Do you think ICS has been solved adequately?

[Dauphin]

In Civ3, the restriction of not having a +12 city until the Industrial era incentivised overlapping city radii. Something should be done about that. Not sure what, but give it some thought.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Skanky Burns
You don't build improvements when using ICS. A pop requirement for city improvements is irrelevant where ICS is concerned.

Yes you do. You want barracks at least.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by vulture
Another way to achieve the same effect is to have the output (in shields or gold) of a city not be a linear function of its input.

An interesting twist would be for the generation of light bulbs (civilisation advancement points). That way, ICS'ers are forever stuck in the dark ages.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Dauphin
In Civ3, the restriction of not having a +12 city until the Industrial era incentivised overlapping city radii. Something should be done about that. Not sure what, but give it some thought.

Overlapping cities are very old. For one thing, the city doesn't cover a regular shape, so some areas are wasted. Then you can never fill up all the squares within the radius anyway. You need entertainers long before that.

[Dauphin]

Overlapping has been around since year dot, mainly for sharing a good tile resource between two cities. I'm talking about having cities overlap the majority of the lands for the sake of being able to have all land tiles worked. IN essence it promotes ICS.

If a city could work most of the tiles in its radius rather than just half (ie it can grow to have enough labourers) it would mean less city overlap and less inclination to ICS..

[Skanky Burns]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
Yes you do. You want barracks at least.

Barracks are arguably a good investment when ICSing.
They would also be the first city improvement a city would be allowed to build - it is doubtful the world would be without barracks until size 12 cities for instance.


I do like Vulture's suggestion and method of curbing ICS by increasing output more than increasing input. People will use whatever is more powerful, and if larger cities are more powerful than that is what will be used.
Applying this method to research as UR suggested makes sense as well due to synergy.

[GePap]

I didn;t know clash used an underlying population model like the one I proposed for ci4-cool.

I think the needed changes should be:

1. Pop. minimums for certain improvements

2. Multiple build queues- any city can make multiple things at a time- this would mean large and very productive cities are simply better, and is more realistic.
The exact number of queues would grow with city size, so a giant maglopolis might be able to produce 6 things at a time, a small burg 1 thing.

[Dauphin]

Muliple queues? You mean so that you can use overflow shields on other projects?

Why would you want to split production over six different projects? The overall build time would be the same, but then none would be built as quickly as a single build queue method.

[Dauphin]

Or are you saying that production isn't split but doubles, triples...sextuples as you get more production lines?

[GePap]

Originally posted by Dauphin
Muliple queues? You mean so that you can use overflow shields on other projects?

Why would you want to split production over six different projects? The overall build time would be the same, but then none would be built as quickly as a single build queue method.

Why not? Besides the problem of shield wastage, you may want to always be making a defensive unit and still be building an imporvement of so. This way you could dedicate a few shields a turn towards a defensive unit while you spend say 90% of shields on a library. If there is any problem, you can switch production mainly to the military units without having to fully abandon the library either.


And again, as the city gets bigger you have the ability to use more production lines, specially if you have lots of shields and think you might be able to make 3 or 4 units per turn from some larger cities.

Obviously this would work better if shields came form more limited sources but at the same time in greater amounts. Say, instead of having 10 tiles each giving 2 shields have 2 tiles each giving 10. Now, specae these tiles out, making it more strategic to place cities, but also lessening the sense of lots of little cities.

[Dauphin]

Originally posted by GePap


Why not? Besides the problem of shield wastage, you may want to always be making a defensive unit and still be building an imporvement of so. This way you could dedicate a few shields a turn towards a defensive unit while you spend say 90% of shields on a library. If there is any problem, you can switch production mainly to the military units without having to fully abandon the library either.

Lets say you have a city with 100 shields. You want to build an improvements costing 100 shields, and produce 4 units each costing 100 shields.

2 scenarios:

1) Single production line. You build the improvement first in Turn 1. You proceed to build one unit every turn after that until you have 4 units and the improvement in Turn 5.

2) 5 production lines, each receiving a portion of the shields. Lets say 20% each. Turn 1 through 4 sees nothing produced. In Turn 5 all units and the improvement get completed.

You are in the same situation at Turn 5 under both systems, except that under scenario 1 you have units and improvements built turns earlier. You also have the option to build the improvement in any of the 5 turns, depending on needs.

I don't think that multiple queues adds anything that overflow with a single queue can't acheive. If overflow is so large as to be able to produce another unit/improvement within a turn then simply allow it to. e.g if you have 5 warriors at 10 shields queued up and have 50 shields per turn then the city produces 5 warriors next turn.

[Nostromo]

Just noodling... How about introducing national improvements? They would work like city improvements, except at the national level. If you want to move from a size 8 empire (meaning an empire with 8 cities) to a size 9 empire, for example, you have to build a certain nationwide improvement.

[Drachasor]

Multiple queues can help in some instances. Let's say you need to defend a city that has no walls. If you can queue walls and units, and later rush both, it is a big help. Same with just unit defenders.

Generally it greatly aids rush buiding, and it is useful in areas where you need to devote some work to two or more critical things. If what happens to the city in the next 5-10 turns doesn't matter, then mutliple queues don't matter much.

Generally though, multiple queues are a bit messy to manage, I imagine. Rather like multiplying the number of cities you need to micromanage. Ugh!

Best to make general production and other bonuses for cities as they grow, perhaps even make bonuses to cities that aren't crowded in by other cities (this makes early game city crunching less tempting).

-Drachasor

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Skanky Burns
Civ 3 attempts to curb ICS