Is ICS truly dead?

[Dominae]

Just thought I would add something to DeepO's great couple of posts:

Anything that produces a lot of Commerce early on is very powerful in CIV. In Civ3, a Gold resource was "nice to have" once you stopped growing/expanding and started researching much more thoroughly, but it did not really factor into your REX strategy.

In CIV, Gold and Silver resources (for example) actually allow you to expand more than you normally could, because they pay for the additional Maintenance costs. Of course, you could just not expand and feed all that Commerce into research, but I personally would rather have 4 cities up and running than 3.

So, next time your capital has access to a Gold Mine, consider that it really is a gold mine!

[DeepO]

MMMMMHHMMMM gold!

DeepO

[Kataphraktoi]

Originally posted by conmcb25


I agree thats what I saw yesterday.

ICS in its CIV III wrapper is dead. But intelligent growth is in.

If you can afford it, go ahead and grow, if you can';t afford it you wont. And the key I believe is going to be grabbing those "bonus tiles and working them early, then planning other pushes of expansion around your general build up and changes in your Civics options over time.

so the main idea that cities are strength increasing and within reason its always better to have another city than less,its still there

[DeepO]

Originally posted by Cataphract887
so the main idea that cities are strength increasing and within reason its always better to have another city than less,its still there

It depends on who you will ask. Some believe that, yes. Others don't think so. A smaller empire is certainly viable, but whether it is better than a large one or not is heavily debated. I assume someday, somebody will run a whole battery of tests to convince us on that one... Suffice it to say that in the end you can build huge, large, normal, and small empires, and still win the game. But every amount of land does require a different playstyle to get the most out of it.

DeepO

[aspvv]

I am still pretty clueless about the mechanics of the civ iv, only put in 3 hours last night, but I tell you the resources are more valuable then ever in this game. Lust night I had a second largest civ with a health economy, and decided to try a war, (no access to iron or ivory) so I send about 9 hors archers to attack a town size 3 defended by 2 archers and a warrior. I lost all hors archers without killing a single defender, ƒ¼ and then a single war elephant unit shrugs 2-3 attacks, marches to my city and takes it killing 2 worries in the process.

[DeepO]

aspvv... that has nothing to do with ICS. Combat in CIV is not Civ3.

...Combined arms...

...catapults...

DeepO

[aspvv]

Ok Fine ļ

[Dominae]

Originally posted by Cataphract887
so the main idea that cities are strength increasing and within reason its always better to have another city than less, its still there

I would say that this is a fair assessment.

Would you call that ICS? CIV is still a 4X game, so expansion still needs to be present, in some form or another. What CIV does away with is mass, mindless expansion. It's the "within reason" part that makes expansion strategic.

[The diplomat]

Originally posted by Dominae
CIV is still a 4X game, so expansion still needs to be present, in some form or another. What CIV does away with is mass, mindless expansion. It's the "within reason" part that makes expansion strategic.

I concurr. In fact, a player should still try to expand with a few cities early in the game. The difference is that you need to expand in a smart way and not just crank out settlers ad infinitum.

[Jerh9e1k5]

It is very exciting to see this kind of "balancing" in a civ game! It seems that every game truely can take a different approach to winning. I found that civ3 became tedious after a while because I would always follow the same formula to attain my win. There was a little variance along the course of the game, but they always turned out to be cookie cutter games. CIV seems to have eliminated this!

Although as was noted above, someone will probably find the "best" way to win. Single player will still be good if the other options are viable enough to defeat the AI, but I worry that the cookie cutter technique will be rampant in multiplayer, and whoever does not use the one technique will ultimately lose. But that's what mods are for

Jerh9e1k5

[mhistbuff]

The above analysis of Rome isn't quite accurate. Rome was funded by conquest. When conquest of weathy neighbors stopped (due to lack of wealthy neighbors), Rome found its far-flung provinces too expensive to maintain with the troop strength necessary to protect them. It never developed the kind of economy necessary to support an empire that wasn't expanding. In this way, I think Civ IV might more accurately represent real-world empires than Civ III did.

[Fried-Psitalon]

Intelligent actions within reason - the motto of Civilization IV.

[The diplomat]

Maintenance costs will prevent rapid expansion in the early game but once you have a strong economy, you'll probably be able to support expansion again (if you have the room for new cities of course).

In civ4, 1 size 12 city really is better than 12 size 1 cities.

Building more cities is a good idea but only under 2 conditions:
1) the new cities can grow to reasonable populations.
2) Your economy can handle the increased maintenance costs.

[Matthew]

Originally posted by mhistbuff
The above analysis of Rome isn't quite accurate. Rome was funded by conquest. When conquest of weathy neighbors stopped (due to lack of wealthy neighbors), Rome found its far-flung provinces too expensive to maintain with the troop strength necessary to protect them. It never developed the kind of economy necessary to support an empire that wasn't expanding. In this way, I think Civ IV might more accurately represent real-world empires than Civ III did.

Actually the Empire didn't expand all that much after the time of Augustus. He left an empire that was very prosperous economically, with more than enough wealth to sustain itself. The economy was so sound it even managed to recover from Caligula and Nero. Over time there were many things which tore away at the Roman economy, including decadent emperors, bloated government, civil war, and barbarian invasions. Of course Rome likely would have fended off the latter easily without the first three.

[khumak]

I think ICS is probably still viable if you're really set on doing it but I think you're just as effective if not more so just selectively building a strong core of cities in "ideal" locations. There is definitely an advantage to building enough cities to allow you to specialize them into different functions.

I basically have

Production specialist cities:

1 super wonder builder: lots of mines, ignores food and commerce, ignores all buildings unless it needs more happiness or there's no wonders to build, never builds any units

1 unit builder: builds ALL of my military units, usually my only city with a barracks, gets all of my xp boosting stuff, high production, when not building military units cranks out missionaries. Ignores buildings unless I don't have a need for more units.

Commerce specialist cities:

1 Econ powerhouse: lots of commerce (towns), ignores everything else, builds all econ boosting buildings/wonders, never builds units, secondary focus is research

1 Research powerhouse: see above except it prioritizes research and makes econ it's secondary focus

Sometimes both of the above are the same city.

Food specialist cities:

1 super GP builder: lots and lots of food, a bit of commerce, ignores production, builds all food boosting buildings, builds all buildings that allow more specialists, builds all wonders that boost single city GP growth, assigns as many citizens to specalist as it can while still growing, winds up building most of my GPs throughout the game

General cities:

Any extra cities are more balanced and tend to just focus on building all buildings, no wonders, and no units