam in many ways. Cause all others have already done it

Brilliant!

If the justification of the resources in the adventure tree are to give an advantage to them as opposed to someone who techs up the civ tree, it does not work in its current state. I always get up to five of these techs as soon as possible even though I am a shameful civic junky. I think these techs should unlock new locations that can be explored by adventurers to gain the desired resource at each level.

Adds to the questing and makes it unique to an adventuring minded player. Does that pass the fun test?

I think the point of the techs is to mitigate a bad start to some extent, but they're not the ideal format. What might be better is moving them from the adventure tree altogether and replacing them with something in the magic tree which would allow you to select what resource and where to spawn it that worked one time, or had a prohibitive cost. Or maybe simply a spell to spawn a resource type requiring the permanent sacrifice of essence to do; i.e. sacrifice five essence and spawn a resource of your choice in the target square. It still lets you avoid a gimped start if you don't get access to a particular resource, but you're not going to want to cast it more than once if at all possible.