ICS as the Christ martyr

[enoeraew]

I feel like civ4 is three steps forward and two steps back.

I would rather play civ 3 + God and diplomacy.

IMHO many features were sacrficed for mutliplayer. Yes the people rioted in the streets when they learned they would have to play extra for a buggy multiplayer in civ3. But as I said..two steps forward three steps back...

I feel the biggest step backwards is the "cities dont grow while building settlers"...30 turns of hitting the spacebar at the start of the game is borning dead time. Soren says in the manual that this system was developed to combat ICS...which was no problem for me as I never played multiplayer and the AI never complained if I used it ..which I never did.

Why are the developers telling us how to play the game. I really had never even heard of the idea of spamming cities everywhere but I guess I'm going to defend it as a legitimate strat now as its way better to risk someone doing that then to lessen the game and create dead time.

Multiplayer is the future of gaming yes. Such things as palace building, and apparently this "ICS", for differnt reasons, are a threat to the multiplayer expereince. Yet the move towards Multiplayer has lessened the CIV experience.

Discuss

[notyoueither]

Good point. SP for everyone has been affected by the desires of MP communities as well as hard core SP fans who wanted 'exploits' crushed.

OTOH, many people are having fun with SP as it is. Personally, I always get bummed when I'm working on growing the cap, building the worker/settler, and my warrior or scout gets sent to Valhalla by the first lion met. Then it's boring. Enter, enter, enter...

[enoeraew]

LOL its so true! Enter, enter, enter, enter, enter, enter, .

....no I'm not going to type 30 of them.... sigh

which of beta testers from these forums found this fun ?

[notyoueither]

Not many I would think, but you do have the warrior/scout to move, and you do have managing the growth of the cap to look after. It takes me not much time for the enters. I spend far more thinking about where to move the warrior/scout and how to flip the govs around as I try to get the most out of com and food for initial growth and research.

[Mart]

Re: ICS as the Christ martyr

Originally posted by enoeraew
I feel the biggest step backwards is the "cities dont grow while building settlers"...30 turns of hitting the spacebar at the start of the game is borning dead time.

In SP (singleplayer) it is no problem. Imagine you play pbem-multiplayer. You get a turn every 2 days. You wait thus much longer for anything interesting to happen.
I play both SP and Multiplayer.
First turns are good taking care of all the things just having that one city.
- try anyway to get first worker ASAP, so it works on terrain for the capital city
- scouting terrain, finding new resources - extremely important
- planning tile improvements - getting as much possible from your first worker as he can do.
- preparing terrain for new cities before you do first settler.

In fact that feature is for me very interesting. I find little true difference in that you loose population or loose food accumulating in a city. It is in fact almost the same thing.
Only that in civ4 when you set your citizens-laborers in the "X" of a city, they stay there, you do not have to rethink the setup for loosing that one-two population.

Soren says in the manual that this system was developed to combat ICS...which was no problem for me as I never played multiplayer and the AI never complained if I used it ..which I never did.

ICS works good in both SP and Multiplayer. It just about efficiency and fastest possible growth.

And actually even in civ4 I try to ICS as much as I can - as much as I have territory+gold for upkeep. It is the production centers that I need that more cities give me.
Well, ICS civ4 style now...

Why are the developers telling us how to play the game. I really had never even heard of the idea of spamming cities everywhere but I guess I'm going to defend it as a legitimate strat now as its way better to risk someone doing that then to lessen the game and create dead time.

I think that dead time is not directly connected only to number of cities. It is complex. Very complex. And difficult to control.
In order to have something to do you can micromange a little:
- workers
- scouts
- playing with laborers in the city radius
etc.

It is more about game complexity, that the more issues in the game you have to/can address the less "dead time"

ICS more destroyed character of a game - you cities were less miningful when you were building dense nets of them. Benefits of just a city without any improvements in them were too large. So when counteracting ICS, you prefer less cities. This reduces possible micromanagemnts - your are better off having less cities.

"Dead time" also comes when building times are too long. Faster games do units, city buildings faster. So you have more things to do in every turn. Play quick version of a game.
Also possibly make a mod making some changes to balance between unit-buildings costs compared to technology costs

Multiplayer is the future of gaming yes. Such things as palace building, and apparently this "ICS", for differnt reasons, are a threat to the multiplayer expereince. Yet the move towards Multiplayer has lessened the CIV experience.

Yet again, I would not differentiate between this much between SP and Multi. It is still the same game. AI is supposed to pretend to be like human.
However I have to agree, that some changes to gameplay are not that I would find the best for it. But on the other hand - I understand how difficult is to design a good game.

[archermoo]

Originally posted by enoeraew
LOL its so true! Enter, enter, enter, enter, enter, enter, .

....no I'm not going to type 30 of them.... sigh

which of beta testers from these forums found this fun ?

So is it somehow less boring to hit the enter key over and over again if your city grows and then shrinks during the process?

[Willem]

Re: ICS as the Christ martyr

Originally posted by enoeraew

Why are the developers telling us how to play the game. I really had never even heard of the idea of spamming cities everywhere but I guess I'm going to defend it as a legitimate strat now as its way better to risk someone doing that then to lessen the game and create dead time.

You have it backwards, players have been complaining about ICS for years now, since at least Civ 2. And it's not a multiplayer thing, the main problem is with SP. With tons of cities, it becomes way to easy to walk all over the AI at the end of the game. That's why in Civ 3 things were introduced like the corruption model, Settlers construction resulting in population loss, and an AI that was just as aggresive at ICS as the human. These were all attempts at balancing the problems ICS caused in Civs 1 & 2. But they didn't really work that well in Civ3 so they've taken a new approach.

[clarkcd]

Re: ICS as the Christ martyr

Originally posted by enoeraew
Soren says in the manual that this system was developed to combat ICS...which was no problem for me as I never played multiplayer and the AI never complained if I used it ..which I never did.

I never played MP either but the problem with the ICS strategy is it is the best strategy for every situation. There is no choice so there is nothing to think about. It's build settlers as fast as you can for as long as you can.

I actually like having to think about how my empire is going to expand instead of spamming cities. Granted it took a few days and more than a couple games to get comfortable with it.

[MattPilot]

I like the new system. I just wish the Maintnance cost were higher for cities and also it would be better if it weren't linear, but rather exponential.

[Niptium]

I'm in total discordance with the messages up above. Civ 4 is just right ! I love the way they took care of ICS and killed it. You know - I really enjoy playing with 3-4-6 cities in a game... It makes me much more aware of my options and my total range of liberty. It also makes the game much more realistic then having a poladot map with cities sprwaling every 3 or for squares apart.

I've been playing SP and (mostly) MP and I have to say it's a great great deal of fun !

[Robert]

I can't see how you guys are bored by the opening game. Just clicking 'next turn'?
Why are you not exploring? Fighting barbarian? Looking for spots to settle new cities? Found a religion? Spread it? Make a plan, a tactic.

Mindless clicking end of turn is defenitely not the right strategy to play cIV. (In fact it's not for any civ-title)

[Boris Godunov]

Re: ICS as the Christ martyr

Originally posted by enoeraew
I feel like civ4 is three steps forward and two steps back.

But as I said..two steps forward three steps back...

I feel the biggest step backwards is the "cities dont grow while building settlers"...30 turns of hitting the spacebar at the start of the game is borning dead time.

Uhhhhh... nonsequitur, anyone? Even if your city were growing while you built a settler, you'd still be hitting the spacebar.

Still, perhaps the problem is your trying to build a settler right away. That's bad strategy in Civ 4. You should be building up your city more before doing so. Then construction of the settler will be much shorter.

Personally, I can remember having the "repeated enter" syndrome in all Civ games, and it seems to me that it's not so bad this time around. Especially on the "normal" as opposed to "epic" setting.

[snoopy369]

I just don't build a worker/settler right away. I think it's a horrible idea - I never build a worker/settler until size 3 at least, and usually 4. I have yet to see a start that justified doing so ...

[xxFlukexx]

"I would rather play civ 3 + God and diplomacy. "

Haha, that is funny. Civ3 was a broken mess, lots of great ideas but the implementation? Ouch, huge gameplay bugs from day one, did they ever fix them in exp packs? I'm not going to pay another $50+ to find out, so I said goodbye to Civ3(I've beaten Civ3 on diety too much, so boring) If you think Civ3 was a great strategy game, you've got another thing coming.

"I feel the biggest step backwards is the "cities dont grow while building settlers"...30 turns of hitting the spacebar at the start of the game is borning dead time"

Lots of hitting end turn in MoO2 and that game is considered one of the greatest TBS games of all time. It was done to maintain game balance. Heck, almost all strategy games are boring in the beginning, hell the first 5 minutes in WC3 or AoE3 is so boring that most good players click frantically around the map because they have nothing to do.

"I feel like civ4 is three steps forward and two steps back. "

Then later you state:

"But as I said..two steps forward three steps back..."

Please, let the smart people make the game, all you have to do is play it. If the creators make a rule you don't like you can either just live with it and go on your merry way as it is barely noticeable, or you can just quit.

[Boris Godunov]

I have virtually forgotten Civ3 since playing Civ4 for all of a week. And I liked Civ3 a lot, actually.