I have to say that on my Large map I encountered this issue a little bit myself.

Explore 1/4 of the map. And found very scarce resources. I was a little disappointed when I explored a little 5-6 squares that were near my most northern city, to find a cluster of 1 Fertile Land, 1 honey bee and 1 berry patch. this in a 3 X 3 square area.  If only those would have been properly scatterer it would of helped a bit.

I'm going to point back to some stuff I said in the past, there needs to be somekind of terrain related city building bonus. Or else, any city that is built with no strategic resource is flavorless. You can make it into wtvr you want and will have no particularities.

Maybe a set of interfacing modifiers. Cities built on plains have +% population, cities built next to many hills/mountains have a +% production. Cities built next to beaches/water have a +% taxes?

This would add another layer to city building and would make people seek specific landscapes to make certain types of cities. When you want to make your ultimate production town, you'll try to find mountains/hills, want a large farm city, look for plains.

As it stands everything is completely centered around strategic resource. Although I wouldn't say I'd like more of them, since they are so powerful. Adding more might just give greater imbalance on who's got the most strategic resources nearby.

... for some reason i had like 3 food and 2 shards and 2 metal at my starting position. with 1 gold mine 1 food (apiary) 1 arcane lib not too far away

well, 1 of the metal is from custom sov. the 2nd shard is probably just luck. don't know where the other 2 food came from. (1 is the bee thingy) think they spawned.

strangest thing is that some nearby coastline was revealed right at the start (just the coastline bit that you can't walk on... it's clouds on either side). even stranger is that i hired 1 merchant... only to find another exact same one waiting to be hired a screen away. so i put the 2 of them in the same city

so... yes.. luck. and a touch of weirdness.

bit more exploring found me yet another apiary, 1 metal and another shard. also saw one of the empire mounts tile.

that said.. it crashed in turn 80.. no clue why. a few turn changes before the crash had some strange sounds.... like the sound you get when slapping down buildings. except it's like a clump of them together.

i doubt i explored 1/10 of the large map

Resources gained from researching the adventure tech line pop up the following round, typically with an exclamation. The problem is that it can show up anywhere within 15 tiles of your capital city. That's a pretty huge distance.

Typically, I don't research that line (if I can help it), until I've really explored the area around my capital and set up a few extra cities (usually at least 3 in different directions). There's usually something to grab, like a couple food producing tiles, or maybe a mine, or materials node, or another shard.

Then, that way if I research a tech and it's quite a ways out, I either already have a city nearby, or I have the resources to quickly send out a pioneer if needed.

If you research it immediately, you run the risk of not seeing where the new resource popped up, and someone else can waltz in and start popping up cities grabbing these resources you've spent research creating.

There is a double edged sword for having an AI close by.. sometimes your researched resources will land close to him, and he'll nab it from you. Then again, I don't remember how many times I've expanded so far that I started seeing resources popping up as the AI researched the tech and gobbled up his hard earned stuff, ha!

Girls have picked them, every one?

Ahem.

You can probably ascribe a good chunk of what you're seeing to simple probability. I've had a few 'scorched earth' games and at least one atrocious 'cradle of civilization' since the patch. Keep playing, it'll even out.

The techs that discover new resources need to find a lot more than just a single resource.  Right now it's pretty pointless as compared to leveling up a warfare tech.

I'm for variety which prevents every game from playing out the same way.  But the lack of resources is doing just that.  Every early game plays out the same way.  The only variety which leads to city management decisions, is how much material I initially find in goody huts.  I seek dynamic decision making which provides me with oppurtunistic choice.  I think the game is in dire need of some map scripting improvements which normalize resource distribution to a limited degree.  Not to be quarenteed Gold, and Horses and Libraries and Temples every game.  Just an assurance that there will be Something worth settling for.  Something to drive decision making and city specialization.  

I usually just keep starting over until i find a somewhat decent land area to start on.  Then I explore some to see what more i can get and do a few quests.  I always hope to get the quest that takes 3 midnight stones and gives yah the 11dam +1speed sword.  Then I look for the closest enemy and take over that city after the work they put in it   Then I travel back and find the perfect spot and start my main city. 

I suppose maybe they haven't really spruced up the resource generation code in relation to map sizes? How many resources get spit out has undergone a lot of changes in the last few versions. Personally I use a mod to play maps far larger than the ones Elemental usually creates. My experience there is that:

1. You either get screwed for starting resources, and get the bare minimum, which is 1 food and 1 shard.

Or

2. You get lucky. You get the minimum and a random amount of additional spawns within 7 tiles or so.

My basic rule is, if I don't have more than the minimum at start, the game is a throwaway.

If I don't have materials at start, the game is a throwaway.

Tech is really, really, really important in Elemental now. 1000x more important in the scope of the game than magic, So Lost Libraries clusters are also pure gold in 1.1. You can get the same effect with 5 studies or archivists...but you end up with a ton of research cities. And those all take time and resources to build. So I try to squeeze in a LL if I can.

Gold mines are pretty much useless in 1.1 The amount of money you make from taxes, combined with economic improvements, far exceeds what you can get out of the mines. So they're just a perk unless you get one near your starting point, which I never seem to.

Currently you don't need much more than a good source of food to get started and you are always given a farm.  You can make more or less everything in your cities.  The overland tiles are just bonuses.

yes, i am getting sick of having huge sub continents of land in which there is not point in building even the smallest of settlements. i mean, look at russia: it's basically all the bits to the north of the other countries that no one else wanted, but they've still managed to find some useful stuff there. resource distribution is key to getting the settlement distribution right in this game. more and more now i'm starting to wonder if the solution is perhaps a lot more resources, but smaller ones.

[quote who="Dsraider" reply="1" id="2848947"]Probably just a bad game. Resources are rarer now but you can still find more than that in most games.[/quote]

Resources are rarer?  That's horrible, if anything we need way more resources.

A problem that I'm running into is I don't have any desire to build more than my capital, because there's just nothing at all out there to make it worth building a second city.  My opening spot usually has a fertile land, maybe a mine or a shard.  After I explore a large distance out from my capital, I find maybe 1 other resource, 100 miles away.  So I build a second city there?  Why build a third, there's no more resources anywhere.  Without the thrill of discovering great, valuable, potential city sites, the game is just not fun.  It boils down to a game where you wander around with your sovereign, killing monsters.  

Well, I know that you can do that.  But putting down cities in an empty world is way less fun.  Exploring and discovering great future city sites seems like a thing of the past.  

I think this is all part of my bigger problem with Elemental, it seems like most of the effort is going into the magic, RPG elements, and the tactical combat...and much less into the empire building (which is--no surprise--my favorite).  This is compounded by the fact that terrain doesn't effect the production of a city in any way.  So you end up with a huge map full of nothing, and no reason to place a city in any particular area.