Ics

[Roman]

We all know of the ICS problem present in all previous civ style games, caused primarily by the fact that a city size 1 works two squares. I think that the system selected for ctp 2, with the city harvesting its entire area of influence might exasperate this problem.
On the other hand it could serve to reduce it if the area harvested increases proportionally (or more) to size, providing the initial harvesting area would also fit on the resulting size area graph linearly.

[Atahualpa]

Dont forget also that each government has a maximum number of cities it can support and if you exceed this number severe unhappiness follows. So that you actually have to spend time in bigger cities for effective research to discover more advanced governments to expand beyond the 10 city limit of tyranny!

Ata

[Lord Silvi]

I dont have a problem with ICS at CTP1. I always have the maximum number of allowed cities per government.
The solution is a problem for me.
But I think it has to be like that.

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For those who fight for it, life has a flavour the sheltered never know.

[DaveWhite]

Hey Guys,

I'm the Lead Designer on CTP2 and I wanted to address your concerns about ICS in CTP2.

The problem is a pretty sneaky one and it seems like no matter what we do to prevent loopholes in the design, stuff like this crops up in every game. Hopefully we've considered all the angles for this one and we have it licked. One thing for certain is that there are a whole lot of you guys out there who will be trying to take advantage of every flaw and loophole in the game and just a handfull of us to try and catch them all before we ship that there's bound to be a couple. I just hope they're minor. =)

As for ICS, I think it would be good to describe how our City Growth system has changed as that has the greatest impact on this problem. The government city maximum are still there and have been reduced considerably but that's just a stop-gap and not really a solution itself.

Cities in CTP2 have an area of influence that they control. This area starts very small when a city is first built and gets larger as the city grows. Newly built cities can only control the 8 tiles immediately next to the city. The next size up goes two tiles out from the city and is the same shape as the standard city influence from CTP1. There are 3 more sizes beyond that so cities can get quite large.

Another significant change is that workers are no longer placed directly on the city tiles. All the resources from the tiles in the city radius are used to calculate what the city collects. I'll use numbers from the game to try to make this a bit more understandable.

The first influence level is used for cities from Size 1 to Size 6. All of the resources available within those 8 tiles are added up and divided by the number of Workers working the terrain. The number of Workers is calculated based on the number of Citizens in the city (based on City Size) not counting those Citizens that have been assigned as Specialists plus the number of Slaves. This is just a number used for the calculations, the Workers never actually have to be placed down. So, if you have only 1 Worker, for a Size 1 City, you will collect one-sixth of the total available resources from those 8 tiles around the city. 2 Workers collect one-third, etc until all the resources are being collected with 6 workers.

When a city reaches the next influence level the same thing happens with the newly controled tiles. You will continue to collect the maximum resources from the original influence area, unless there are less than 6 Workers assigned. The resources from the tile that the city is located on are always collected regardless of the number of Workers assigned.

The influence areas of different cities can never overlap. Tiles are claimed on a first come first served basis and cities can never be built within the influence of another city.

How will this affect ICS? Well, the closest you can build two cities to each other is with one tile seperating them and only the first city built will get the full resources. Any overlapping tiles of influence will be lost to the second city and will effect everything that city tries to do. Additionally as the cities grow and control greater areas of influence one of the cities will grow around the other further cutting it off from vital resources. This coupled with the government caps should help keep ICS from being an issue.

Initial city growth and empire expansion will always be a critical part of the inital strategies of the game but a point will be quickly reached where the empire that has larger cities will far outstrip the production levels and power of other empires.

Hopefully, this was clear enough and answers your concerns about ICS in CTP2. Design changes like this to the game were made based on feedback we've gotten from many of the die-hard players of CTP1, many of them right here on this board, and hopefully the game is much better for it. I'm real excited about how it's turned out and hope that you'll all get hundreds of hours of fun play out of it.

[MidKnight Lament]

Thanks again for going to the effort of explaining this to us.

quote: All of the resources available within those 8 tiles are added up and divided by the number of Workers working the terrain

This got me a little confused though. I'm probably just interpreting this incorrectly, but shouldn't that be, "multiplied by (Workers/Possible # of Workers)"? eg. 2 Workers/6 = 1/3 of resources in city radius.

I've probably just confused the situation now. I think I've confused myself.

Anyway, where's all our resident ICS experts to analyse the new system?

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- MKL
"I'm OK. How are you? Thanks for asking, thanks for asking."
Shameless Plug: http://www.poetic-license.org

[Paul]

MKL, Based on the rest of Dave's post and applying some logical thinking, I have to say that you are probably right.

[MidKnight Lament]

Ahh, good. Thanks. Maybe I'm not going senile in my old age then. I'm 21 today!

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- MKL
"I'm OK. How are you? Thanks for asking, thanks for asking."
Shameless Plug: http://www.poetic-license.org

[Atahualpa]

Hmm yes MKL is right!

Nevertheless, I think with this new system you will have to place your cities real far away from each other.

Btw, I looked at a Civ2 map recently and I must say its crowded with grassland and plains. Whereas CtP maps are crowded with swamps and jungle and other unusable terrain.
Has the map generator from CtP1 been improved and if yes: How?

ATa

[Roman]

"The resources from the tile that the city is located on are always collected regardless of the number of Workers assigned."

Well it seems this answers your question about the city tile, but I think the mentioned changes will make ICS more difficult and possibly by enough of a margin to make it impractical to practice.

[Roman]

"The resources from the tile that the city is located on are always collected regardless of the number of Workers assigned."

Well it seems this answers your question about the city tile, Gedrin, but I think the mentioned changes will make ICS more difficult and possibly by enough of a margin to make it impractical to practice in most situations. If you have to space your cities so far apart you will soon reach the sea, or another civ. Moreover the city limit for the less advanced governments has been further decreased.

These changes do not address the main cause of ICS itself, but they may still succeed in solving it.

[Daniel Frappier]

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... The resources from the tile that the city is located on are always collected regardless of the number of Workers assigned.
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This is that extra "free" worker that is the problem, but we will have to wait to see how all the other changes have made an impact.

I never understood why peoples says it's impossible to kill that free worker because it will make small cities to difficult to grow. In Civ II the food box's size is (population + 1) * 10 , this is that simple equation that is at the heart of the problem because as a city grow the ratio of extra food needed to grow again is less and less every time the city grows. A simple change of the food box's size to (population * 10) would have mean that a city (with no extra worker) would theorically take the same time to grow no matter the city size.

As an example if we have a size 1 city with a worker on grassland that produce 1 extra food it would take 10 turns to fill the food box.

A city of size 6 with 6 workers on grassland that each produce one extra food would also take 10 turns to fill the food box. (because it is 6 * 10)

Then ICS would no longer exist.

[hexagonian]

Regarding the worst terrain factor, if this is the setup being used.

Since terrain does play an important role in defense modifiers (an additional 50% to 100% per unit), a player will have to ask himself whether he would be better off building on bad production/defense terrain (such as swamps, desert, tundra) to gain some production, or build in a forest/mountain (sacrificing some production for the sake of defense).

It would help if the AI would pose more of a threat militarily, so this decision becomes more critical.

Of course, the easiest way to eliminate ICS altogether would be to eliminate the worker within the city (so a pop 1 city is truly a pop 1 city). All tiles within the city radius, including the tile which the city is built on would be worked.

With the new setup, a city probably will be more balanced overall in terms of producing food/production/gold, since you will be taking the entire radius into account. It sems that the new setup will equalize cities in the short term, making individual city growth management easier. I'm not sure this is progress, but until I play with the new setup, I cannot be too critical.
On the other hand, the trick will be in placement of cities in relation to one another - with a view for future growth.

A question - can you still emphasize food over production in a city (and vice versa) in the new setup (via different means, obviously), as you are currently able to do in CTP1 by moving workers?

[Gedrin]

*Bonk* I never noticed that line and that is the sort of statement I was looking for... can I blame it on coffee?

Ok so it looks like it is option 2:
Lets not forget that in order to make ICS more difficult things must impact an ICSer more than a non-ICSer.

While City limits do impact an ICS first they also impact a non-ICSer that has simply taken over half the world dispite his sparse cities just as much. An ICSer would race quickly to that limit and then strive for the next more advanced government. It's the tortoise and the hare but this time I think the hare would win out.

Next consider terrain. An ICSer is looking for many small areas of good terrain where as a non-ICSer wants fewer large areas of good terrain. If large areas of good terrain are available they can be sub-divided into smaller areas of good terrain. Hence suitable ICS style terrain seems easier to come by... but I will grant it should be less so than at present.

Lets not forget the impact of happiness and city size. Cities get to a certain point where another pop does you no good anyway since they must go to entertainers.

Well let me just conclude here that it is exceedingly difficult to make ICS a non-viable option while the root cause of it, the free working of a tile, is still there.
By this I mean if you can express the tiles worked in a city as = c + fn(pop) where c is a constant != 0 then ICS in some form will likely be present.

Having said that I play with a few triggers.
1. Bureacracy Tax -> gold cost = fn(aveCityPop);
So many small cites is really really bad.
2. PopMigration -> a # of Citizens = fn(aveCityPop) will leave your smallest/newest city and join the civ with the fewest # of cities.
3. Disseminate which if you play with the Med Mod you already know about... this just really keeps the tech on the timeline as a result of my B-Tax trigger.

This sort of thing directly punishes anyone ICSing since low average City Pops are the halmark on an ICSer.

PS. and a little off topic
My next trigger projects include:
-Terrorist strikes from independant radical groups for anyone with score well above the average score... embassy/government building bombings, that sort of thing.

-Civil Dissobedience for engaging in practices that might annoy your general populous. Like starting unjust wars, nuking indiscriminantly, capturing cities (this represents resistance groups in the occupied citizenry). My thoughts on this one are sparked by the rise and fall of empires concept and how they can fall from pressures both within and without. It will not be something you can affect directly either... at least not in the sort term. It will involve a delta and a rating. You can try to reduce the yearly delta but your empire may already have a future date with destiny.

I guess this last one is an attempt to turn it from strict resource management into a more accountable leadership model.

SLIC can do these things... course they'd be a lot easier with user defined arrays!

[Slax]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but does this mean that if each tile contained 1 unit resource, then

1 city of size 4 collects 6.33 res
4 cities of size 1 (packed) collects 7.83 res
4 cities of size 1 (dispersed) collects 9.33 res

1 city of size 6 collects 9 res
6 cities of size 1 (packed) collects 10.83 res
6 cities of size 1 (dispersed) collects 14 res

(note: the city packing pattern may effect the exact res collected)

Is this right?

[Dauphin]

There is one thing i'm not clear on. Say you build a city that has 4 good tiles and 4 useless tiles. Will all the tiles be worked on from the beginning - no matter how useless? Tundra for example.