Metal

[Sol]

So I heard that you are supposed to spawn with a metal in your zone within a first few turns but that doesn't seem to be happening to me lately. What do you do if you can't find it? seems like game over to me.

[Thomas]

I think metal mine is given on lowest difficulty.

[Palo Blaze]

You get a Metal and Water deposit near your starting city on EASY. REGULAR, you only get Water.

If you have no metal, then build Recycling centers on ruins. Almost every map I've seen has at least a few ruins near the starting city.

I just played a SIWA planet that was loaded with Ruins - large large deserted cities. As such I needed no Metal deposits at all that game.

[Chazsi]

I've played three times, all on "regular" difficulty. Two starts had a Major faction within 7 hexes of my start city. Quick losses. One had only minors around me. I controlled 1/6 of the map and still had found NO METAL. Impossible

Just started my fourth game on "beginner" to try and get some metal after seeing this thread. No mine given to start with and no metal in sight after initial expansion

VERY FRUSTRATING

BUT I LOVE THIS GAME......

[Crimes of Typing]

Originally posted by Zarg:

So I heard that you are supposed to spawn with a metal in your zone within a first few turns but that doesn't seem to be happening to me lately. What do you do if you can't find it? seems like game over to me.

It will also depend on the Tech Start. Tech start IV guarantees metal deposit or metal mine, I believe.

[George The Ork]

Yeah early game you need to salvage and mine what you can, or buy from the market. Just be insanely frugal with your spending and try to get the private sector to carry some of the burden until you can invest into a metal filtration thingies.

Honestly the game variance on the planet style and colonisation can be great as much as maddening when you don't know of the solution. Hell I have had some games where I managed to unlock more advanced technology first so I had top deploy advanced armours and weapons due to a lack of plentiful common metals.

Almost makes me wish we could have alternative resource paths like wooden planes or ceramic armours.

[vr·aa·nuh·kuh]

Originally posted by Chazsi:

I controlled 1/6 of the map and still had found NO METAL. Impossible

That's a lot of land, for a new and inexperienced leader with a small bureaucracy, that needs surveying, furthermore your capacity to find metal is further reduced by #metal-deposits/#all-Deposits. Try funnelling more of your BP into prospecting via funnelling it into interior council. Highest skill prospecting leaders as city governors will also help. stop expanding, draw back and only hold what you need and a small area around your capital to restrict how much land is being prospected.

[cranky corvid]

You can see whether there's undiscovered resource deposits in your zones in the prospecting report. If there aren't, prospecting won't help, and stopping expansion is the opposite of what you should do.

Prospecting is also the responsibility of the Economic Council, not Interior.

[Spaceman_Spiff]

Also worth noting is that the prospecting skill of the Economic Council leader, as well as the Governor of the zone, does not increase the chance of finding a resource deposit. It only affects the speed at which you find the pre-generated deposits, augmented by the Prospecting BP allocation in your Economic Council slider settings. I tend to keep that at 10% or less especially at the beginning. Your starting governor should be able to find any initial deposits before you have the resources needed to actually utilize them.