Anti-ICS measures

[GeoModder]

Originally posted by Diadem
Building a chariot is a much easier way of founding a city than building a settler is.

*Almost* sig material!

[SpencerH]

Originally posted by Krill

You have to deal with them and it makes no sense to just burn em so you end up overextended and lowering your science to nothing - game over.

Of course it makes sense to burn them, if not burning them causes you to lose the game. You burn them and stay in the game, instead of keeping them and losing.

The problem is that (occasionally) one can be alone on a large island and unless you have masses of troops with which to patrol (which is also tedious) they will just re-spawn. The point is that the maintenance cost prevention of ICS works reasonably well for a pangea map but not in all circumstances.

My own answer has been to not bother building more than 3 or 4 settlers until the middle ages or so (filling in the gaps) and to keep the barb cities. I think I have 4 or 5 in my current game.

[asleepathewheel]

Originally posted by StarLightDeath
Yes, lets further dumb the game down by yet further removing options from the game. Simply genius...as if this game wasn't totally made for 5 year olds in the first place. This game is like watching a cartoon...not that some cartoons are bad or anything. Needless to say the "ICS counter" imposed in this game has done nothing more than significantly lower the ceiling on the game and reduce the gap between better and lesser players to being non-existent.

You must be confused, ICS is for the brain of a 5 year old-how difficult is it to spam cities like that? I can see how you would be upset, though, if your favorite maneuver has been weakened, since you are now forced to be a bit more creative in your gameplay.

[Azuarc]

The way I thought it should work:

1) A city starts with *only* the city tile. Call that a size 0 city if you like. Effectively, this is a settlement or an outpost.

2) All tiles have three levels of productivity for food, hammers, and shields. (You could change that number, but I like 3.) Initially the city tile is highly productive for food, moderate on hammers, and minimal on commerce.

3) When a city reaches size 1, up from 0, the city radius expands to a thin X, so 5 spaces in all. The side spaces have low overall production, but one of them is being worked now.

4) As the city grows, the side spaces become moderate production. When the city reaches size 4, it opens up the diagonal spaces as low production spaces while the main city tile drops to moderate production, but increased to moderate commerce. (More people = less space to farm, etc. but more markets.)

5) Gradually, as the city expands, eventually the spaces directly 2 spaces away, and then a "knight's move" away become open, and maybe even 3 direct, but at the same time the spaces all go through a gradual process of being minimally productive to highly productive agricultural areas to food production waning in favor of commerce. This last phase is effectively representing sprawl or metropolitan area, or whatever you want to call it.

6) Starting from size 3, the city automatically generates some minimal amount of culture...say N-2 per turn for city size N. Culture would still be necessary for determining national boundaries and territory, but native culture borders would not directly hamper the growth of the city.

7) To truly begin a new far-flung city, settlers could not be built until a city reaches size 3. Settlers are people looking to be intrepid pioneers, not expand upon the existing land of their town. It takes a decent city size to have enough of those folks.

8) Discontent would not be nearly as discrete, and would increasingly lower production levels on tiles rather than removing them altogether. This helps prevent the "I'll starve to death before I work for you" situation of capturing a foreign city.


Due to rounding, or min-max scenarios of "I better stay below size 10 before my diagonal spaces become part of the sprawl and lose production," this might feel a little artificial or forced, but I'd like to see it in practice.

It would, for example, open up a number of other sorts of bonuses. Serfdom could increase food production one level. Industrialization would add hammers to "sprawl" spaces that have started to be absorbed into the metropolis, as though they had factories and production plants. Markets could add commerce to the sprawl spaces rather than a percentage bonus. Building a railroad to a space might increase its hammer output to the next level. Farms and mines, rather than having some flat generic bonus, might increase the tile's respective output by one level, possibly to a fourth bonus level.


On another note, I think all cities should have two production queues - one domestic and one remote. The domestic queue would be for building wonders and buildings. The remote one would be for creating units and for terrain improvements. (This would do away with workers.) A player can choose to build something from the other build list, at a 50% penalty - so wartime maximal troop production is possible, or working on building up the city while creating a wonder - but is de-emphasized to allow for better, almost required versatility. I'm not sure this would work well in conjunction with my other tiling idea, but it's another interesting idea to play with.

[StarLightDeath]

You must be confused, ICS is for the brain of a 5 year old-how difficult is it to spam cities like that? I can see how you would be upset, though, if your favorite maneuver has been weakened, since you are now forced to be a bit more creative in your gameplay.

What creativity? Do you really think expanding your culture borders and building up your cities takes skill? All you're doing is clicking on buildings and worker automations. I doubt you even play MP so this discussion is probably pointless. It's all about numbers and caps and in this game the cap system is extremely constraining. There are simply few options that allow you to get ahead which is why even against the worst of players you can have games coming down to the 150 turn limit separated by only a few hundred points. I'm not the only one saying this either. The game simply has no secret to it and while I figured out most of the stuff faster than others, there is nothing stopping people from figuring it out too in the next few months. Every single MP game is going to come down to RNG rolls (which is nearly as bad a system as the civ3 one and is completely and utterly random) and resources. What an awesome game.

[Mujadaddy]

Bye, then, SLD.... Buh-bye....buh-bye now... Buh-bye...

[Drachasor]

Somewhat related to this, I am intending on making a mod that handles food in a very different way. Food will be able to move along trade routes from one city to another (perhaps between empires, perhaps just within an empire).

The easiest way to do this would be to have all the cities connected to the capital pool their food together. The it would be distributed among cities based on a number of things. I figure commerce, production, happiness, and health would be the main factors.

Anyhow, that's my rough idea, I'd probably add some ability to micromanage food movement a bit (such as allowing a city to trade 1 commerce or production for 1 food more than it would normally get; this traded production or commerce would be "lost" to the empire, and no city would get it).

Of course, a more difficult and complicated way to do this would be to look at each city by itself and figure out how far it's food can travel based on the technology the civ has.

I was also intending on adding a farming specialist that could work more than one tile, so long as all the tiles were farmland (and perhaps only food would be generated on such land, but perhaps not). As technology progresses the farming specialist can work an ever larger number of tiles. This would simulate how technology had made farming more and more efficient.

Anyhow, this seemed somewhat related to this thread, so I thought I'd mention it. I am sure it could be tweaked a little to also discourage ICS. *goes off to ponder*

-Drachasor

PS. I probably won't get started on this until a week passes, given finals.

[petermarkab]

re: Drachasor
if you mod that, I'll play it!

ps. Finals?! do they really matter?

[Drachasor]

Originally posted by petermarkab
re: Drachasor
if you mod that, I'll play it!

ps. Finals?! do they really matter?

Well, it is probably the first mod I'll work on. I have a few mod ideas (Great Military Leaders that you can use to gain the ability to build a current Era UU is another). I'll probably do each idea seperately, but eventually I think I'll combine them together.

I will need to take some time to familiarize myself with python though. I've only used C++ and Ruby much.

-Drachasor

PS. Yes, I must ensure my exit from purgatory.

[Senethro]

UNLIMITED POWER!

[Guynemer]

What the hell is that?

[Vlad Antlerkov]

Originally posted by Senethro


UNLIMITED POWER!

Nifty, although as I recall, you can't legally have boreholes on tiles bordering water. Also, I don't think I've ever seen crawlers working tiles INSIDE the city radius of some city...

[Senethro]

Originally posted by Vlad Antlerkov


Nifty, although as I recall, you can't legally have boreholes on tiles bordering water. Also, I don't think I've ever seen crawlers working tiles INSIDE the city radius of some city...

Fortunately for the SMACheads, both of these work. In fact, you'll find boreholes mostly at the waters edge since boreholes have to be built at the lowest points of land.

Crawlers can't work a tile a city is working. The cities are stuffed with specialists, meaning the crawlers can work inside the radius.

Edit:

Originally posted by Guynemer


What the hell is that?

I should probably explain this. Its a screenshot of the Morganite faction in Alpha Centauri. The player shown has used super-farms, super-mines and orbital industry to be able to get size 18 bases even if they're 1 square apart. about 17 of those citizens will be specialists. Most likely Thinkers (equivalent of scientists in Civ4).

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Drachasor
Somewhat related to this, I am intending on making a mod that handles food in a very different way. Food will be able to move along trade routes from one city to another (perhaps between empires, perhaps just within an empire).

How would that affect population growth?

Originally posted by Drachasor
Of course, a more difficult and complicated way to do this would be to look at each city by itself and figure out how far it's food can travel based on the technology the civ has.

If special food resources can go anywhere in an empire - and to other empires as well - you don't need to worry about that in game terms.

[Russian_King]

so far the anti-ICS i've been encountering is the economic debt from building too many cities! they require lots of support and no longer produce that much gold! in fact u have to build COTTAGES for gold and that can be a pain in the ass because of barbarians and sacrificing growth and prod.
otherwise, i do like the way food is used to build settlers! makes it easyer to build em!
so basically it is now faster to spread ur cities overall, but u cannot do it too fast otherwise u will hit a depression!