Originally posted by yin26
Ah, but so many 'experts' tell me "ICS is fixed!"
And when I say that the AI has only made the city mess even worse, they booed and hissed at me. Go figure.
Ah, but so many 'experts' tell me "ICS is fixed!"
And when I say that the AI has only made the city mess even worse, they booed and hissed at me. Go figure.
The exception is the production bonus gotten by commercial or industrious civs, which is in effect a (small) city square production bonus. Thus these civs have a small ICS leak.
Which will slam into the onerous currption rules - but corruption is an _extraenous_ factor to ICS, and is left out of the discussion here, to not confuse the issue. Especially as it is a whole 'nother can of worms.
Flattening the pop growth curve for small cities does not reintroduce "ICS" through the backdoor. It fuels the problem people are complaining about, but the problem IS NOT ICS. Anybody who played CivI or II extensively should know this by now, and is performing a disservice by using the already defined ICS acronym to point to a _different_ problem.
So, with that off my chest, what to call the new problem? I propose TCS, "Territorial City Slease". The strategy is not economic - to compound returns on the city square bonus - but territorial: to grab space and deny it to others. Resource control are another issue and should be put aside here to focus on the general case (and if colonies were more than marginally useful, would be moot to the main point here). The territory you grabbed might be relatively economically useless to yourself, but you can deny it to another, closer, civ to whom it might be much more useful.
Unfortuantely, I believe this problem cuts to the core structure of the Civ series: its' "city-centricity". Productive force and military logistics are tied to the city like a ball and chain. The introduction of the Culture feature/functionality has actually accentuated city-centricity by adding a new dimension of power that is entirely dependent on the existence of a city (and the core wealth - or quantity of lumberjacking workers, just to mention another exploit - to fully realize it).
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