How do you deal with a start with no resources? Both random shard and campaign.

I recently had a start with NO iron, horse or wood in first three rings. I explored the provinces to 40% to find any hidden resources; but only got mandrake. By this time the price of all three missing resources had jumped to 100+ making further buildings/units prohibitive in cost.

I normally don't bother about the rare resources as they are needed less often but the common resources (iron, wood, horses and mandrake) are required for practically everything, often in multiple quantities. Also remember that apart from the mill, all other economic buildings require some common resource which can really squeeze economic development!

You could use the solo Warrior or Slayer strategy, depending on terrain. As for level 2 units, Assassins are the only ones that don't require resources, and they're quite cost efficient as well. Your hero will work mostly solo though, so they're not immediately necessary.

Then there's the "frugal" economic development plan, which fits well into this context: Don't build any economic province buildings and only build demesne buildings that your hero absolutely needs. Save up money whenever you can, only support your solo hero with brigands if necessary. Go directly for a treasury first and upgrade it to a moneylender a little later. 12500 gold or more saved up will give you the max interest income of 500 gold per turn. At this point, you won't even need most provinces anymore since they only add to corruption, so you can let them defect.

So mostly swamps? I’d take a Mage.

Hmm I don't really adjust my strategy much for resource availability. Normally the crucial part of play happens before I get any resources at all. By the time I get to more than 1 resource I am usually on such a roll looting stuff that it doesnt matter much what I have and where I pay 100 more.
Its a bit different for the crystal heavy resources like mandrake and arcanite. Those can really drain your crystal reserves if you want to go for mage guilds or magic creatures.And depending on map layout you cant even loot many of those.
So yeah I try to get em all,but generally dont worry much about them, except when I play with mage (which is most of the time) I worry about mandrake and arcanite. That means on a hilly or plains map I might go for another hero when no swamps are in sight.

Mixed terrain - but still nothing. It's likely that the rarer resources were present but didn't check! Well, it was slightly different here... I mean I can win some battles and get decent loot but the really tough battles which would result in hundreds of gold or nice items all resulted in loss of a unit or two. This normally ended up as revenue neutral!

The problem is that getting to higher tiers of buildings is literally impossible as it will probably take gold in the thousands in the absence of resources. To give an example of exorbitant costs: I was replacing swords at around two hundred gold in the later stages!

The problem is after clearing my initial ring I went for Scout and Commander assuming that the resources are either hidden or sitting in the third circle! Warrior solo would probably the best if I can find some decent equipment, especially armor for the hero.

One way to approach this is to quickly build the buildings that reveal hidden resources in certain types of provinces, so that you can target your exploring efforts. Of course, if these buildings reveal that there aren't any hidden resources near your location then you're still boned. Alternatively, you can choose units that don't have resources requirements; this is less of an option for level 2 and higher units, but it can really save you in terms of costs when you're still mostly using level 1 units (which tend to be the ones you have to replace the most often anyway).

@DarkPhoenix

Your logic is sound but still doesn't solve the problem! The reason being that by exploring up to 40% you will always find the common resources (iron, horse, wood, mandrake). The resource spotting buildings mostly help with the rarer resources for which you need to explore more - obviously you can't run around exploring every swamp province to 80% to hunt for Black Lotus!

Also, since my name is not Gremlion, I need more than tier 1 units and spells to go through the map especially ring 3+ provinces! While most games that I play have a resource (or two) missing, having all four missing really causes costs to shoot through the roof; after tier 1 most buildings and units have multiple common resources required.

I guess that the game needs a balanced resources setting like Civilization which ensures strategic resources (copper, horses & iron) in the starting area.

Ah, I wasn't aware of that. Thanks for mentioning it.

Not quite sure about this. There is no setting in var files on minimal and maximal borders, and I remember finding iron on 96th%.

I can't locate the source of the advice right now - but I remember reading repeatedly that common resources are found within 40% exploration. I have never found common resources at such a high exploration percentage though!

There are a lot of rumors. I constantly hear that "if you destroy every inquisition site, they wouldn't appear", which is a lie. There is no possibility to disable inquisition attacks at all.

OK. Then DarrkPhoenix's advice sounds good - to narrow down resource containing sites for exploration!

Could be 40%+ of what was already explored when it was conquered. 56% when you conquered it, and then +40% points is 96%. (just speculating, but also remember reading something like this somewhere)

if you have an arena (tough to build with reduced resources, but if you're lucky to find one) what I do is park a scout on it and fight arena battles every round, and pick the 'looting' skill which gives bonus to rewards. Eventually you get like 500g per round which lets you ignore lack-of-resource penalties for a long while.