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Resource Tutorial

Choose a subject:
Introduction
How to add resources
Terrain - resource list
resources_extra

Introduction

This zip contains two pictures, "resources.pcx" and "EXTRA resources.pcx". You need a decent art program like Paintshop Pro (which is excellent, and free for eval. at www.jasc.com) to view 'Zsoft Paintshop' files.

The pictures are icon charts for resources. You can cut-and-paste them into your personal resources.pcx file. That file is found in your CivilizationIII/Art folder. You can also just replace your old resources.pcx with the one in this zip, but cattle will get a different icon if you do. The old icon for cattle is in "EXTRA resources.pcx" and I've also included the original file that comes with the game in case anyone screws up. I think the new cattle icon is better; the old one looks like a bird with its head at the ground picking a seed... or so I think.

So, extract the files into a folder and lets open resources.pcx. The icons here are diverse and used for different resources, unlike the other file which is just a cut-and-paste collection not intended to be used on its own.

The Horse in the top left corner is Icon 1. Coal is Icon 4, and Aluminium is Icon 7. You need to know how to count icons when you add your resources. I should probably say that you can settle for adding three resources and leave the rest of the icons as they are; you don't HAVE to use all of them, it won't affect the game to leave them where they are.

Gold -- Icon 21 -- is the last standard resource. Below is my reworked chart of all resources. It's pretty self-explanatory, but see right underneath it for some miscellaneous notes.

Strategic Resource	Food	Shields	Commerce	Prerequisite	Appears in	App/Disapp ratio
Aluminium	+0	+2	+0	Rocketry	Hills and Mountains	[80]400
Coal	+0	+2	+1	Steampower	Hills	[80]400
Copper	+0	+1	+2	Nil	Mountains	[140]500
Dolphin	+0	+0	+0	Nil	Ocean	[10]0
Horses	+0	+0	+1	The Wheel	Grassland and Plains	[160]0
Iron	+0	+1	+0	Iron Working	Mountains	[120]800
Oil	+0	+1	+2	Refining	Desert and Tundra	[80]500
Rubber	+0	+0	+2	Replaceable Parts	Jungle	[80]0
Ruins	+0	+0	+1	Nil	Hills and grassland	[40]0
Saltpeter	+0	+0	+1	Gunpowder	Desert	[80]800
Seaweed	+4	+0	+0	Recycling	Coast	[40]0
Timber	+0	+1	+2	Astronomy	Forest	[100]700
Tungsten	+0	+3	+0	Superconductor	Mountains	[40]300
Uranium	+0	+2	+3	Fission	Mountains	[60]100

Luxury Resource	Food	Shields	Commerce	Prerequisite
Beer	+1	+0	+2	[20] app. ratio
Coffee	+0	+0	+3
Cotton	+0	+1	+3
Dyes	+0	+0	+1
Furs	+0	+1	+1
Gems	+0	+0	+4	(Also called Diamonds)
Incense	+0	+0	+1
Ivory	+0	+0	+2
Jade	+0	+1	+2
Pearls	+0	+0	+4	Currency
Salt	+0	+0	+3
Silks	+0	+0	+3
Spices	+0	+0	+2
Sugar	+1	+0	+1
Tobacco	+0	+0	+2	Navigation
Whiskey	+0	+1	+3	[20] app. ratio
Wines	+1	+0	+1
Wool	+1	+1	+2
Bonus Resource	Food	Shields	Commerce	Prerequisite
Apple	+1	+0	+0
Banana	+2	+0	+0
Bloom	+1	+0	+0
Calamari	+1	+1	+1	Map Making
Cattle	+2	+1	+0
Cherry	+1	+0	+0
Fish	+2	+0	+1	Map Making
Game	+1	+0	+0
Gold	+0	+0	+4
Lemon	+0	+0	+1
Melon	+1	+0	+0
Mineral	+0	+2	+0
Oasis	+2	+0	+1
Oat	+2	+0	+0
Orange	+1	+0	+1
Potato	+2	+0	+0
School	+3	+0	+0	Map Making
Strawberry	+1	+0	+1
Tea	+0	+0	+2
Walrus	+2	+0	+2
Whales	+1	+1	+2	Map Making
Wheat	+2	+0	+0

Ruins (looks like easter island heads) is a 'resource' I use which gives 1 commerce from tourism. I have it set to strategic so I can control its appearance ratio, and it is used to build a national Museum.
Oat replaces wheat in Plains in my mod.
Calamari = squid, octopus.
Beer and Whiskey aren't very 'natural' resources; they represent barley (beer) and rye (whisky), which would be farfetched to use as resources because the player would just confuse them with Wheat and Oat.
Tungsten (or Wolfram) is used to, among other things, light up a light bulb. It's 50% more massive than led and is frequently mentioned in science fiction as a component for advanced robots. I'm using it for some of my futuristic units.
The seven fruits are there for the variety -- bonus resources are automatically distributed evenly among the different types.
I use Seaweed in the late stages of the game as an unused source of food. My Waterfarm small wonder uses it.

How to add resources

Do you have Civ3MultiTool? If not, get it here.
In the CopyTool, select your bic (civ3mod.bic).
Choose to add as many resources as you want. Don't add too many! You can add more later, but you can't delete resources that are left over.

Double-click on civ3mod.bic in your CivilizationIII root directory and you're in the editor. Press CTRL+R. Select the "Natural Resources" tab. Scroll down the list until you get to gold -- now you'll see a bunch of entries named identically. These are the blank slates you'll use for your new resources. (Actually they're not blank, they're copies of the item you chose in Grampho's program).

1) Set the appropriate icon. You can do like I often do, click in the box with the numbers and use the up and down arrow to scroll through the icons, or double-click and type in the number you want.

2) Click the "Rename" button and name your resource.
2b) Optionally, enter a link to an entry in the civilopedia. There's a great guide to modding the 'pedia here: http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=33937

3) If you choose a prerequisite, your resource will be hidden until that tech has been researched.

4) By default, appearance ratio is only used with Strategic R., though I like to use it with Luxury R. in some cases. Beer and Whisky (see below) will be required to build a Brewery and Distillery in my future update to my mod.

With 16 players an appearance ratio of 160 will give each player one instance of this resource, meaning it will be placed in relative vicinity of them. If they succeed in claiming it is another matter. Naturally the more strategic resources you have the more cluttered the map will be -- that's why you might want to rescale the ratios for all Strategic luxuries so the player won't get a headache.

Original Appearance Ratios:
160 Horses & Iron
120 Saltpeter, Coal, Oil, Rubber & Aluminium
100 Uranium

Horses are very important for any civilization because the best units - horsemen, knight, cavalry - dominate 2 1/2 ages. If this value is too low, you'll likely see more wars since the Horse-owners will be far superior to those lacking steeds. I'm keeping it at 160.
I'm giving Iron a setting of 120.
Category II goes from 120 to 80 in my book, and uranium goes down to 60. Civs won't be allowed to sit on their ass now, hehe. So if I did my math correct we went from 1020 to 740 total points. That gives me 280 points to distribute on my three new strategic resources. I gave:

Copper 140
Timber 100
Tungsten 40

Since bonus resources can't be requirements for anything (in the newer patches), I have set Seaweed (ap:40) and Ruins (ap:20) to be strategic resources; the first lets the city build a building increasing food from water, the second lets it build a culture-generating museum.

Terrain - resource list

I suggest you tick these options instead of the defaults on the "Terrain" tab to get a nice spread of resources.

What comes where?
Desert Saltpeter, oil, incense, oasis, bloom.
Plains Horses, ivory, cattle, tobacco, sugar, oat, orange, lemon.
Grassland Horses, wheat, cotton, wool, beer, potato, apple, pear, ruins.
Tundra Oil, furs, game, walrus.
Flood plain Wheat, whisky, melon.
Hills Coal, aluminium, wines, jade, coffee, tea, ruins.
Mountains Iron, uranium, gems, gold, copper, tungsten, mineral.
Forest Furs, dyes, silks, game, timber, cherry, strawberry.
Jungle Rubber, dyes, spices, gems, banana, tea.

Coast Fish, salt, seaweed
Sea Whales, school, calamari, pearls
Ocean Dolphins

resources_extra.pcx

The icons are of:
tobacco, weird fruit, tobacco again, two weird fruits, weed (as in drugs),
Easter Island Heads from CtP2, Uranium I think, Tomato, Oasis, Fruit, Banana.
Next comes resources with increased visibility, that someone else made.
Then comes horse, oil, uranium, deer, "Original civ3 cattle" and gold.

written by MonsterMan/Patrik Jonasson (webmaster@overvikt.se) on 2002-02-25

Please email me with any comments, complaints, bugs or anything else you feel like telling me.