Hi everybody,

first of all, the motivation for this thread:

Right now you search for resources (either strategic or luxury) in the very first turns, then decide which territories you want to claim and ultimatly build an improvement on top of the resources. Then you leave them alone until the end of the game.
While this concet is also true for Civilization, I always wanted more depth in the exploitation and cultivation of natural resources, as historically every technological advancement also boosted the productivity of, let's say, mines, plantations or farms.

So my ideas:
1. On the map you have resources spread over the world randomly, which you could regularly harvest (like sanctuaries, but with a cooldwon instead of destroying them). As an example I take a natural accumulation of olive trees. As a result, after the harvest you would get food and stability. Later in your technological progress you could learn to cultivate them, making this field of olive plants a real olive plantation, which gives food and stability bonuses every round.
Going even further in the tech tree, one could also make an argument for expanding the plantation to adjacent tiles (when they fulfill fitting requirements, so you could not set an olive plantation on a dessert tile) or to proceed the olives to special products, like olive oil, thus making them a luxury resource.

2. To balance especially the last point I mentioned, so that not at some point in the game every nation has a bunch of luxuries, one could restrict the amount of luxury good to a maximum of X, depending on how much the resources get produced. So, let's say every nation has a patch of salt in their realm. While in the early game it makes sense, that salt is a luxury, since the exploitation in the salt mines is low, when industrialisation kicks in, the global market gets flooded with salt, thus making ist an effortable resource for everyone and not a luxury.

So only the X rarest resources are actual luxuries.

3. The wild animals on the map could be tamed! Assume you don't want to kill the nearest deer unit, but instead tame it and create a pasture. Then you need the fitting position and it would be similar to point 1. Also you could add more animals (with different taming chances, ranging from 0 to 1), like lions, which can get used as recreation in colosseums for example.

These ideas could be expanded even more, like the depletion of resources like coal or iron in the late game, forcing player to either getting the resources elsewhere via expensive trade or violent diplomatic actions ("did someone say oil?") or changing their economy to renewable resources.

I'm not a big fan of harvesting because too much micro management

Otherwise having some tech allowing to pump more resource from an exploitation could be nice but only useful if strat resource don't become obsolete, but you just need more of it for economic reason as well

Depletion can also be nice and tech would be a way to counter it. Maybe you could also discover new source, as for example copper was only mined from surcface early but we were able to build deeper and deeper and find more 

It would be nice if some resource could be adopted in your territory (at high cost), like importing horses to the americas, importing coffey plants, stealing silk worms and so on

It would however need to add a distinction on what resource make sense to be copied

Luxuries value variation could be interesting but removing the luxury bonus is harsh, maybe add a Tiered bonus based of monoply:

Monopole: big bonuses, you own >90% of the exploited resource in the world

Rare luxury: medium >40%

Common luxury: small bonuses

or something like that

Bonuses would be medium until there is X (5?) amount of this resource exploited in the world

This would also change how much money you gain from it trough trade route mechanics

Personally I don't see any differences between looting sanctury places like in the opendev, or harvesting. Sure, harvesting would be repeatable, but I find this especially interesting for the player, that they have to decide: Am I looking for new resources for my realm by scouting, or do I try to gather as much from the resources I already discovered. This feels, in my opinion, more like it was historically.

The other points you mentioned are completly fine with that, what I wanted, when posting this idea.
But in generell, one has to keep in mind that these changes would need a lot of balancing, so I can completly understand everyone, if they don't want to touch this resource design idea.

Yeah maybe it could work, i think my reluctance point is because it would make you sit on it. But having some interest in not exploring but focusing on your development is interesting idea

Also yes, i think what i mentionned would proably fit in a mod