Help W/ Units

[Sartek]

How can you get swordsman? Do you need a special resource to build them, or it is determined by turns/ages/techonology? Same problem with horsemen, I'm in 1600's with only warriors, spearmen, and longbows (+catapults)...

[Kloreep]

Yes; you need to connect an iron Strategic Resource. (Or a horse resource for horses. Some units, like Knights, require more than one resource; you can check the civilopedia to see what requires what.) Usually, the best way to connect a resource is to get the resource in your cultural borders and then connect it to your road network.

If the resource is too far away or in bad terrain for you to found a useful city next to it, you can also connect it by roading to the tile and then moving your worker on to the tile and commanding it to build a colony. This will effectively disband the worker, but the colony will connect the resource. Be warned though: colonies are disbanded once someone's cultural borders encompass the tile, and since the AI will eventually settle every inch of unclaimed land available, you'll need to eventually build a settler and get there first lest you lose your resource.

If you spread to multiple landmasses and need to transport your resources over the sea, just build a harbor in a coastal city on each side of the ocean.

[Sartek]

what to the resources look like? The only "special" tiles i've seen is cattle, fish, dyes, and some silvery nugget-like things on some of the tiles, but I don't think its iron since there's a lot of it

[Kloreep]

Those silvery nuggets are probably it. (See attached image.) If you're unsure what a resource on a tile is, right-click on the tile; the small window that will pop up will have the name of the resource in it.

Also, since you're just getting used to resources, a further explanation is probably in order:

There are three types of resources. All provide a bonus to food, shields, and/or commerce production in their tile. One type of resource, Bonus Resources, do only this. Bonus Resources include Cattle, Wheat, fish, whales, etc.

Another type of resource is the Strategic Resource. In addition to their tile bonuses, these enable you to build certain units and buildings if you connect them to your cities. (Iron, for example, is required for units like swords, pikes, knights, and cannons in the early and middle ages, and is later required to build factories and lay railroad in the industrial era.) Note that this type of resource always requires a specific tech for you to "see" them in the first place; iron requires Iron Working, horses The Wheel, saltpeter Gunpowder, etc.

The last type of resource is the Luxury Resource. Once connected, a luxury resource provides a "happy face" to each of your cities, allowing you to have bigger cities without the population becoming too unhappy and causing unrest. They are especially powerful in combination, for once you build markets in your cities, each new luxury can provide multiple happy faces. These do not require a tech to see.

Note that any one luxury or strategic resource can supply your entire empire. The main benefit of having (and connecting) multiple identical resources is for trade to other civs who don't have the resource. (Also, another benefit is that most Strategic resources have a small chance each turn of being "used up", in which case the resource vanishes from its old tile and reappears in a new one; and if you don't control the new tile and didn't have a duplicate resource hooked up somewhere else, you're back to being ironless, or saltpeterless, or whatever you lost. Horses and Rubber are the two resources that don't occassionally move in this way.)

[Sartek]

I see

[vmxa1]

Note that you cannot see resources until you have "learned" the tech that provides the access for it. In the case of Iron it is Iron Working, for Saltpetter it is Gunpowder and so on.