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 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 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)

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.

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

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.

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)

...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?

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.

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.

That's a fantastic idea!

Brilliant!

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.