The Ultimate ICS Thread: Revived (author: korn469)

[yin26]

Since this has become a hot topic again, I thought I'd post this for some people to consider. --Yin

The ultimate ICS thread: analysis and solutions

1. What is ICS?

ICS also know as infinite city sprawl, is a strategy in civ games where a person seeks to create an endless amount of cities radiating out from a central hub. these cities generally lack the overall infrastructure of a so called perfectionist strategy where cities are spread out and are highly developed. the perfectionist strategy calls for maximizing each city's production. ICS is about optimizing your civ's overall production.

2. Why is ICS a problem?

ICS is a problem for a multitude of reasons, but the biggest problems arise from the current civ models for city production, unit support, the happiness model, and the growth model. i will address each model one at a time

city production:

the civ model for city production is base squares worked equal number of workers per city plus one multiplied by the total number of cities
or
(W+1)xC where w=workers per city and C=total number of cities

additionally each city is a production center

for example we have two civs: the green civ is a perfectionist civ with one size 10 city, the yellow civ is an ICS with ten size 1 cities

the yellow civ started with one colony pod and spent 270 minerals building nine more, each of the yellow civ's city have no infrastructure...

the green civ's city has the following alpha centauri infrastructure...a recyling tank, a recreation commons, a hologram theater, a tree farm, and one 1-1-1 police units costing 260 minerals...

all citizens of both civs are workers, and all citizens are working a forest square; there are no special resources or economy or industry bonuses

the yellow civ's total output is:
base square: 20-10-11 (+1 for HQ)
workers: 10-20-10
total: 30-30-21
surplus: 20-30-21 (minus people eating)

the green civ's total output is
base square: 3-2-3 (+1 for HQ)
workers: 20-20-10
total: 23-22-13
surplus: 13-22-6 (minus people eating and maint.)

additionally the yellow civ has ten production centers while the green civ only has one

unit support:

using the same stats for the yellow and green civs, if both civs have zero support ratings in the social engineering table, gives us

the yellow civ can support 20 units for free
(2x the number of cities)

the green civ can support 2 units for free
(2x the number of cities)

happiness model

using the same stats for the yellow and the green civs we get the following happiness scores

on librarian on a standard map at zero effic.

the green civ has a total of 10 workers seven of them are drones before base facilities and garrison units
four are taken care of by base facilities
three are taken care of by the police garrison unit (assuming the green civ has a police rating of +3)

the yellow civ has no drones

the growth model

with adequate food and a pop boom the green civ could only grow one citizens per turn, while under the same conditions the yellow civ could grow ten citizens per turn

also it cost ten food per worker to grow a base by one citizens so at size one the yellow civ's bases would only need one tenth of the food to increase by one citizen compared to the green civ

Solutions and analysis:
this is only the first installment of proposed solutions, and only a brief analysis for now...i intend to further explore causes, effects, and solutions for ICS plus add in more analysis

Re: city production:

although i am unsure of what to do about the (W+1)xC problem, i do have one proposed fix for this...advanced cities after building some facility should be able to produce more than one unit per turn...in Alpha Centauri i would suggest that each factory facility (genejack, robotic, nanoreplicator, quantum converter...) should add a new building slot...so if a city had all five of those facilities it could produce a maximum of six units at once

Re: Unit Support:

this is quite simple to fix. add in global unit support. give one point of support for each population unit. a side note to this is unis get more advanced and costly they should cost more support.

Re: Happiness Model:

though not as easy as a fix as unit support (which could be implemented in various ways but would still have global unit support as its crux) civs with a roughly equal population should have roughly equal drones reguardless of cities. Also, and this though not completely related to overall happiness, does have direct consequence to the problem. A city should not be able to have more specialists of any kind (i'm mostly refering to doctors/empaths/transcendi) than it has workers (until it's of a huge size like 20+), and a city should always have to have at least one worker.

This would stop people being to escape drone riots at will by simply turning workers into specialists to avoid drones. currently it is possible to ALWAYS avoid growth related drones only using specialists, without units or facilities if you are paying attention. This model would also help enfore the pacifism penalty. Currently a size one city with the only citizen turned into a doctor could support an entire army and suffer no pacifism penalty. With supply crawlers ferryingminerals back it could easily support 10 needle jets which normally would incure 20 drones due to pacifism. Also, pacifism drones like unit support should be global (working in the same way as ineffic. drones do)

Re Growth model:

this is fairly simple...do not base the growth model entirely on food surpluses

korn469

[splangy]

ummm this is civ 3 not alpha centuria

[yin26]

The same principles apply...

[yin26]

Some of the other ICS threads could really use this information. Trust me...so I won't let this thread drop for a while.

[joseph1944]

Originally posted by yin26
Some of the other ICS threads could really use this information. Trust me...so I won't let this thread drop for a while.

I believe this problem as you call it, is going to corrected by the new model. That is, it will take a city size 3 before you can build a settler, plus a city size 2 before you can build a civ worker. Until we know how fast the city can collect enough food to gain 1 pop. point, why should we worried? When the city start out, the city worker will only be able to work the first 8 tiles. This will be the big item. If each tile produces one food item, per/turn, then it could take a long time before we gain a pop. point. However if each tile is producing two or three foods per tile, per/turn, then we would gain a pop. point a lot faster, and therefore be able to produce settler a lot quicker. If I remember correctly Dan M. said they (Firaxis) are going to slow down the number of cities that you can build.

[yin26]

Yes, "slow down" is all the Firaxis 'fix' will seemingly do. ICS will still be with us...but slower. Not sure if that's a fix or an annoyance. We might well just have much slower (and potentially boring) early games.

One thing I like about korn's suggestion is to simply allow bigger cities to produce things simultaneously. In fact, the inability NOT to produce more than one unit a time has always been a weakness of the game, IMO. So giving this ability to bigger cities makes perfect sense and offers a substantial equalizer against a slew of tiny cities producing at a fraction of the rate.

[KrazyHorse]

The point is, if an ICS player's expansion is slowed, but the growth of a perfectionist civ is not slowed (or even just slowed less), then ICS becomes less attractive comparatively.

[yin26]

Slowed? = Yes

Less Attractive? = Perhaps

Fixed? = No

But let me just say that making expanding your cities too much of a hassle would also slow the game to such a degree that it might be horribly boring for too many turns.

[KrazyHorse]

It's just a matter of scale. Eventually, ICS becomes so difficult to support that a more balanced approach to gameplay will win 90% of the time.

[yin26]

Yes, scale is my point. 10 cities can produce / support a lot more and a lot faster than 1 10-size city. This is scale. Not only that, but those 10 cities have the added bonus of taking up more map and getting to better resources faster.

We won't know until we play, of course, but I'm willing to bet that the computer will still fall for the same old tricks. What this might help with, however, is against a human player who will be more clever in using a mix of ICS / Perfectionist strategies. That's fine by me.

[korn469]

well from what i have heard i think that firaxis is trying their best to make ICS a thing of the past, however i am not completely sure if all of their ICS safeguards will work

first let me point out that their is a difference between expansion and ICS, all good players will expand and the players who expands the most should have an advantage over a player who neglects expansion...however ICS is more or less an exploit of the game mechanics, it is not really about expansion it is about taking advantage of how cities work...

2 pop settlers and the seperation of settlers and workers will curb ICS to an extent but this alone will not end ICS, it will however for all practical purposes take away the extra production square from founding a new city...but this is only one of the reasons that ICS exists

the second way that firaxis is attacking ICS, is by supporting military units with gold...this has been mentioned in various previews and if it is true, then it could curb ICS more than 2 pop settlers, because this will take away all of the free support units that exist in civ2

in civ3 if two civs have the same population and the same form of government and the same number and types of units in their army, then they should have to pay the same amount of upkeep on that army...

i'm not saying that a democratic and a communist army should cost the same to support but i am saying that two 20 pop communist civs should have to pay the exact same upkeep on their 10 rifleman army, if one civ has a single size 20 city, and the other has twenty size one cities it shouldn't matter...and i really have my fingers crossed on this one (in civ2 the twenty size one cities would provide twenty times the amount of support, which causes ICS)

firaxis also has another ace up it's sleeve with special resources...if implemented correctly, special resources could really hammer an ICS empire, and by being done correctly, i mean that if a single special resource node is supply ten cities who are all building legions then that iron deposit should deplete at a much higher rate than if just one city is using a an iron resource node to build legions

then there are two other X-factors that are present in civ3 that could make ICS as widespread as in every other civ game, and that is population growth and wonders...

the fact that ten size one cities need the same exact amount of food to grow by ten population points as one size ten city needs to grow by one population point is going to encourage ICS...firaxis needs to reaxamine this and make changes as appropriate

then there comes wonders...

wonders could be really interesting and could add spice to civ3, like for example if sun zu's war acadmy gave all cities with a baracks some special benefit...instead of sun zu's just counting as a barracks in every city

all of the wonders that simply "counts as buildingX in every city" breed ICS, bore the players, and are really less than wonderful

it is my dream that civ3 will NOT include any wonders that simply count as a certain building in every city (or even in a certain number of cities)

if all wonders could grant certain special abilities to a civ, that did not duplicate the effect a building but instead either enhanced the power of a certain type of building or just let that civ do something special then i would be a very happy person...we need more wonders like the network backbone in civ 2.3 (SMAC) and less wonders like the command nexus

so i hope that ICS won't exist in civ3, but until we have more information i'm really not sure if firaxis has done enough to end ICS or not

[yin26]

The MAN himself shows up! Thanks, Korn. I think your explanations and comments on this topic have been outstanding. I'm glad I dragged you back in here.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Yin, you know this was a subtle ploy to get Korn back in here .

Nice analysis, korn... very interesting.

[To_Serve_Man]

I agree with Korn469.. the new features that are going to be added to Civ3 will change ICS. I wont re-state them, Korn already did it very nicely.

But my real problem is, why do we need to get rid of ICS? ICS should be part of Civ3. Theres more than one way to skin a cat. There is more than one way to play Civ. Theres no need to Solve ICS. There needs to be news ways to promote different types of games styles.

[polypheus]

Originally posted by To_Serve_Man
I agree with Korn469.. the new features that are going to be added to Civ3 will change ICS. I wont re-state them, Korn already did it very nicely.

But my real problem is, why do we need to get rid of ICS? ICS should be part of Civ3. Theres more than one way to skin a cat. There is more than one way to play Civ. Theres no need to Solve ICS. There needs to be news ways to promote different types of games styles.

As has been said many times, in Civ2, ICS is the optimum strategy to use. It is not merely one of many possible successful strategies, but is the optimum strategy. This is mainly owing to the game mechanics as described well by korn469.

By "solving ICS", most people mean that it is solved in such as way that an ICS strategy is risky and not necessarily optimum most of the time but not making it impossible either.

The point is that ICS should NOT be the optimum strategy to use all the time.