Proposals to Fix ICS in Civ3: Firaxis, please stop by...

[Comrade Tribune]

Re: i think they have fixed ICS

Originally posted by korn469
ICS isn't the same thing as expansion, ICS was basically a way to exploit the game mechanics in order to achieve an advantage, in the same way a player would station a bomber over a stack of units to keep them from getting killed

ICS existed because of the following reasons

*by building a settler 1 pop essentially became 2 pop with the free settler
this is fixed in Civ3

*a large number of size one cities supported far more units than a few large cities with equal pop
this is partially fixed in Civ3

*size one cities grew exponentially faster than really large cities
this has pretty much been taken care of in civ3

civ3 has done a fairly good job of breaking the mechanics that made ICS work but what's left is a situation where it's either expand or die, and you can say the exact same thing about starcraft...plus larger cities are more valuable in civ3 than what they were in civ2, so exceptions to the expand or die rule will exist

Korn, I totally agree with this post: 'Expand or Die' is not as bad as ICS.

Yin: Your solution is too restrictive. Furthermore, I don´t quite get this: What´s the problem with enslaving his settlers? You get 2 workers, he gets nothing: Great deal? Then threaten his cities, make peace with him, if he sends settlers again, enslave them again!

[Meneer Popken]

I skipped over some parts of this thread, so I hope this hasn't been mentioned yet, but my ideas about this problem are:

Borders should be respected always. You only cross borders to attack or if you have agreed that it is allowed to cross them, this would make the game more realistic and would solve the problem of the AI building cities in enclosed areas of another civ's empire. Bad side might be that it would be possible to cordon off an area and stop all growth of an enemy, but the AI is handy enough with boats, so that shouldn't be too much of a problem.

Second thing is to make borders of high culture cities not retract when someone else builds a city next to the other city. Now an enemy gets all 8 surrounding squares if they lie in 3rd or beyond culture range of a city. It's not realistic and allows for stealing resources etc without causing a war.

[Comrade Tribune]

Originally posted by yin26
It's not that I can't beat the AI that does these things. I'm killing India in my game, for example. It's just that it's not very satisfying. I was bored after the first 30 minutes playing land grab and 'watch the AI walk through my territory.'

Yin, think of it as 'Illegal Immigration'. That problem has continued to persist to this day.

[Comrade Tribune]

Originally posted by Skanky Burns
Yin, you need a new acronym to describe this, since it isnt ICS.

What about 'Infinite Expansion Madness', IEM ? (I am not yet fully convinced that it is a problem, though.)

[Comrade Tribune]

Originally posted by Talenn
Even something so simple as making it so that a city must have a pop of at least 4-5(?) before it can build a settler would cure many of the problems. This would cause those little worthlessly placed cities to be effectively dead-ends and would slow up early spreading in favor of building up some cities, which would in turn, encourage some real cultural development to keep those cities functioning properly.

At any rate restricting where you can build limits a lot of strategies IMO and takes a lot out of the decision making in the early game. I'd much rather see a system where it was far harder to colonize instead so that you have to prioritize your locations more and thus, you'd have less worthless placeholder cities.

This seems the best solution. Simple and elegant.

[yin26]

TechWins has highlighted the issue nicely: I predict that in a few weeks time, more and more players will begin to complain that AI's 'expand at all costs' is cranked up too high and is actually at some point HURTING the AI's empire.

Yes, yes, yes. I know that I can easily swallow up his cities. The less thoughtful people in this thread think I am arguing that those cities somehow hurt ME. They don't! They hurt the AI by being senselessly eaten up by my culture expansion.

I want the AI expansion to curb back at a more reasonable moment to focus on its own infrastructure.

Sure, it works when the AI has lots of land with which to work. It should STOP doing this stuff once it has to resort to plopping down size 2 cities between mountains in the middle of your empire.

This gets the AI nowhere, people. Consider that point. The expansion needs to be more refined and the player should still have more consistent control over how trespassers get delt with.

[player3]

As I said before, I consider the AI's wanton expansion into my territory to be a clever strategy at disrupting my own expansion. It doesn't necessarily harm me per se, but it doesn't make things any easier either. The AI actually positioned itself within my territory so as to sever my trade route on one occasion (much to my dismay), so it can be effective. And the worst that can happen is that they lose one worthless city to culture influence. No big loss really, since settlers are cheap to build resource-wise.

With regards to discouraging ICS, I think a more effective approach would be to give players more incentive to favor large citys over numerous smaller ones. You could give bonus resources, commerce and culture to citys based on population, for instance. There are plenty of possibilities without having to severely restrict expansion.

[Bosh]

"AI expansion is great! Awesome, in fact! But the AI will expand at the expense of his own empire and common sense regarding borders."
"Sure, I could. But that just means the expansion AI is forcing me into wars every game. It shouldn't have to play that way."

Hmmm Yin you seem to be contradicting yourself is the strategy self-destructive for the AI, or so effective that it forces you to emulate it?
Ray K really hits the nail on the head, the solution isn't to impose artificial solutions like population caps, rules about where to place cities etc. (many of which would do just as much to hurt us bloodthirsty conquerers, such as the current corruption in Civ 3). What needs to be done is make cities in piss-poor locations be unable to grow until quite late in the game (at least without huge investments in workers) and generally be just a drain on resources. Having cities grow slower without granaries would also help since it would slow things down a bit to have all of the expansionists have to pause a bit to build granaries.

[yin26]

What I mean is that the AI needs just a bit more tweaking as regards to where it sets its cities. If, for example, it can slip behind me and start grabbing great tracts of land ... well, that makes sense, especially if the AI can't expand backwards because it is next to an ocean or something.

Those kinds of expansions are awesome and a great lift to the game IMO. Yes, I do the same in that situation.

But: Even if we argue that settlers 'don't cost all that much,' we have to agree that yes, in fact, settlers and cities that are destined to do nothing but get swallowed up are a bad idea for the AI and a bad idea for the player. That same settler either A) put in a better position or B) left to help grow its orginal city would produce better results.

Now, I understand that for both the AI and the human player, this is always a luck and risk factor. That is cool. And I'm not saying the AI should never try to found a city unless it has some magical 100% assurance of success.

But there clearly are a number of times that the AI cities could never get him anywhere. I suppose this is a bit of "Throw enough at the wall, and some of it will stick." It's a solution of raw force that will have increasingly dimished returns as players learn to counter it better.

[joseph1944]

The one way to stop ICS is ask Firaxis to recode the AI not to build on Tundra at all, can only build in Jungle after clearing, and on desert tiles only if 6 of the 8 surrounding tiles are grasslands or plains. Another is stop the trespassing unless right of passage is given.

[player3]

Yin, I'll grant that the AI doesn't seem to have any strategy behind infesting your terrritory with worthless citys. As you noted it's a sound strategy for the AI to take advantage of neglected land within your borders, but there are other times where their intrusion seems to serve no purpose other than disrupting your expansion.

Still, there seems to be some intelligence behind it. In the aformentioned situation where an intruding AI city cut off my supply route (I was exporting incense to Greece) I was forced to build an alternate route through mountains and jungle to re-establish trade, only to learn that the intruding AI began exporting THEIR incense to Greece as soon as they cut me off!!! I was both pissed and delighted (in that the AI was clever enough to think of something so sleazy). It almost seemed like a HUMAN strategy and not the product of a befuddled AI.

Now, I'm skeptical as to whether that was really their intention all along or the whole situation was just a coincidence of the AI dropping a city in the right place at the right time. But you have to wonder...

But as to whether the AI benefits from building worthless citys in your territory; in the scenario above they definately benifetted, but this is rare. I think if they've already filled their territory then it only makes sense to colonize whatever open space they can find, even if it only serves to disrupt YOUR empire.

[yin26]

But as to whether the AI benefits from building worthless citys in your territory; in the scenario above they definately benifetted, but this is rare. I think if they've already filled their territory then it only makes sense to colonize whatever open space they can find, even if it only serves to disrupt YOUR empire.

Well, I'm almost certain it was just lucky. Again, throw enough and something will stick. But I take issue with the second part of the quote: Actually, if their territory is filled and if there is no reasonably good territory to grab they should INVEST IN INFRASTRUCTURE! [sorry, I'm not shouting at you ].

Again, this is particularly so since they don't disrupt your empire in any significant way with those cities but they DO disrupte themselves. Even in the spectacular case where your trade route was severed (something I'm sure you'll simply watch out for next game), I bet you could easily have built roads or just waited until you absorbed his city with your superior culture.

Basically, I think there is a 'sweet spot' that the AI needs to hit, and I feel as it stands the AI was turned to 'maniacal' on the expansion setting perhaps to hit us all hard as we first learn the game, in which case it is somewhat disruptive.

Two months from now, though, I think we'll be begging for a smater AI, and one of the most important things we'll analyze then is better placement of AI cities and its know when to stop expanding and invest all the saved resources in its culture and army.

[player3]

I noticed that the 'AI not spending enough on infrastructure' issue has been brought up by other people, and I agree that their citys are often woefully undeveloped. Then again, MY citys don't develop as easily as they did in Civ2, either. This still doesn't explain the 'senseless' expansion that we've all noticed though, so my assumption is that this was intended to disrupt player expansion. I honestly don't think Firaxis would have missed something like this, and it must be intentional (then again, I've been wrong before about erronius 'features' in SMAC)

One other thing I've noticed is that the AI likes to keep spare settlers in case a space suddenly opens up. I remember one instance where I raized an enemy city, and the very next turn a settler (escorted by a spearman) from another nearby civ comes running in and plops down a city right where the old one was! Now that's some aggressive expansion!

[yin26]

Well, it's a fact that game developers who don't invest in an open beta/alpha pretty much have to try to guess how the general public will adapt to a given AI strategy. Actually, even an open beta/alpha won't always tell you.

So I think Firaxis is looking at how the public is playing since we are the 'real world' environment for which the game was intended. It is only my humble opinion that some tweaking will have to be done to this AI expansion code.

Keep settlers on stand-by just to claim an empty square 20 some odd turns later isn't quite efficient. It's certainly an interesting plan and can have payoffs under the right conditions, of course.

I will wait now and see how public opinion develops on AI expansion and AI efficiency.

[player3]

On a side note I think the AI in general is quite intelligent. After reading your account of your first game and the 'British Invasion' it sounds like you would agree.

Naturally some tweaking might be needed on the expansion issue as well as others (corruption perhaps) but like you said it's going to be several weeks before any of us figure out the AI completely.