Despotic Pop Rush = New ICS?

[gamma]

From reading all the posts here on despotism pop-rushing, it seems like it's the new ICS.

Should it really be this powerful? There doesn't seem to be any downside to it except for the unhappiness. If your town is a unit producer, you can solve unhappiness by turning it into a settler and then replanting it.

Shouldn't pop-rushing in one town increase unhappiness in other towns? And what about the people that "left"? Couldn't they become refugees that join your neighboring civs? Or resisters? And should there be any impact on that town's culture?

[Velociryx]

I think yes. We've got some pretty in-depth discussions going on over in the strat thread about this very thing.

Despotic Rushing is soooo much more powerful than "traditional" ICS ever thought about being....it's just insanely fast! In next to no time, you can crank out an overwhelming number of troops, and there's a variant I'm working on whereby many (half) of your cities set about working on cultural improvements.

True, it halves the *military* effect of Pop-Rushing, but since culture is a pretty integral part of the game too, I think it's important to give both sides of that particular coin close attention.

In my test games thus far, nothing else even comes close.

-=Vel=-

[GeorgeG]

Yes it is. I never got very good at pushing and ICS strategy in CivII, but the reason was I stayed mostly on Price level. In playing on King and higher, I did find that ICS was needed not just because five pop 2 cities produce units faster (15 squares being worked) than a single pop ten (eleven squares being worked (and grow faster etc)). ICS was driven by the unhappiness, so it was a natural response to unhappiness; to simply deport the desperate and poor to found new cities, because to build city improvements takes time, drains upkeep, and you aren't building militarty units.

So along has come despotic rushing (I've also seen it called REXing?). Most of my games, my starting location is not really good for it, but I recently started a game in a massive floodplain. Production is fairly poor, but so what "The people crave an iron fist." So I tried for the first time sacrificing the people, and the empire exploded in every compass direction. All I needed to do was to procure some luxuries to distract the people with debauchery and circuses. Yep, probably too powerful.

[quinalla]

It is powerful, but at least the AI uses it too, not to the extent that they will get rid of a super-unhappy city and replant a settler in the same spot, but they certainly use it to rush-build things.

[ThaddeusAlexander]

Not that this means anything, but I just wanted to add two things.

IF you're going to use this strategy, build granaries ! If you don't , i will personally come to your house and beat you with the limited edition tin you got the game in.

Also, i think under communism it works better - under despotism, your irrigation usually does nothing ( which makes me wonder why the AI builds so much irrigation ... ) but once you can irrigate and bring in the extra food (not to mention the railroad bonus over irrigation) then you can pump out tanks and boats and planes and whatever super-fast ....

Cheers
~Alex

[Asher]

I rather like the pop rush.

[player1]

It can be easly fixed by Firaxis.

Just any city should store real unhappiness.
So if you did 3 pop rushes you should have -3 happines, not just -1 happines because city is of size 1.
So you'll need to have at lest 2 Martal Law units & Temple to have content person.

[Fitz]

I was actually thinking that exact same thing player1. But I was wondering what the ramifications would be.

In SMAX, having too many cities had exactly this effect, to a certain extent. The extra unhappy citizens from a large number of cities could create unhappy citizens that were "twice as strong", effectively a -2 happiness. The maximum "negative" happiness was therefore 2*population.

I don't know how easy that would be to code. Obviously it has been done before, so maybe they can do it again, this time in relation to despotism.

Vel had an idea in another thread: Diminishing returns.

Basically each rush returns 10 shields less than the base 40 until you get to 0. After a certain number of turns, the level goes up again. If the number increased by ten evey time the "associated" unhappy citizen disappeared, this would work well.

[dexter4dxm]

Originally posted by GeorgeG
So along has come despotic rushing (I've also seen it called REXing?). Most of my games, my starting location is not really

i thought REXing was the exploitation of forrest harvesting around cities with lots of corruption

[Monoriu]

REX = Rapid early expansion. In the early phase of the game, you do nothing but build settlers, temples and warriors to expand the borders of the empire as fast as you can. The cities will be "normally" spaced.

IFE = Infinite forest exploitation. Plant/chop down forests repeatedly to get shields.