So as someone who has spent more time with FreeCiv and SMAC and now having a 0-3 record in Conquests, I have to wonder if I'm doing something wrong, or if the game's dice suck.

All three of my failures are due to failing to find critical resources.

The first time I was timed out and lost against a non-aggressive Spain due to a Time Out. Which was indeed an embarrassing loss due to the fact that I was practicing on Chieftain with no barbarians. I had yet to learn that the カメ(Kame) strategy of citybuilding wouldn't work.

The second and third time, I wasn't even playing with AI, I was just refining my stratagem, but it turns out that the (new for me) requirement of resources to build those magical railroads is something of a massive setback. Sure, I could be nearing the end of the tech tree, but without those, rubber, and uranium, things quickly grind to a dead-end.

So I decided to open up the editor and generate a map, which I would then tweak accordingly. I made a huge/60/normal climate/pangea...and was a little surprised.

From what I could tell, a player was lucky if they even got one Strategic Resource within reach of their starting area.

Is that how it is normally?

Update: Another game was loaded up and it turns out that the coal, uranium, and oil were off on some other islands, far away, meaning that despite having learned how to Civ 3, I didn't gain access to them until I built satellites.

It sounds like you aren't being expansionist enough. More than any other game in the series Civ 3 encourages expansionism, and it's very difficult to turn things around if you reach the modern ages without being a continent-spanning superpower.

Well, I'd love to be expansionist, but how am I to do that with galleons and no means of transporting the settlers quickly if I can't have the railroad because coal is off on some tiny out of the way landmass?

Setting aside the fact that galleons come earlier on the tech tree than the railroad, this is part of the game; sometimes the strategic resource you're looking for isn't within your borders and you need to acquire it. That's not an intractable problem by any stretch of the imagination in singleplayer. Ultimately the Civilization series has a lot of random chance, most notably the map layout and the battles. Don't get too hung up on it, sometimes the dice just aren't in your favor, and especially in singleplayer you can work around it.

Yes, but bad dice thrice in a row?

It happens. Believe me, I played some online pokemon matches over my lunch break today and got hit by a horrible cavalcade of bad luck. It's just something you gotta live with if you're going to play games with a chance-based element. Sometimes you can work around it, sometimes you can't, but singleplayer against AI's tends to have a lot more leeway in that regard, regardless of what game we're talking about it.

Nope, your're not alone. I recently picked up Civ3. I never played it before, though I have a good amount of experience in Civ2. However, this resource thing drives my nuts.

In the current game I control 65% of all land and yet I have no damn rubber. I am currently waging a war against 2 civilizations to get it. And before that I could not get any coal. I was in control of the largest continent and there was no iron on it. Whatsoever. Basically, both coal and rubber got bunched up on small areas in the middle of other civilization.

This is my second playthrough where this happens. It is very frustrating as coal is definitely not a rare resource in the world. Rubber I can understand more, because it was only originally available in Latin America (Brazil?). But then people invented synthetic rubber. Why there is no such invention in the game? Why do we have to fight for a resources that are not used in the modern world?

Or why can't we figure out clever alternatives, as has been done with coal and such?

That's a cool feature of Civilization IV that they added with corporations. If you find yourself without an aluminum or oil resource you're a bit screwed, because you can't build tanks, war ships or jet fighters. However there are corporations you can found that provide alternatives for each : Aluminum Co. and Standard Ethanol

Cool, but I don't have IV (Yet.) What I do know is that historically, the steam trains in the early USA burned wood, not coal.

this is because resources are limited by terrain, where they can be found. It's normal, what you can't find Wheat in the Tundra, but overall everything about resources in Civ3 tuned very, very bad.

here a 3 things what you can do:

1. continue playing and planning beforehand.
2. open editor and config - Nature Resources - Appearance Ratio (Determines how many instances of the selected resource appear per player in the game. In an eight-player game, a value of 160 would mean 2 of each resource per player. Note that even if this number indicates that there are two resources per player in the game, this does not mean that each player will have access to those two resources. Setting this value to zero means the resource will be distributed at random.) . But this does nothing, if in your country 3 hill and 1 mountain :))
3.going to google, made request, for example: civilization 5 iron -> civilization.wikia.com/wiki/Iron_%28Civ5%29
Iron: Strategic resource found from Grassland, Plains, Desert, Tundra, Snow, Hills.
now open editor and add (CTRL+click) iron spawn to -> Terrain: Grassland, Plains, Desert, Tundra. i think its more fair, than how its look in original game, where iron can be found only in Hills and Mountains.
i did it with other resources. this makes game more interesting, imo.

Thanks for that. I'll be sure to look into it.

To remedy this I do believe you can find a premade World map over at Civfanatics where reources are realistically distributed. This one should probably do: https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/rhyes-180x180-earth-map.112/

Actually, I noticed that GOG's Civ III comes preloaded with maps. Is there a chance that this map might already be loaded in?

If you load up the map in the editor you can check and see how the resources are distributed.

And by the way, some of the fan made maps and scenarios that comes with the game might be some older versions. I believe there is a Rhye's world map in the game but not sure if this is his latest version. In case just download the map from the link I provided.