Are they finally gonna fix

[Capt Dizle]

ICS? Cause, I ain't spending another dime on another civ type game till they do.

[Nikolai]

1) We don't know. Which is the current answer to your question.
2) I'm not sure if they should. Restrain it, yes. But remove it? That will be hard, and I think other things are more important. Besides, the game has to be fun, and if all successfull stragegies should be removed, the fun'll be gone. ICS is not a game killer IMHO, but it should possibly be made less efficient, ie not be the only way to win the game easily. BTW, who said you had to do it the easiest way?

[Capt Dizle]

Well, I didn't say I couldn't or haven't. Micromanagement is generally a thing people dislike. I like meaningful micromanagement. Taking extra time to site my cities so that can reach their full potential and running them efficiently, even elegantly, no I call that meaningful micromanagement. Its also known as game play.

Simply building citites on every available square and then building six thousand units, nah, thats not gaming.

You could design better rules in 10 minutes but these guys are too lazy and too cheap to code it.

Rule:

Found village: can build 3 improvements in center tile
village +1 tile : can build 2 additional improvements
and on to
village +8 adjacent tiles: can build up to 19 improvments

Rule 2:

Can't build improvements on sea, lake or mountian ever, nor swamp, jungle or marsh until drained or desert until irrigated.

Rule 3: No improvements can be built in a tile adjacent to another improved village/city tile.

Rule 4: Roads may not be constructed on adjacent tiles (see exception for intersection) but the bonuses count for the tile and the two adjacent parallel tiles unless improvements are in place in which case no bonus is allowed for the improved tile.

Rule 5: Production bonuses for the center tile of large cities are as follows ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ and increase as the city size grows in the following manner ~~~~~~~~~~~~


You can start with rules like that and make a game with plenty of different strategies but none that favor ICS.

[TechWins]

Re: Are they finally gonna fix

Originally posted by Capt Dizle
ICS? Cause, I ain't spending another dime on another civ type game till they do.

Maybe the whole idea of building cities and how many will be tweeked to correct the problem, because I don't think trying to build as many cities ASAP should be beneficial and it takes away from the whole idea of exploring and expanding a lot later on. From that perspective I hope it is fixed, because I don't use any exploitive, city building cheats anyways.

[General Ludd]

Given that Civ4 is apparently headed by the guy who thought it was a good idea to make ICS manditory iin civ3, not likely.

Screw him and his munchkin AI.

[Maquiladora]

Originally posted by Capt Dizle
I like meaningful micromanagement. Taking extra time to site my cities so that can reach their full potential and running them efficiently, even elegantly, no I call that meaningful micromanagement.

You just described Call to Power 2.

Screw him and his munchkin AI.

[Max Sinister]

You don't have to like ICS, but other than some things in Civ, it's not that unrealistic... would the US be the superpower it is without having settled half of North America? Of course, small states who are strong in science/diplomacy/industry/money can have a relatively big influence, but I guess, in the long run the states with big population are better off.

Of course, they should slow it down - at the moment it's unrealistic how fast states grow and the earth is uncovered.

[Capt Dizle]

You know. I never played CTP 2. I bought CTP and I have it still in shrink wrap. Never opened it because of bad reviews.

I wonder if there is someway to order CTP2 on the net. I am currently homebound and could spare some time.

[hexagonian]

Originally posted by Capt Dizle
You know. I never played CTP 2. I bought CTP and I have it still in shrink wrap. Never opened it because of bad reviews.
I wonder if there is someway to order CTP2 on the net. I am currently homebound and could spare some time.

I'd keep an eye on this project then...(at least until civ4 come out)

Ages of Man merges many of the features of civ3 and CTP2. The site linked at the top of the thread has a detailed readme file of the features of the game.

Target release date - end of April/early May.

CTP2 discs should be available, as you will need CTP2 to play it.

[DrSpike]

ICS is already fixed, it's just the AI.

In Civ2 there is a nice balance between ICS and a smaller more technologically advanced empire (at least in the short term before the ICSer WLTKDs). This comes out in MP more, but even in SP the earliest landings are for a 10 city empire, because the long run is usually (not always though - shows balance) too long for an ICS approach to catch up. ICS is only powerful because the AI will give you anything in Civ2 if you have a lot of cities, and wont attack you.

In Civ3 there is essentially a city cap because of corruption. Sure you have to expand quickly to begin with, but it's hardly infinite if you expand to circa 20 cities or so. You should have to expand quickly early to set yourself up: the strategic choice you have to make based on the game is whether to do it peacefully or militarily.

ICS is fine.

I think 'fixing ICS' threads are very damaging to Civ, and should be ceased immediately. Or who knows what the next 'corruption' will be?

[Proteus_MST]

Originally posted by Capt Dizle
You know. I never played CTP 2. I bought CTP and I have it still in shrink wrap. Never opened it because of bad reviews.

I wonder if there is someway to order CTP2 on the net. I am currently homebound and could spare some time.

Try eBay

http://search.ebay.com/Call-To-Power-II

I bought CtP2 for a colleague of mine as a birthday present (they had it in the Low price bins at this time.
Before that he played Civ3, but after I gave him CtP2 he immediately switc´hed to this game and doesn´t think of switching back to Civ 3 again

Got me to play CtP2 again after a long break, and it still has this addiction factor
Especially if you try some of the mods (I am currently playing with the Call to Conquest Mod and this really makes an already good game still better).

[The diplomat]

Civ4 should borrow a page out of RoN's book and have a cap on how many cities can be built which could be raised when you researched the right tech.

Have certain techs that would raise the limit on how many cities can be built. Obviously, the player could go above the limit through conquest. And, governments could modify the cap. The cap would also depend on map size.

What this do is limit the number of cities a player can build until they research certain techs. This would eliminate ICS completely since players would only be able to build a few cities at the start. And it would force players to focus on managing their cities rather than just multipliying their cities.

[Proteus_MST]

CtP2 has this also implemented,
with the number of cities you can have depending on the type of government.
Republic for example gives you 20 cities, Democracy 35 and Ecotopia and Virtual Democracy (the best governments you can research) give you 60 cities.

You can go above this number any time, but the more cities you build above the allowed limit of cities, the unhappier your citizens get.

[TechWins]

Originally posted by Proteus_MST
CtP2 has this also implemented,
with the number of cities you can have depending on the type of government.
Republic for example gives you 20 cities, Democracy 35 and Ecotopia and Virtual Democracy (the best governments you can research) give you 60 cities.

You can go above this number any time, but the more cities you build above the allowed limit of cities, the unhappier your citizens get.

I like this idea more than what Diplomat describes with RoN's restrictive factor. An increase of corruption throughout the empire might be a nice touch when a Civ exceeds its government city limit. When a 21st, per se, city is initialized in Republic via conquest does that also increase unhappiness in CtP2? Also, how does the AI respond to all of this?

[The diplomat]

Originally posted by TechWins
I like this idea more than what Diplomat describes with RoN's restrictive factor. An increase of corruption throughout the empire might be a nice touch when a Civ exceeds its government city limit.

The problem with that is how much corruption should the game have? If you have too little, then the limit really does not do that much because players won't be hurt that much if they go over. So players can still ICS and they won't care because it won't hurt them very much. On other hand, if corruption is set too high, then you cripple the game because anytime you go over the limit, corruption will kill your production.

So, in essence what will happen is that players will ICS anyway and not care about the effects of corruption because having a gazillion cities will overrule any penalties from corruption.