ICS as the Christ martyr

[enoeraew]

I perfer to keep the corruption model in civ 3 and let players decide how many cities we want to build instead of engineering us towards one way or another..

MoO2 still is the best game of all time...my roommates and I call it "the game"...

I still build setters in every city once they hit 2...its all about the land grab and the Great Wall of culture...


hehe ya one step two step backward forward...thats the "..just one more turn" pee pee dance heh

[Ansaga]

Originally posted by enoeraew
I perfer to keep the corruption model in civ 3 and let players decide how many cities we want to build instead of engineering us towards one way or another..

MoO2 still is the best game of all time...my roommates and I call it "the game"...

I still build setters in every city once they hit 2...its all about the land grab and the Great Wall of culture...


hehe ya one step two step backward forward...thats the "..just one more turn" pee pee dance heh

Go right ahead you do that strategy. Just because it doesn't work as well as Civ3 you shouldn't go around crying about it.

[Mart]

You can still ICS, however with 3 tiles spacing and if you can afford it.

[binTravkin]

Go right ahead you do that strategy. Just because it doesn't work as well as Civ3 you shouldn't go around crying about it.

Indeed, if something is not working as you used to see it, maybe it's not the game is wrong but you are.
Don't expect to use the same strategies of Civ1 throughout to Civ2k

You can still ICS, however with 3 tiles spacing and if you can afford it.

Yes and it does not take much to be able to afford it, 'organised' helps quite a bit and then you can look at the civics and other things that alter the upkeep or your income.

A good chunk of territory is still important because of chance to get valuable resource.
More production centers are good aswell, the same old truth, just now they will be spaced 3 tiles thus they will also be more powerful (more production per base).

[Ribannah]

If it takes 30 turns to build a Settler, don't do it!

[Kataphraktoi]

the whole idea is that its over-trying to balance the game. if i want to build 1x1....why the heck should i not. this is just more over-zealous exploit squashing,and another reason why civX can never be as good as smac,which is a basicly one big package of such 'exploits'.

if ICS is overpowered,make less bases stronger somehow. nerfing everything indicates lack of improvistion by the cIV team imho

balanced high>balanced low


you should be able to win with 4 or 5 or 6 cities over 100 of them,not because the ICS gets insane penalties but because you made a descision to stay small and got some benefit that comensates

[Mart]

It all comes to same result, but higher city costs are somewhat better:

In corruption model in civ3 you gained little having more cities, but still little.
In civ4 you have to pay more even having negative balance.

The penalty for ICS is a benefit when you do not ICS.

The ICS might be killed if all benefits of an additional city might be converted into a tile improvement. What I mean here - you build many cities, coz it is better investment into a tile than a farm for example.
A city is:

- free worker (on the city tile) often that 2-1-1 is better than a tile can give alone. So change that - city tile gives no bonus.

- production center. It manufactures buildings and units. A tile cannot do it. So some fix should be found here. Notice, that when you establish a city it can start making smth right away with no cost or upkeep. That is a problem too. So maybe more things should be made the way that if you have no building for production a city does not build anything.

- No free buildings from wonders. Period. It is artificial. It is strong ICS hint. Wonders should give other kind of bonuses.

- Good thing is upkeep of cities. Bureaucracy cost increasing with number of cities. And civ4 has it. Good thing.

- Crawlers present in SMAC might be introduced into Civ games. What for? In order to exactly give a player reason not to build that one more city, but use a crawler instead. Then you would strategically choose that better feature over making just one more city simply coz it would be more beneficial.

- No culture and territory spreading from cities. This just exactly makes players to make more cities. Instead maybe territory claiming. Inter-civ agreements for borders, and so on. Mechanisms for building culture based on large cities than on small ones. So e.g. 1 city size 5 is better than 10 cities size 1. But we have smth like that already in Civ4, am I right here? I am not sure of the system, just forgot at the moment.

---------
Overall, if a city is made something like nothing much more than a tile improvement, that would solve the problem. Look like Europa Universalis works.

[quinalla]

ICS was not just a MP problem, it unbalanced SP as well. What cIV has done well is get rid of any "best" strategy, there are lots of things that work. You can still expand rapidly, it is just that there are downsides to that strat like anything else.

And really, if you never used ICS, I'm not sure what your issue is? Having your city not grow does not make it any les exciting really for those turns where you have nothing to do.

[Apocalypse Cow]

Originally posted by Cataphract887

balanced high>balanced low

Having multiple strategies > one "silver bullet" that will always work.

[Fried-Psitalon]

Mart, what you're describing isn't ICS. ICS is pointless, rampant, unstopping city expansion. You're describing "Expanding until my finances can't handle it." "Expanding until it's no longer financially solvent to do so" and so on.

THAT isn't ICS. ICS is "warrior, settler" rinse and repeat. What you're describing is an aggressive but intelligent expansion strategy. THAT does work - and it works fairly well, with risks and rewards comparable to a more conservative, militant one.

REAL ICS is in the grave - intelligent ICS doesn't deserve that term; it's just intelligent, aggressive expansion.

[DeepO]

BTW, ICS in CIV terms would be

warrior-settler-settler-settler...

for each and every city until the map is filled. Building warriors in between was only needed in Civ3 because you needed to grow your city. You don't need to do that in CIV.

DeepO

[Mart]

Definitely all the changes in civ4 are influencing ICS very much. ICS has though variants, and if you think of it, the border between ICS and non-ICS strategies is fluid. If players choose apart from settlers other improvements, then it is more away from the most extreme ICS. However civ in comparison to smac for example has opportunities to hurry buildings much later. Slavery helps, but in no such good way - you loose population. Universal Sufrage is here the key. Early in the game, if a player has to wait like 20 turns for a Forge, worker or settler might be a better option still. For sure, with 3 tiles spacing if you make settlers too early you loose. It just moves the moment you want to build a new settler to the point when new laborers in field do not bring much benefit.

Playing civ games for many years, initially I attampted for cities to not overlap, but later it turned out people's strategies of more dense city placement worked better. The time when my cities could work all 20 tiles with the best benefit of the facilities/buildings in them were coming too late.

My last game, and second, I got quite quickly over 10 cities on continents map Tiny size, with 3 AI and me. I got leading position for many turns. Only later in late Middle Ages AI started to regain. Finally in renaisance I could no longer have significant lead in technology. However I did not attack anyone so far. Noble difficulty. I wonder what will be the end of the game. Then I will try level up.

In my first game I was too late with enough cities and I remained on 5th position from 7 civs. Still expansion counts. It is to determine yet how various strategies work here, but I think the exponential growth of cities upkeep might be even higher then. And also workers and settlers might be even more expensive.

[Willem]

Originally posted by Cataphract887
theif ICS is overpowered,make less bases stronger somehow. nerfing everything indicates lack of improvistion by the cIV team imho

They tried that in Civ 3 with the corruption model and look how many people complained about that. The bottom line is that you can't please everyone.

[RobC]

Originally posted by archermoo
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?

QFT

[polypheus]

The really big problem with "ICS" (by which I mean extremely aggressive rapid early expansion) as I see it is that it is grossly inaccurate modelling of early history in the general sense and hugely unbalancing. Also the design of Civ 2 and Civ 3 was such that ICS was absolutely necessary to play a successful game. In Civ 2, the game became so easy even in diety level once you realized you could block the AIs expansion (which was pathethic anyway) through zone of control and just do settler rush. You'd easily win. I quickly realized that Civ 2 was crap design.

In Civ 3, instead of trying to better model the drawbacks of ICS realistically, they conceded ICS (pop cost of 2 does nothing but delays ICS) and simply made the AIs much better at ICS! So you were in this settler rush, ICS race and it was so annoying to be forced into this type of game. A perfectionist game simply would not work because each new village right off the bat is net positive contribution to your empire and also city growth was fairly rapid so it didn't take long for those villages to be built up quickly. ICS was the only way in Civ 3!

Now in Civ 4, it appears they have done something about this and made it so that a more balanced approach is usually optimal. Like IRL, villages are net negatives until you build them up. This means that a "perfectionist" with far fewer but very developed cities could gain such a large lead on you just like IRL history. And with rapid early expansion you fall too far behind and can't catch up very quickly. Also now with barbarians being more like "mini-Civs" and taking over cities, this defending your villages with nothing or weak defense just is real risky just like IRL would be!

Since I don't yet have Civ 4, I can't say how well ICS has been eliminated in favor of a more balanced game but so far it sounds promising. But as long as the mandatory settler rush/city founding race isn't there, then that's a big plus. In Civ 3, you felt you had to try to claim every square as quickly as possible cause that's what the AI was doing. I hope that in Civ 4, that's not the case!