The ultimate ICS thread: analysis and solutions

[supremus]

Korn, I think we are in essence saying the same thing. You say there's a problem with the game balance and I agree. The difference is based only in what could be the better way to solve the problem. The better solution depends on what we think the game should be oriented. I prefer, as a Civilization game, it remains as close as possible historically oriented and you seems to prefer it can be balanced independently of it. Maybe they can attend both, making the balancing alternative as part of the options menu. For ex:
1 - ICS is possible like in civ II and larger cities will have a turbo financial engine that gives them extra money from size 7 on.
2 - ICS advantages will be reduced using one of the models developed here (some of them are very inteligent btw)

P. S. I liked your British XIX century example. They did ICS a lot in North America and Australia and that's the reason they became the largest empire of the mankind history. And that's also the reason USA, Canadá and Australia as theyrs heirs became so large countries. ICS works in real life !

[pikachu]

I have two ideas for you to criticize. I prefer to keep the solution to be simple and stupid.
1) For each government type, there can be a productive range of average citizens. Outside the range, some or all cities suffer additional corruption of 30%. For example, productive average citizens in despotism is 1 - 3. Monarchy is 1.5 - 5. The numbers can be tweaked. The idea is similar to be Bureaucracy point idea. But it is easy to understand.
2) To simulate the need of one (or several) strong city for an civilization with integrity (My belief is, no strong figure, no powerful civilization), if the proportion of small cities is much bigger than the proportion of big cities (size 3+?), the small cities have a chance of becoming independent minor nations (if minor nations are to be implemented). The number can also be tweaked.
I am sure that similar ideas have appeared before, but these should be simple enough to be understood.


PikaPika!

[The Joker]

korn:

Fine idea with the Hospital improvement.

Still looking forward to that summary!!

Supremus:

You can not actually say that Civ2 is realistic compared to human history. ICS does not work in real life for a very long time. In Civ2 the Romans, the Mongols, the British and all the other previously mighty realms would have stayed strong and ended up concouring the world. But that didn't happend. history has shown that all great powers has collapsed at one time or the other. Even without any foreign power winning wars against them they have collapsed. This is not so in Civ2. When you become the mightiest civ you allmost always stay that way. In order for Civ3 to have it's gameplay made better and more realistic there has to be something done against the infinite spread of cities.

After all, the british empire collapsed even though it used ICS.

[supremus]

Joker,
Yes you're right too. There's a basic unbalance in Civ2 when you use a perfeccionist strategy. I agree. But that is the point should be fixed, not the ICS.
About the rising and fall of the civilizations in history, ok, you've got a point here, but anyway that's the point where the game is a game, you have to use as accurate as possible history to try to win a game, so YOUR civilization has to be allowed to last forever or the game will not be a game. Anyway, China is a good example of a civilization thal lasts for thousand of years and did ICS a lot. In a certain way we can say the same about India. And Japan is a good example of a civ that lasts from thousand of years too and DID NOT make ICS.
My conclusion: We should not ask for putting ICS more difficult in Civ 3, but to improve the chances for winning to perfeccionist strategy.

[S. Kroeze]

Dear Korn469,

I don't want to be hypercritical. You did a great job by organizing the current Fixes/New Ideas list. Thank you!
And of course a Civgame doesn't need to be realistic or historically correct.

But please read and consider my posts about the relationship between food supply and population growth before introducing hospitals and the like! Some specialists like Harel have a different opinion on this subject, but most professionals publishing and lecturing about it agree on the essentials:

-before 1935 the influence of medicine on population growth was of secondary importance only
-before 1800 doctors probably killed as many patients as they cured; they very often spread infectious diseases and enfeebled the sick by bleeding

"Under agriculture there was a beginning of control of the environment, and an increase in food supplies led to a decline of mortality and expansion of numbers. But reproduction was not effectively restricted, and populations increased to the size at which food supplies became again marginal. As many of the basic conditions of life were unchanged, non-communicable diseases were still rare; but living together in large numbers and unhygienic conditions, human beings had inadvertently created precisely the conditions required for the propagation and transmission of many infective organisms. Infectious diseases became the predominant causes of sickness and death.

For nearly the whole of human existence, as in the Third World today, numbers were excessive in relation to the resources available, and ill health was due mainly to the multiple effects of poverty. These effects have varied in different periods, but the constant and major determinant has been lack of food. There could be no more convincing evidence for this conclusion than the fact that in developing countries such as China and India (in the state of Kerala), which in a few decades have attained western standards of health, the advances are attributable almost entirely to improved nutrition; there were no substantial improvements in water, sanitation and personal health services, and immunization coverage was low. But the effects of poverty are also manifested through various hazards, particularly exposure to infectious diseases through defective hygiene and aggregation of large populations. The deficiencies and hazards derived from poverty are the major causes of sickness and death in the Third World today, and they are also largely responsible for the ill health of many poor people in developed countries. Moreover the difficulties will increase because of rapid population growth - the world's population is expected to double before it stabilizes - and the movements of people from rural to urban areas. It is painful to imagine what health conditions are likely to be on the streets of Calcutta or the outskirts of Mexico City in the twenty-first century, when the population of each city will be well above 20 million"

source: T. McKeown: 'The Origins of Human Disease', 1988

[korn469]

S. Kroeze

what changes would you suggest for my model?

if you give me some specific changes i will go back and reevaluate it and change where it is appropriate...but i mean specific civ changes to game play, not historical facts cuz i'm decent with the first one and not so decent with the second one

also i am going to use the failure of the state i wrote the other day as the basis for the second summary which will eventually get
here just give me some time guys

korn469

[Vietcong]

I dont see the prob wif ICS.
I mean i am a perfectionist. I like to make huge citys before i make another one.
Usually i make a large army too. If i see my neighbour builds 10 cities while I still have 1 i know that he has almost no units there. So wheni wanne exspand Ill just take one of his cities. I he complains ill eliminate him completely.
So where is the prob?

[BOSS Roller]

Here are a collection of ideas that may be useful in solving the ICS problem. Some combination of them would likely help solve the problem WITHOUT introducing any new concepts to an already deep game.

Unit Support:
Number of units NOT needing support from city must some FRACTION of the CITY SIZE (anywhere from 0% to 100% (despotism) depending on the government). If it remains 1 per city or 3 per city, then the more cities the better (which we do not want).

Happiness:

If happiness were removed entirely from the model, then it would cease to be a problem. However, this solution is unlikely to find much support; even from myself. More acceptable solutions might be to either:

1) lower the number of luxuries needed to make a citizen happy to 1 (from 2).
2) lower the number of shields necessary to produce happiness improvements.
3) lower the maintenance cost of happiness improvements.
4) increase the benefits of happiness improvements.

Expanding into a Vacuum:

I agree with Youngsun here. Yes, the world is far too empty and safe at the start, thus promoting ICS. I think that the world should either:

1) be filled with huts, many of which containing barbarian villages.
2) be filled with more civilizations - perhaps 20 or more (depending on world size and user choice).

This would force the player to fight his way into territory in order to expand and would be much more realistic. In fact, this feature alone might solve the ICS problem.

City Site Restriction:

It would be illegal to build a city inside another city's city radius (or perhaps even ADJACENT to another city's city radius) . If a player attempted to build close to an unseen city, the city would be exposed just like when you are asked to leave an enemy's city radius.

Early Factory:

There is no early city improvement that increases the production of resources by 50%. The first one is the Factory. If this improvement were introduced at a similar time to the marketplace and library (as a Workshop perhaps), then this would promote early city growth.

Other Ideas that don't affect Gameplay:

City Size: In response to S. Kroeze, I think that the scale of cities should be changed to be more realisitic. Instead of multiples of 10,000, the population should be represented in multiples of say, 2,000. Hence a city of size 8 would have a population of (1+8)*4*2,000 =72,000 rather than 360,000, and a city of size 20 would have a population of (1+20)*10*2,000 =420,000 rather than 2,100,000.

[Father Beast]

Allright, I apologize for not paticipating in this earlier, and there has been a lot of deep thinking on the part of almost everyone here. but I realized today that this is actually very simple.
The problem of ICS arises from the fact that the number of tiles produced is (City size) +1.
The obvious solution would be to make tiles produced become = city size. That means at size 1, you only produce the city square itself. This would also address certain other matters of concern.
all the other stuff is a matter of jumping through hoops to get around the central problem, ultimately leading to other problems to crop up later on.

[Father Beast]

Consider the effect of having 1 tile being produced for each citizen.
- go with the concept of each citizen eats one food, and all else the same.
- the city actually grows faster as it gets bigger, eliminating Korn's gripe about it being harder for large cities to grow.
- you could not build on a mountain tile, since you could produce no food. (the heck with Alexander's Horse!)
-if you turn your one citizen into an elvis, your citizens starve, and the city dissappears, providing an alternate way of getting rid of inconveniently placed cities.
- If you found a city on a non shield grassland square, you can't produce anything off the bat, but your city would grow to produce another worker in time, just be careful where you build.
- this doesn't address the problem of multiple cities having more unit support, but that is nicely balanced against the opportunity for more citizens and production.
- and IMO, balance of different methods is one of the beauties of this game

[yin26]

Bumping up this very interesting issue...

[yin26]

How about having settlers cost two population points to build. (thus, you won't get an extra worker for free when you build a city...) Another possible solution is to not allow cities to build settlers until they are size 3.

What do you guys think?

[Father Beast]

Yin,
I think that's going around the issue and we should only have 1 worker per pop unit.
Simple.
effective.
hits at the root of the problem.

[TheLimey]

My most recent Civ game, one using CtP with Wes' Med Mod beta 5 on Emperor, shows that there are other solutions to the ICS problem, rather than eliminating the extra worker square.

CtP introduced a few features which directly effect 'ICS'ing'.

Firstly, you can remove the city tile bonuses as a penalty for the city itself, thus implementing basically what you're suggesting here. While it was certainly an interesting experiment, it wasn't universally loved.

One problem with the one worker per pop model, is the 'lack of excess' when you're dealing with less than optimal terrain. City foundation on mountain squares and so on is unattractive enough at the moment, while it would be very attractive from a strategic standpoint.

The second idea it took from Civ2 and expanded was an unhappiness penalty for number of cities. It went further, however and is specific based on the government.

Where it went wrong was that it had far too high limits to be confining. Also there was a balance problem with Theocracy (which was intended to be useful the game through, which unfortunately made it far too powerful in the early game). Celestial Dawn's and Wes' Med Mod have solved these limit problems by lowering government limits enough to be confining and including a 'modern' form of Theocracy; Fundamentalism, and toning down Theocracy.

The third idea is government specific capital distance unhappiness penalties. There is a minimum distance, up to which cities don't face a penalty, and past that they face an increasing penalty, up to a maximum. These have been optimized in the CD/Wes mod to severely hamper distant cities. Cities may even die after their creation, as they riot as soon as they are built, if you've not provided a suitable garrison and transportation network.

A way of reducing these is to decrease travel time through roads (and later railroads etc.) Of course to build roads you need to divert production from regular building... reducing headlong expansionism.

The culmulative effect of empire size & distance happiness penalties isn't a banning of ICS

(EDIT: well actually it DOES stops ICS in its truest sense, since you can't create infinite happiness, or even perhaps more than a 3 or 4 happiness bonus, in a small city,)

but a steadily reducing benefit, as you need to compensate by wonders (which go obsolete), happiness improvements (which take time to build and gold to maintain.) and entertainers (reducing the productivity of the city.)

In my opinion, the balance is just about right here; allow that extra worker to still exist, but set firm penalties for 'overloading' the governing capacity of your government (and relax in modern, and allow for more in post modern governments.)
[This message has been edited by TheLimey (edited June 20, 2000).]

[Urban Ranger]

Simple Way to Eliminate ICS: Remove the Settler unit

Create another unit that can transform terrain but cannot build cities.

Let cities develop by a set of rules, e.g. proximity to food and other special sources.


Thought on Infinite China Syndrome:

Throughtout history, the peasantry in China didn't care much about discrepancy as long as they were left alone. This has a lot to do with Confucianism, with a central theme of predestination.

However, as soon as some dumb king started to do stupid things, such as drafting peasants for army or levy heavy taxes, resent started to build. When the inevitable natural disaster triggered peasant revolts, the cycle would start again.

I also don't think that a large civ needs to spend a lot on research just to preserve knowledge. Again, I am using China as a reference. The central government never had any interest in science other than astronomy, yet a large body of scientific and technical knowledge was maintained by the people.