You really raised really fundamental problem of all civ-style game and we all think the ICS problem should be solved. with you!

What about we approach this matter from different angle. Why did Roman empire stopped to expand? Romans did not want to take any more military liability for its client state and they knew exactly what point they should stop its expansion at maxium benefit of trade under the cover of Pax Romana.

One thing that bothers me is that current civ-style game does not offer any human inhabitants on the globe but only pikced civs themselves. What about the Barbars from goody huts? No! they are temporary they make one sweep and disapear. We need more interaction with those goody huts like the Indian tribes of Colonisation.

We might counter countless number of primitive or nomadic tribes in that way. Just think about how many goody huts we can have!
Historically, many civs interacted with tribes like Romans and Numidian.

What am trying to say is that most of habitable land should be occupied with some local tribes. So when we expand, a struggle with that locals should be inevitable. Many players will have to think about thier proper defense against its tribal neighbours thus they simply have to build more military units rather than building another settler.

Building a simple military unit like warriors would not solve the defense dilemma against tribal neigbours since they(locals) can have similar mil unit or perhaps more advanced(horsemen)one. A city which has proper infra should be able to do all the sophisticated production or research then the production of more advanced units will be possible.

So easy expansion after the production of few phalanx or legion? Maybe easier than with warriors but that still shoudn't be like walking in the park because the locals learns from You. See all the Indian tribes mounted and armed with rifles after some interaction with whiteman.

No more empty land filled with dead goody huts! No more easy settlement! We need alive goody huts which can represent a tribe that can talk,get angry,be happy and form even military alliance with us.

Korn: I know that some balancing would be needed. If we keep to the system whereby irrigation is automatically added in. Then grasslands will produce 3 food allowing for growth in 40 turns. Then after this there would be differences between size 1 cities. Of course if we could have the terrain slightly more complex allowing for a + or - of upto 0.5 for each terrain square, decided at the beginning of the game but not known to the player. This would represent the fact that you don't know how fertile the land is to begin with. There could of course be someway to find this out. The programmers would probably multiply all values by 10 as this allows integer maths rather than slow floating point maths so in the example below I will do the same.

City 1 on grassland (automatically irrigated) that happens to be very fertile so has 35 food produce. One citizen requires 20 food so 15 is available for growth and 400 food is require for growth. So thats about 27 turns required.

City 2 on grassland that happnes to be normal so has 30 food produce. 10 food available for growth and 400 food is required. So thats 40 turns

City 3 on grassland that happnes to be less fertile so has 25 food produce. 5 food available for growth and 400 food is required. So thats 80 turns

that is one of the problems that must be addressed before ICS will go away...what to do about the base square...we know that...

the base square is evil, stupid, unrealistic, and causes ICS

that without the base square most small cities don't have a chance of growing or building anything

ok so if we do go with the diplomat or madwoodster ideas about the first citizen works the base square, then what are we going to do about city growth?

maybe have the land under the base square count as fully upgraded and then possibly give a 1.5 times food in the square

so if you built in a desert you'd get 1 food +1 times the bounus or if you built on a food special you might get 4 food plus a 2 food bonus...this small bounus amout of food would certainly be better than the current ICS situation...especially if all cities require the same amount o food for growth...do you think that is a good compromise? the one positive is that cities would get to work up to 21 citizens now

youngsun

i like your idea about barbarians limiting civ expansion...i think this thread is spawning ideas about three different areas of civ gameplay

1. ICS (Infinite City Sprawl): a technical study of how the rules of growth, production, and support make it better to have 10 size one cities compared to 1 size ten city

2. ICS (Infinite China Syndrome): a study of how empires last from 4000bce to 2000ce virtually intact, and that over the course of hundreds of games less than ten cities will declare indepedence or revolt out of the thousands of cities you build

3. ICS (Infinite Civ Stratofication): ok i was reaching on that one but what i mean is that once a civ gets to be a certain size about mid way through the game then that civ will win in almost all cases...the fact about civ is that a small civ has no advantages over a large one...this makes for boring games

youngsun i am mostly just concerned with the technical issues of ICS in this thread but i think i am going to open a thread for the other two ICS problems...as for barbarians, maybe they could work like this...

when civ starts off each civ has borders like in SMAC, however most of the land outside of those borders are divided into different barbarian territories...there would be no cities in barbarian territories but barbarian units would roam this territory with a number of units...barbarians would start out with just horsemen but they would steal military technology by osmosis (kind of like the great library, when it comes to a military technology the barbarians could build any unit that three civs could build)...when you sent units in barbarian territory barbarian units would head out to attack unit units, and if you built cities in barbarian territory, barbarian units would come and try to attack it...if you had a city in their territory for long enough it would assimilate the territory, and push the barbarian borders back...barbarian units would rarely leave their territory but they sometimes would go on raids into the nearest civilized territory...you could sign treaties with the barbarians and ask them to attack your neighbors...barbarians would have around a fixed number of units...though massive settlement of their ands would cause them to spawn even more units, after a barbarian unit died a new one would respawn in a few years (5-15) time...there would be a random chance of a barbarian area becoming civilized...if it did, cities would pop up in that barbarian's territory and then they would be a civ

how does that sound?

Also, I think small "cities" should suffer from limitations on square production like Despotism. Up to a certain size, can't get more than two trade or production from a square. Because only larger cities become centres for Trade and Industry. That will kick the s*** out of ICS.

O/T? A lot of people complain about the 21 square model and the relative scale in miles it represents. I think the base square represents the actual urban centre, with all the improvements, and each square worked is a nearby village or suburb, economically linked the the city.

Korn - your Barbarians ideas are great - but maybe take it a step further - and all rival CIVs start as "Barbarians". Have 30+ tribes and you don't know which ones will become major civs, minor tribes or stay nomads until they're wiped out.

Now I have another proposal.

Let me start with a population model:

dP/dt=A*P-B*P*P

where P is the current population, dP/dt is the rate of change in population at the current time. A and B are positive numbers: A is normal in scale but B is quite small.

The model basically says that, when population is small (thus B*P*P is neglectable), the population growth rate is proportional to itself (dP/dt=A*P); but if it grows to a certain size, then due to 'competition' (the term -B*P*P), the growing rate will decline and finally halt.

We can impliment the model to the game. Let A be proportional to the total resource available in the city radius, and let B be proportional to the number of cities in an area surrounding the city (say a 10*10 square). The size of the food box is proportional to 1/(A*P-B*P*P). Thus if there is more resources (can use 'food + 1/2 trade') in the city radius, A is bigger hence the food box is smaller; on the other hand, if there are more cities in the surrounding area, B is bigger and the food box is bigger.

An example: Suppose A=100 and B=#of cities in surrounding area (including the city itself). Food box=1000/(A*P-B*P*P).

A perfectionist puts 4 cities in the area, hence B=4. A size 10 city will have a food box size 1000/(100*10-4*10*10)=1.33.

City growth is indeed totally unrealistic - in fact, Civ/SMAC/CtP gets it backwards! Until modern improvements in public health, most cities only maintained size thru immigration - the city was a totally unhealthy environment, with disease, fire, and crime, and deaths greatly outpaced births. Rural areas had to continually replace the losses of cities with new workers. And those workers only came to find jobs. So if there were no jobs in an town, it would not grow. In fact, if the employment base dried up, the city would shrink very rapidly as many died and more fled.

It follows that the presence of so many people creates a demand for food that must be met. Rome imported vast supplies of grain from Egypt to feed its people, and most of the large Medieval cities maintained population with food imports, usually from central europe via the Baltic Sea, or thru the Med.
Jobs draw people, who demand food. Not Food creates people, who work jobs.

As to ICS, the problem is indeed based on the free base-square. The 2-for-one deal creates the exponential ICS growth rate. To combat it, you need to reduce it to an arithmetic growth rate (or very close to it). At that point, the natural economies of scale that infrastructure improvements afford will tilt the balance to non-ICS strategies.

But giving, say, +50% to the base square only gets you back where you started: all those additional base squares get the same +50% bonus. I think the answer is three fold:
1. eliminate the free base square, (you can work it like any other square, and can be improved - a city is never the size of one of the map squares)
2. make city growth at least flat: same food for each pop point, and
3. provide a limit on the size required to build settlers - maybe 3? No community of 20,000 is going to send half the pop away to found a new city.

One obvious result is that it takes a while to get cities up to speed because of slower growth - so then just make food/nutrients more abundant!

...or just recognize the underlying flaws and abandon the model altogether.

if you adopt the the upgraded base square and give it +50% to food production, this means that the base square would produce between one to three extra food, which with an arithmetic growth system would make that small amount of extra food per base insignificant...fourty size 1 cities compared to one size 40 city would produce between 37 and 119 extra food a turn compared to 80 food 40 minerals and 40 energy a turn (in SMAC)

in SMAC it would take 800 food for those size fourty cities to grow from size 1 to size 2, and 800 food for the size 40 city to grow to size 41...under our flat food growth system it would take 1600 food for those 40 cities to grow from size 1 to size 2, while it would only take 40 food for the size 40 city to grow to size 41

i like your idea that a city can't produce a settler until it reaches size three

Xin Yu

i think your growth model might tip the scales back to far in favor of Super Cities...but please tell me more about it ok?

Growth: the nutrient(food) box should be the same size for all cities, and once that food box gets filled the city grows in size by one population. I propose that this nutrient box be size 40 nutrients(food). This is the growth box.

In a side note, after building a granery, cities should be able to direct some of their food into another box. This box can hold up to ten food per citizen. This represents the stored food in your city. If for any reason you run out of food in the growth box, then your city will drawn on food stockpiled in this granery box. This will allow you to stockpile food in case of sieges, droughts, famines, ect. Until the discovery of refrigeration, a very small percentage of the food in this box will be lost to decay. This loss should be around one unit of nutrients per turn.

Cities should have to be size three before they can build a settler.

Support: The amount of free support generated by your empire should be based on three things. One is population. Two is support generating facilities. Three is your civs Social Engineering Support level. Your SE Support level would act as a modifier to the first two categories. We would use the following formula to calculate support.

S(P+I)

Where S equals SE support level, P equals population and I equals support increasing infrastructure. Units would not be supported by cities. Instead your civ would generate a number of support units based on the three categories. Each unit would cost so many support points. After your civ had exceeded the number of support points it generated, then shields from random bases would be converted into support points. SE Support leves would determine exactly how many support points each shield would generate. This process would happen automatically and the player would not be involved in it. Support generating facilites should be military structures (barracks) and advanced manufactoring structures (factories).

Production: Take away the free base square. Instead have it where the base square can be worked. The base square counts as an irragated square and produces 50% extra food.

Also when a city builds an advanced manufactoring facility it should add in another production slot. So that a civ that had a nanoreplicator could make two units at the same time. A city that had a nanoreplicator and a quantum converter could produce three units at the same time.

Happiness: For cities size 1-4 there should have to be one worker for each pysch specialist, with there always having to be one worker. If the worker was discontent(a drone) then the city would riot and revolt. For larger cities, size 5-20 there would have to be one worker for every two specialist, with a minimum number of three workers. If these workers were discontent they would riot and revolt. For the largest cities, size 21+ there should be a minimum number of seven workers but an unlimited number of specialists. If the workers were discontent the city would riot and revolt. Now only police, happiness spending, or happiness facilities could pacify this minimum number of workers. They could not be turned into happiness or any other kind of specialists.

Additionally all specialists should take three food to support instead of the normal two food for workers.

-The chance of civil wars raised if you were a large civ. The chance would be even higher if you had a very polarised civ (like great difference between the individual cities in wealth etc), which would also be more likely in a large civ.

-Every civilization should spend part of its research points on education, just to preserve the knowledge it has: a larger civ should always spend/pay more on education just to ensure that no knowledge disappears; if it spends too little, doesn't have enough libraries, advances/knowledge will disappear (like a substantial part of the knowledge of the Romans after the Great Migration); as it has more people in it, it needs more administrators, more priests, more lawyers, more scientists just to run the empire!

Assimilation: This should definately be included, but I think it should be done by including nationalism, and not just have it so that after x turns a city is assimilated. Assimilation should be gradual, and determined by your actions against the ethnicity the city belongs to, the happyness in the city, the use of police, the amount of improvements you build in the city etc. A city should be able to concist of 20% americans, 70% Germans and 10% Russians.

you have alot of good ideas! they have got me thinking...how about this...use a modified prototype system like in alpha centauri...

when your civ discovers a new technology
then a check is made by checking your sphere of influence

a sphere of influence is this, 5 times the speed of your fastest unit. then apply that distance like how borders are applied in SMAC

the check follows this preliminary flow chart

1. does your civ have the strongest military?
if no prototype cost is normal

2. does the second strongest military have at least 80% of your strength?
if yes prototype cost is normal

3. is your civ twice as strong as the second place civ?
if yes add 50% to cost of prototype

4. is your civ twice as powerful than the second and third place civ?
if yes add 100% to cost of prototype

5. is your civ more power than all of the other civs in your sphere of influence?
if yes add 150% to cost of prototype

6. is your civ twice as powerful as all of the other civs combined in your SoI?
if yes add 200% to cost of prototype

7. do no other civs exist in your sphere of influence?
if yes add 300% to cost of prototype

in addition i think that prototype costs should be higher than in SMAC, somewhere between +100 to +200 percent

so in that model your first unit could cost up to six times the cost of a normal unit...the same system could be applied to technology and everything

no i haven't forgot, i have been busy lately, and i am waiting for the EC3 final drafts to come in so i can pull ideas together from it into the eternal china and david versus goliath sections

I also like the idea of a city having to be size 3 to grow. It not only solves some ICS problems, it is also realistic, as people don't move out of cities untill they become overpopulated.

I like the prototype system, all though it would propably be most useful for research. It would make you need other civs in your area. Great idea!

Looking forward to more summaries!!

dP/dt=A*P

This means, suppose a city grow from size 1 to 2 in 5 turns, then it will grow to size 4 in another 5 turns (the speed of growing at size 2 is twice of that at size 1), and to size 8 in another 5 turns, and so on. This is called a geometric growth. According to the original theory, since consumption goods increases at a much lower rate, people will become starving and standard of living will decline. War and epidemic desease will be the only things to reduce population.

A later theory adds a term of 'competition' to the equation:

dP/dt=A*P-B*P*P

The competition term has little effect when population is small but will be more and more significat in reducing the population growth rate when the population is larger.

thanks! so besides having SE influence the growth rate here is what else should...

commerce (money from trade routes)
hospitals (maybe have this building take the food box from 40 to thirty to represent how much faster a population can grow without disease)

the prototype system is completely hammered out but i am going to work on it more...there are about five EC threads that i am looking at for ideas right now in my last two so look for new summaries on thursday or friday!

Xin Yu

i am going to have to look over your growth model more and see exactly how it counter balances large versus small but it sounds like you have been doing some research!

supremus

quote: But I would like to assert again I SEE NO WRONG WHIT ICS. So the problem is not a problem, or, at least, the problem is in another area. A large state that made ICS a lot in its history is more powerfull than smaller ones. That's what history tell us

this is not a history thread it is a gameplay thread...but i do dispute your "historical" evidence...how about great britian throughout the 19th century? i could give more examples but it is pointless to argue over history which is subject in it's interpretation

ICS is a problem because in the highly unrealistic game of Civ it is almost always better to expand that to build up your territory...the same amount of population spread out through more cities is always better than having it concentrated into a few cities, and that strategy is simply unbalanced

plus civ is incredably boring because strong states always grow more powerful and weak states always get weaker, once a human player who has beat the AI before gets on top they stay on top...it is just a matter of time before the human grinds the AI into dust with no challenge at all

there needs to be a better balance between building up and spreading out (the first summary) and there needs to be a better balance in the rise and fall of civs (my second summary) and there needs to be a way to simulate a relatively new civ (the US) who is weak, growing to be a world Super Power in less than two hundred years instead of once the romans got on top, they stay on top and send a space ship to Alpha Centauri in 1600 because they crush their competition

we are trying to fix ICS and make civ gameplay better, i would also like to make it where it is virtually impossible to win with a One City Challenge also but i think ICS is more of a problem than a OOC victory right now

summary: to have a large happy empire that stands for centuries and remains a super power throughout the game should be hard but not impossible to do. there should be a better balance between building up and spreading out with both strategies being valid

Fine idea with the Hospital improvement.

Still looking forward to that summary!!

Supremus:

You can not actually say that Civ2 is realistic compared to human history. ICS does not work in real life for a very long time. In Civ2 the Romans, the Mongols, the British and all the other previously mighty realms would have stayed strong and ended up concouring the world. But that didn't happend. history has shown that all great powers has collapsed at one time or the other. Even without any foreign power winning wars against them they have collapsed. This is not so in Civ2. When you become the mightiest civ you allmost always stay that way. In order for Civ3 to have it's gameplay made better and more realistic there has to be something done against the infinite spread of cities.

I don't want to be hypercritical. You did a great job by organizing the current Fixes/New Ideas list. Thank you!
And of course a Civgame doesn't need to be realistic or historically correct.

But please read and consider my posts about the relationship between food supply and population growth before introducing hospitals and the like! Some specialists like Harel have a different opinion on this subject, but most professionals publishing and lecturing about it agree on the essentials:

-before 1935 the influence of medicine on population growth was of secondary importance only
-before 1800 doctors probably killed as many patients as they cured; they very often spread infectious diseases and enfeebled the sick by bleeding

"Under agriculture there was a beginning of control of the environment, and an increase in food supplies led to a decline of mortality and expansion of numbers. But reproduction was not effectively restricted, and populations increased to the size at which food supplies became again marginal. As many of the basic conditions of life were unchanged, non-communicable diseases were still rare; but living together in large numbers and unhygienic conditions, human beings had inadvertently created precisely the conditions required for the propagation and transmission of many infective organisms. Infectious diseases became the predominant causes of sickness and death.

For nearly the whole of human existence, as in the Third World today, numbers were excessive in relation to the resources available, and ill health was due mainly to the multiple effects of poverty. These effects have varied in different periods, but the constant and major determinant has been lack of food. There could be no more convincing evidence for this conclusion than the fact that in developing countries such as China and India (in the state of Kerala), which in a few decades have attained western standards of health, the advances are attributable almost entirely to improved nutrition; there were no substantial improvements in water, sanitation and personal health services, and immunization coverage was low. But the effects of poverty are also manifested through various hazards, particularly exposure to infectious diseases through defective hygiene and aggregation of large populations. The deficiencies and hazards derived from poverty are the major causes of sickness and death in the Third World today, and they are also largely responsible for the ill health of many poor people in developed countries. Moreover the difficulties will increase because of rapid population growth - the world's population is expected to double before it stabilizes - and the movements of people from rural to urban areas. It is painful to imagine what health conditions are likely to be on the streets of Calcutta or the outskirts of Mexico City in the twenty-first century, when the population of each city will be well above 20 million"

what changes would you suggest for my model?

if you give me some specific changes i will go back and reevaluate it and change where it is appropriate...but i mean specific civ changes to game play, not historical facts cuz i'm decent with the first one and not so decent with the second one

also i am going to use the failure of the state i wrote the other day as the basis for the second summary which will eventually get
here just give me some time guys

Unit Support:
Number of units NOT needing support from city must some FRACTION of the CITY SIZE (anywhere from 0% to 100% (despotism) depending on the government). If it remains 1 per city or 3 per city, then the more cities the better (which we do not want).

Happiness:

If happiness were removed entirely from the model, then it would cease to be a problem. However, this solution is unlikely to find much support; even from myself. More acceptable solutions might be to either:

1) lower the number of luxuries needed to make a citizen happy to 1 (from 2).
2) lower the number of shields necessary to produce happiness improvements.
3) lower the maintenance cost of happiness improvements.
4) increase the benefits of happiness improvements.

Expanding into a Vacuum:

I agree with Youngsun here. Yes, the world is far too empty and safe at the start, thus promoting ICS. I think that the world should either:

1) be filled with huts, many of which containing barbarian villages.
2) be filled with more civilizations - perhaps 20 or more (depending on world size and user choice).

This would force the player to fight his way into territory in order to expand and would be much more realistic. In fact, this feature alone might solve the ICS problem.

City Site Restriction:

It would be illegal to build a city inside another city's city radius (or perhaps even ADJACENT to another city's city radius) . If a player attempted to build close to an unseen city, the city would be exposed just like when you are asked to leave an enemy's city radius.

Early Factory:

There is no early city improvement that increases the production of resources by 50%. The first one is the Factory. If this improvement were introduced at a similar time to the marketplace and library (as a Workshop perhaps), then this would promote early city growth.

Other Ideas that don't affect Gameplay:

City Size: In response to S. Kroeze, I think that the scale of cities should be changed to be more realisitic. Instead of multiples of 10,000, the population should be represented in multiples of say, 2,000. Hence a city of size 8 would have a population of (1+8)*4*2,000 =72,000 rather than 360,000, and a city of size 20 would have a population of (1+20)*10*2,000 =420,000 rather than 2,100,000.