Early-gaem deity base-spacing paradigm

[Aginor]

Wow been a while since I was around on the SMAC forums...

Anyway, been kicking around CivIII - as someone has mentioned this game is obviously designed to stop our old school strategies for getting a lead and keeping it. To me this is unfortunate as it destroys what we would call "civ" gameplay but that's neither here nor there...

I have been fiddling around with base spacing during the land grab trying to figure out what the most efficient spacing paradigm is. My experience is that ICS does not work well (to start) as you NEED to grab as much dirt as you can asap. OTOH if you overextend with a non-industrious civ your road network takes FOREVER to catch up, slowing your expansion by several turns per city.

Seems to me that 5! spaces in each direction from the starting city is optimal (due to the palace culture boost), followed by 4-spacing. The reason this is strong is because it expands your borders as much as possible yet still permits you to come back and build ICS cities in between after the land grab to despot-rush soldiers. I have found that with the computer's GREATLY stronger expansion capabilities you need to carve out as much turf as you can with what little you get to work with <g>

Needless to say this feels very strange to the Yang player in me & my habit of 3-spacing, but whatever.

I have been playing largely as the Persians - I like Industrious workers quite a bit and feel that you might as well have your special unit early on while you can slam it out with despot-rushing.

While I have logical reasoning behind what I am doing here it does not seem to operate at maximum efficiency to me...perhaps because the computer cheats so much & I am not used to losing early lol...any thoughts?

[Dominae]

Aginor, a city-spacing plan that works well for me is to space 4 tiles apart during the early expansion. This simultaneously allows you to grab a lot of land early on and grow some nice cities later in the game. The AI pretty much follows this plan to the letter at all difficulty levels (I haven't tried Chieftan, so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on that one). However, there's a lot more to early expansion that this simple plan.

Your intuition that placing cities too close is a bad idea in Civ3 is only partially correct. At the beginning of the game, you want to position yourself to get as much land inside your borders as possible. By "borders" I don't necessarily mean the colored lines you see appearing around cities. The borders I'm talking about are more like "virtual borders" (essentially, how much land you control that the other civs can't or won't immediately settle). After placing a few core cities, I try cut off a big chunk of land from the other civs by creating a wall of cities around it (this usually only involves 3 or 4 cities placed at a good chokepoint). At this point, my "borders" consist of all land within my cultural borders, plus all that area the AI can't reach without going through my wall. I then look to expand toward the AI, before settling the land behind the wall. I'm sure you've used this kind of strategy before. My point here is that, in Civ3, doing this sort of thing is essential to beating the AI in the early-game land grab. If you place your cities too close, the AI will end up with a lot more land, which translates into 1) better cities and 2) greater access to strategic resources. Furthermore, you typically won't have that many more cities than the AI because it produces Settlers a lot faster than you. So, early on, placing your cities the "normal" 4 tiles apart allows you to expand well, preventing the AI from getting away with too much land.

(I find the early-game land grab in Civ3 is quite similar to the game of Go. If you've ever played Go, I think you'll understand the analogy).

Once the early land grab is over, you should feel free to pack your cities as you see fit. As was demonstrated by Aeson is another thread, ICS is alive and well in Civ3. I try to go for a hybrid strategy. For example, if I've got a lot of nice food-producing tiles around one particular city I'll plop another couple of cities around it and get some Worker factories going. So, packing cities close together is still a very strong strategy, you just need to make sure you're done expanding first.

To sum up, my suggestion to you is to initially place your cities at the "optimal" distance of 4 tiles apart. Afterward, fill in the spaces between select cities to increase your number of production centers (I usually disband these after a little while, but that's not really important here).

Another important factor is road-building. I recommend setting your first Workers on building a good network before any other type of improvements. The turns you save doing this are gold in Civ3 compared to Civ2 and SMAC. If you like Industrious civs, all the better!

I hope this rather long post is somewhat useful to you!


Dominae

[PhoenixPhlame73]

I like the four space idea because it allows for the maximum amount of cities without having overlapping borders. The first time I played I tried to do it with 6 between because I didn't know if it would be like Civ:CTP2 where your city expands when your population goes up enough, though as far as i know it will only expand up to two squares from your city, anyone know if this is true or does it expand more over time (I know that culture does).

[Aeson]

ICS is still alive and kicking. On Deity it's the only way to outexpand the AI that I've found. It means about half corruption from distance. An ICS spaced Empire basically gets a free Forbidden Palace, and when the Forbidden Palace is built, it helps corruption even more. Settlers take less time getting to their city sites, and you don't need as many Workers building roads.

I can sometimes build cities at a 5:6 ratio of what the AI does with 4 spacing. It's very very rare though. Usually more like 1:2. With ICS I can usually triple or quadrouple the number of AI cities by 10AD. In my current game I've been neglecting my expansion for some time now, building up Temples, Libraries, and Knights. Still I have 73 cities at 390BC, and will just about double that by 10AD. That's not counting any cities my army will take by then. The largest AI has 33 cities.

[PhoenixPhlame73]

1) What does "ICS" stand for???

2) How do you pull off 73 cities?!?!?!?! Can I have some more info???

[ledj]

It depends on the play style, in an early conquest game (tiny map, 4 civ) you only build 1- 3 cities. The game is over before city sizes pass 12. So a space of 3 is ok. On the other hand, a space race game may requir a space of 4.
IMHO.

[punkbass2000]

Originally posted by PhoenixPhlame73
1) What does "ICS" stand for???

Infinite City Sprawl

2) How do you pull off 73 cities?!?!?!?! Can I have some more info???

The theory behind ICS is to build as many as cities as possible as close to each other as possible. It's virtually an exploit, IMO, as it's just too effective.

[Aginor]

Originally posted by Aeson
ICS is still alive and kicking. On Deity it's the only way to outexpand the AI that I've found. It means about half corruption from distance. An ICS spaced Empire basically gets a free Forbidden Palace, and when the Forbidden Palace is built, it helps corruption even more. Settlers take less time getting to their city sites, and you don't need as many Workers building roads.

I've noticed that eventual ICS spacing is clearly the way to go...been wondering how all you guys manage to stay unmolested for long enough to come back through & fill in the gaps without having to fight an ugly war first, and your picture of that huge map answers my question (great pic btw, laughed for a while at that)

Still I'm not quite sure how you all manage to stay in the tech race early...I can't buy 'em fast enough, & if i devote any time before 1500 BC to brawling it throws me soooooo far behind in the land race...I can only get one level of tech for conquering a victim, & while that can be helpful if I get to Writing it still doesn't quite do the trick in catch-up!

Been trying to take advantage of the one positive for the human that was added in 1.17, the Legion/Immortal upgrade from Warriors trick...doesn't work as well as I'd hoped for early rushing though. Last game I got into an ugly early war with the Aztecs (that 1500 BC thing) & fought pretty much to a stalemate after my first three objectives (cities) were achieved. Bagged the big city and the two flankers on my frontiers, but never could get the momentum to get a sustained push on Tenochtitlan for the Hanging Gardens and capitulation, as he had more/bigger cities than me for most of the 500-year war anyway & slammed out units as fast if not faster than me. The Immortal is definitely lethal, but obviously I needed a little more patience to have an overwhelming force b/c if you get into a brawl the attrition KILLS you...will have to back up & take another stab at it buying off Montezuma for a bit longer so i can go to ICS before I try to take him out...

Again, been playing too much Yang in SMAC so patience no longer my strong suit

[Aeson]

Number of Cities:

Every city builds a Settler every time it reaches size 3. One becomes two, two becomes four... ect. These doublings occur on average of every 15-25 turns, usually the 15 to start, and slowly declines as you pass the corruption barrier. In the BC's there are 127 turns. With a Settler from a hut, that starts you out with 2 cities, and time for 6-8 doublings. 64-256 cities are possible in the BC's, without counting any that are taken/demanded from the AI. Since "power" is highly subject to number of cities, you can usually renegotiate peace treaties and get AI cities in return.

Tech:

I was playing on a Huge/Pangaea map as the Expansionist Iroquois. The Scouts (about 20 of them) were able to grab most of the huts on the map pretty quickly. I got every ancient era tech from huts. That put me about 4 techs ahead, which allowed me to research 2 techs first, Feudalism and Chivalry. I demanded Monotheism from one of the Scientific civs.

Defense:

Scouts are great defensive units. In some ways they may be the best. You'd think that a 0 att 0 defense unit wouldn't work that way, but they do. Intelligence is key. If you have Scouts in AI territory (and you should), you can see a "sneak" attack coming a mile away. Scouts are also great at providing diversions, the AI will chase them if they are inside or next to the AI's cultural borders, sometimes even farther out. I've fought 3 wars so far, one was a "Scout only" war. My Scouts just led the english army around in circles until they were ready to surrender!

Having so many cities means you can react quickly to any situation. If you see a line of AI troops heading your way, it's relatively easy to build up a large military quickly. Consider that I could switch to Despotism one turn, and pop rush 50 Mounted Warriors on the next (cutting off my own Iron or trading it away).

It's virtually an exploit, IMO, as it's just too effective.

I agree, but I'm playing this game for a CivFanatics HOF submission, and it's not against the rules. Getting the highest score possible means taking advantage of any legal strategy, exploitative or not.

In my "for fun" games I usually use a 20 tile city pattern.

[No.Dice]

Aeson: How big do those cities usually grow before the overlapping/micromanagement becomes too much? Later in the game, are some of those cities disbanded to make more room for growth?

Oh and, are you just pop-rushing or joining workers to the cities prior to pop-rushing? I'm not too familiar with how this works in 1.17.

Thanks

[Aeson]

They can usually grow to size 6 before railroads, more or less depending on the terrain. With Railroads most cities will still be near the Hospital limit. In the BC's they usually don't get larger than size 3 though, they are all producing Settlers whenever possible.

It's possible to disband the cities in cases where they are too crowded. I wouldn't do this before Mass Transits because of pollution. If you wanted to you could start out ICS, and then just relocate each city later on. It would probably still be more efficient than most any other expansion pattern. The core cities would be behind in improvements though.

I only pop rush what my luxuries will allow. A Religious civ can pop rush temples for free, they take care of their own unhappiness. Adding workers to be pop rushed can be useful, but I prefer to keep the workers active at least until all the terrain is improved. After that there isn't really any need for pop rushing anyways.