Are they finally gonna fix

[Xorbon]

ICS wasn't fixed in Civ 3. It's worse because the AI uses ICS to the extreme! You're forced into ICS just to compete. In most games I've played, the entire world is settled by 1 A.D. It would be nice if there were some viable alternative strategies in addition to ICS.

I think they may need to revamp how settlers and expansion work if they want to fix it.

[EscapedGoat]

Xorbon, we are talking about different things. Yes, in Civ3 you must expand fast, but to me, that is not ICS, I think people call that REX(rapid expansion?) around here.

ICS means CxCxC city spacing scheme, where you pack cities as close together as possible, often on a grid. In fact, ICS can often be the opposite of REX because you are packing cities as close as possible instead of spreading them out for max territory. What I meant in my post is that the fundamental economic logic of ICS has been fixed in Civ3 for the reasons I mentioned.

[Xorbon]

Oh ok. Yeah, I was mostly thinking of REX (in combination with ICS) in my post. It's easy to mix up the two since they often go hand-in-hand. But having said that, how do 2 pop cost settlers affect ICS? I can see how they can slow down REX though.


Instead of penalizing ICS, there should be exponential benefits to owning larger cities. That way, a person would have to decide between the immediate benefit of having a lot of closely packed cities, or the long-term benefit of having larger cities.

In addition, perhaps when cities are only one or two tiles apart they should grow slower. The more cities that closely surround one city in the middle, the slower the city in the middle will grow.

Oh wait, that would be penalizing ICS. Oh well.

[hexagonian]

Originally posted by Xorbon
But having said that, how do 2 pop cost settlers affect ICS? I can see how they can slow down REX though.

Cities actually have an additional worker (pop) working the tile underneath the city that does not show up on your city size. So a size 1 city actually acts as a size 2 city because it is working 2 tiles.

So when you create a new city, you had spent one population at the city where you built the settler, but you gain back that population plus a second population point under the new city. Multiply this over a number of cities, and you see a huge gain.

Making a new settler cost 2 pop points negates that gain.

Tight spacing merely allows you to create cities faster because you do not have to move so far to build cities.