In the popular book “Guns, Germs and Steel”, author Jared Diamond argues that geography is destiny. The reason why the “Old World” colonized the “New World” and not vice versa was because the Old World lacked the kinds of resources necessary to build advanced civilizations. Cows, horses, chickens, sheep, wheat, rye, barley, pigs, etc. were not present in the New World. Obviously, the map generator for Earth was pretty badly written.
One of my complaints with Galactic Civilizations III and IV has been how resources are distributed. Specifically, Elerium, Anti-Matter and Thulium. These are special resources needed for the development of beam energy weapons, explosive energy weapons and kinetic weapons respectively. If you lack the corresponding resource, it will be tougher to produce the starships that make use of these weapons. My complaint is that the resources are tied to natural phenomenon which themselves are randomly scattered across the galaxy.
Anti-matter is linked to the edges of black holes. Elerium forms in nebula and Thulium is the result of super-massive planets that fail to create a fusion reaction forming into a super dense dead world. I have no quibble with the Sci-Fi. It is what it is. But I do quibble a lot with the fact that geography plays less of a role in strategic decision making than it could… until now.
So in the course of putting together the 2026 roadmap for Galactic Civilizations IV, we’ve been reading through the forums, Discord, Reddit, etc. but also we have our own list of things that bug us and this was near the top of my gripes. So, what to do? The answer is that in version 3.1, going into Preview shortly, these resources can be spawned in clusters rather than requiring a blackhole or a nebula to form. Not just that, but when a cluster of Elerium formed, it actively repels the formation of Anti-Matter or Thulium in the same area.
As a result, players will tend to have a lot of one resource, but less so than others. Moreover, because they cluster, as opposed to being scattered, it makes certain areas of space interesting. Especially if we update the AI to care about these clusters a lot. Having a group of 3 self-supporting starbases harvesting 5 Elerium in a single area is a lot more interesting than 5 isolated starbases out there randomly. It also means that what weapon and defense system one designs their ships around becomes more interesting because players will generally, we hope, have equal amounts of all 3 resources as they do now.
Now, we still do allow nebula and black holes to form their corresponding resource. It’s just a lot less frequent. So while we have tried to ensure that the # of resources remains the same as before on a given map size, the clustering changes things.
So take a look at this screenshot of a medium sized galaxy. The red resources are Durantium and they are still randomly distributed. Everyone needs this resource. But take a look at the Yellow, Blue and Cyani resources. See how they cluster?
Now, the occasional Nebula or black hole will still result in a random lucky resource showing up but you can see where one tends to cluster, the others do not.
How this plays out during the upcoming Preview builds remains to be seen. BTW, the numbers are all moddable so they can adjusted, but we will be tinkering with these a lot in the forthcoming weeks.