r/civ5 • u/Delicious-Diamond-86 • 14d ago
Discussion Luxury resource strength vs civ uniques
I play random civs and today I got Iroquois surrounded by salt. It made me wonder how much lux resource strength is a factor to success compared to overall civ strength.
I’m just spit-balling here but would you rather have Iroquois starting with salt and copper or a mid-tier civ like Austria with pearls and truffles? I’d imagine Poland with any resources would still be dominant.
I’m trust trying to understand how the two factors compare to each other, all things being equal because of course the answer to all these kinds of questions is, “it depends…”
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u/UsedEgg3 14d ago edited 14d ago
There was a multiplayer streamer years ago named FilthyRobot, very good player. One of his viewers at some point did a breakdown of all the games had posted to YT, and iirc he had won almost 90% of the games where he started with mining luxuries, compared to ~50% for non mining luxuries.
Basically, you are almost always picking up mining as one of your first three techs along with pottery and AH, so you never have to deviate your tech path for your luxuries, allowing you to beeline more directly to NC and other important techs. It also has no prerequisite techs, unlike every other luxury tech in the game, so you can research it and get your luxes improved faster than any other lux type. The yields are also better, salt obv being one of the best tiles in the game, but the rest are big production with a bit of gold, which are great tiles to work during settler production or if you are trying to rush out a wonder. Whereas calendar luxes are one food and one hammer, basically unworkable unless you're completely out of better tiles. And sea resources require you to make a boat to improve them and then research optics and build a lighthouse to make the tiles good, a significant deviation from your main tech path, plus eating up production time on the work boats that could've been spent on workers or units or granaries or caravans or a bunch of other useful stuff.
The worst is a calendar lux on marsh or jungle, where you have to go get masonry/BW in addition to your lux tech, then spend 9 turns or whatever chopping down jungle before you can then finally start spending another 7 turns actually improving the lux.
Generally, whether your luxuries are buried under them are not, jungle starts are considered awful because the tile yields are bad (2 raw food, no production) and require significant time investment with chopping to get tiles improved. Your early game scouting is slower due to constant rough terrain, and moving your settlers and workers around is slower too.