Ics

[Gedrin]

Timothy:

You make some excellent points.
The lower city limits will make ICSing less effective. It is the city sphere thing that I have my doubts about.

With respect to point 1) RE: concentration of effort.
Let me first state that I do not know how that is going to work. Having said that however I infer from what I have read that this is done via specialists. Otherwise the statement that a size 6 city with X workers works the sum of 8 tiles * X/6 would not be correct. Workers would still be placed by the program in this event. I get the impression that it is more generic than that and you simply get a percentage of all the terrain without any picking and choosing taking place.

With respect to point 2) RE: Government thresholds.
Lower thresholds do reduce the potential of ICS by lowering the wall so to speak. However is a player who controls half the map with 50 cities on it ICSing or just doing well. Is a player who controls 1/4 the map with 25 cities ICSing or doing well to any lesser degree? I see ICS as the strategy of rushing to the city limit as fast as possible and foresaking all else. Lower city limits just lower the potential gains by this but they do not invalidate the strategy.

Let me elaborate by example. We have a player who rushes the the city limit of say 10 and another who plods to it on identical terrain with identical city placement. Once there they both stay at 10 until both have the same total pop.

Do we have distilled out the effects of terrain, city placement and capital distance in this little thought experiment.

My assertion is that the player who rushes to the city limit will have worked more total tile turns than a player who plods to the city limit by the time they are equal in population. In addition since the 'rusher' has more smaller cities for longer than the 'ploder', the 'rusher' if far more able to exclude poor terrain tiles within the sample terrain even though the cities are in the exact same location. This assumes of course that cities are logically placed within good terrain and away from poor terrain. Thus the 'rusher' can make better use of his workers within this time since poor tiles do not begin to get worked until later.

Also consider that when comparing city pops it is more appropriate to consider the number of tile turns it took to produce the food to get that pop.
Size 1 cities work 2 tiles per turn effectively and require X food to grow... whatever X is.
Size 2 cities work 3 tiles per turn effectively and require 2X food to grow... whatever X is.
The required food has increased 100% while the effective tiles worked only increased 50%.
Hmmm... but then again, this is the whole crux of ICS so not to relevant to discusions of specific CTPII impacts on it...

Lower city limits are not unique to CTPII. I was focusing on the new provisions in CTPII and their effects on ICS. Also lower city limits has profoundly negative effects on military victory options.

Finally the optimal distance is in fact based on your expected city sizes when the game is over. ICSing causes such a rapid growth that one is usually able to eliminate all opposition long before you get to max city sizes so distances of 10 between cities does not apply to an ICSer... unless of course the benifits are not enough to criple everyone else by then.

Anyway I must go now... til the 'morrow.
Gedrin

[Slax]

When it comes to concentrating on Growth, etc, I agree with Pintello. It seems simple. If I have 20 Gold, 20 Food and 20 Commerce available from my tiles, and collect 1/6 (if a size 1 city) then I collect 10 resources, but these resources could be any fraction of Gold, Food, and Commerce. They could be 10 Food if concentrating on Growth. I have not considered the city tile.

[MidKnight Lament]

This was the sort of discussion I was looking for! ICS always felt far too much like cheating to me, (although, I know it's just making the best use of the rules), so I don't have a great understanding of it.

That said, I thought Tim's points were quite poignant. I was also thinking about the Distance from Capital issue, but unfortunately wasn't able to get online yesterday. But then, if someone ICS's early on when it's not punished, and manages to capture some decent-sized enemy cities, then perhaps they can get away with it.

It would be fantastic if we were met with a choice early on as to whether it's in our best interest to ICS. On a large continent where you're not likely to be bothered for a while, it seems we would be best not to push the city limits too early, and instead make sure you have a good base of medium-sized cities. However, if we need early military strength, perhaps we can eliminate our close enemies using ICS and recoup our losses by using their larger cities that we've captured. If we were forced to choose which strategy, it would be great. We just don't want ICS to always be the better option.

Hopefully if everything is balanced properly in CTP2, we can be met with this sort of situation.

Let me know if I'm off-track though.

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

[Roman]

Hmm, good thinking Gedrin. On the surface it seems that you have to take your settlers further to build cities and that would hamper ICS, but as you said the greater availibility of small patches of good terrain without the flexibility to assign workers will probably offset this.
I really like your idea of starting cities at size 2 and having settlers cost 2 population points, with one of the consequent 2 workers being permanently assigned to the city tile, though I think it is too late to implement it now.

This would in fact shift the balance sharply in favour of larger cities, since only 6 workers are required to work 8 tiles surrounding the city, making the worker on the city tile less productive than the others.

[Roman]

I am interested in your Pop Mig and Tax triggers. Where can I find them? Are they on Apolyton?

[Slax]

Although I've never 'fleshed-out' the idea, I like the solution of restricting most city improvements according to population. This way a production multiplying improvement is only available to a size 6+ city, for example.

[Atahualpa]

quote: If I have 20 Gold, 20 Food and 20 Commerce available from my tiles, and collect 1/6 (if a size 1 city) then I collect 10 resources, but these resources could be any fraction of Gold, Food, and Commerce.

Correct me if am wrong, but I think its rather 3.33334 (20/6) Gold 3.33334 Food and 3.33334 Commerce that you collect!

[hexagonian]

Concerning ICS in regards to empire size...

CD cut in half the number of cities in empire size and imposed heavy happiness penalties if you exceeded that limit. In one of my PBEM games using the Apolyton Pack, one of the players used a standard ICS strategy for his empire. His civ blew up in his face (his three main cities revolted) because he ended up exceeding the the empire size allowed for his government and the unhappiness caused revolts.

In my own single player games, I'm constantly having to curtail empire growth via peaceful means because I am at the cap of my empire size. So I end up not building new cities after a point in time, because it becomes more pratical to go out and conquer cities that are already developed. This was never an issue in the default game, because the cap was so high.

So imposing these large penalties and capping empire size will work to some extent. It may not get rid of the problem altogether, but it is a move in the right direction.

Activision has already said that they are reducing the numbers for empire size in CTP2, which is encouraging.

[Slax]

Ata - This is the point I'm making. I envision resource collecting as all of the resources going into 1 pile, and then a ratio of the total (in this case 1/6) is collected by the workers. They can select any one of the three types of resource.

Is this incorrect?

[Atahualpa]

Slax: I am sure that it doesnt go in one pile! Just think a forest tile produces 20 production. Now how should that be food?
From what I have read and from what I think all the different resources of all 8 tiles are added up and then multiplied by city_size/6 + the city tile.
Else it would be odd to have a city with lots of grassland around it and with lots of farms and you could choose if you want production, commerce or food as output from the grassland+farms tiles
I dont believe thats the way it is.

I hope I understood you correctly.

Ata

[Gedrin]

Hey Slax:
I understand the scheme you and Timothy describes I just don't think (with my current available information) that it is the way Activision did implement it.

However without more information from them it is hard to say.

The way I do believe it is done is you get the same percentage of each resource being collected and concentration is done via specialists. However I do see a problem with concentration on growth in such a scheme. Are there Farmer specialists now? Your scheme would not need Farmers... or Laborers. What about concentration on Commerce? These questions would suggest what you describe to be more accurate.
I don't know. I think we need Dave White to clarify this for us. DAVE!!!! Little help?

I think we are starting to go round in circles here.
Here are a few points that I think we are trying to make:

1) Lower City Limits will hamper ICS: The main problem IMO of using City Limits to curb ICS is it treats a symptom not the cause. Yes, it will curtail ICS by capping city counts but it will also curtail military conquest. The hallmark of ICS is not many cities. It is many cities with low pop in a relatively small area. I've even mulled over the idea of 0 city limits and a fairly small penalty per city to go over it. However such a scheme punishes a player with 15 size 10 cites as much as 15 size 1 cities. It is indiscriminate.

2) Aspects of the 'inability to place workers' will promote ICS: The use of more smaller cities over fewer large ones permits one to exclude poor terrain. Additionally if the terrain between cities consists of many dead or very poor terrain then who cares if the spheres overlap. Including nothing is the same as excluding it.

3) Since the number of tiles worked is 1+fn(workers) ICS is not completly eliminated: This is the root cause of ICS. Whether or not other aspects make ICS inviable without undue impact on other strategies must remain to be seen.

Did I miss anything?

My primary concern is the impact of lower city limits on military conquest.
General: "Sir, Sun Tzu teaches us to turn our enemy's resources against him!!!"
Politician: "Sun Tzu be dammed General, we can't afford to because I'll go way over my city count!!!"


One might also ask if smaller cities are always happier. Man is a social animal after all. It might be better to have an optimal size.

Gedrin

[Slax]

Ata - Dave White said:

"you will collect one-sixth of the total available resources from those 8 tiles around the city"

"total available". Although, I'm not sure that my interpretation is correct, it could mean what I said above, but you don't understand what I mean. Commerce can't become Food or vice-versa. Its like a pile of apples, bananas and oranges. If you are concentrating on Growth, the workers take mostly Food first (the apples), until it runs out, or you reach some fraction as determined by sliders, or something. Then the others are taken, also according to some fraction. The total number of resources (fruit) they can take depends on the number of workers.

But I digress. Back to eliminating ICS!

[Pintello]

Hi All,

I have just looked at the CTP2 Asset Pack that you can get from the CTP2 Website. One of the images the Asset Pack contained was a City Management Screen. Picture ctp2_9.jpg to be specific.

In that screen they had the following specialist: Entertainers, Farmers, Laborer, Merchants, and Scientist. I guess these coincide to the different resources that can be aquired from you city radius. To the right of the specialist, they had a list of what looked like areas to concentrate on. Those areas were Production, Growth, Offense, Defense, Science, Gold, and Wonders.

I don't know if this has anything to do with anything, but it is where I got my idea about how cities can be set to specialize in certain areas. In this case the Mayor function was on, so I guess you can tell the mayor to specialize in one of the listed areas for that city and he will optimize it in every way possible to acheive that goal.

I think spcializing a city in, say the area of Growth, for the first part of a game would do a lot to eliminate the competative advantages of the ICSers out there. With all this specialization possible, I think ICSing just becomes one of several different strategies you can follow in the early game to be sucessful in CTP2.

Timothy Pintello

[hexagonian]

Agreed - The limitations on empire size do slow down military conquest and actually allow the human player more time to build up military - one thing that the human player does not need, given the fact that the AI has not been capable of putting a concerted effort into launching military strikes against the human. (It basically allows the human to put a stack of 9 in the field as opposed to a stack of 5, because he is forced to wait a few turns)

Gedrin - As you said, ICS will always be a problem because what it boils down to, is a player gets two workers for the cost of one (and some production outlay). Unless the programmers eliminate the bonus worker, this will always be an issue. The idea of making the settler cost 2 workers from a city is a viable solution. But that means that a city has to be pop. size 3 before it can build a new settler unit.

If you impose an additional happiness penalty (entire civ) using total population divided by the number of cities (where if you fell below a certain number, your happiness would fall) that might slow down ICS somewhat.

Example...

penalty kicks in at (1.5) or below

5 cities at pop. 2 each = 10 total pop. / 5 = (2) -> no happiness penalty enacted

10 cities at pop. 1 each = 10 total pop. / 10 = (1) -> happiness penalty enacted

This additional unhappiness factor would affect a civ with a lot of small cities (classic ICS setup) but wouldn't affect a civ with a healthy mix of cities.

You may have to start this formula when your empire hits 3-5 cities, to allow for initial growth.

This becomes an issue at the beginning of the game, when happiness is more easily thrown out of whack. Then you have to adjust one of your global settings to a less than optimal setting, in order to use ICS.

There already is a penalty in CTP for cities that are too big - but this penalty mainly affects large cities only, - it will drag down your average civ happiness, but at a slower rate.

I do not know if this is viable - (it definitely needs to be finetuned, as I am just giving a general concept).

It does seem that as long as there is that bonus worker, there will be ICS. You may have no choice but to deal with the symptoms instead of the root of the problem.

The other solutions provided (Bureacratic Tax, for example) are really the same principle. A penalty on ICS...
[This message has been edited by hexagonian (edited September 29, 2000).]

[Dauphin]

I think the best idea I've heard so far is the concept of city size limiting what you can build. That way small cities might get more free workers but larger cities have opportunities for larger bonuses - greater than that of a free worker.

For example: Say markertplaces & banks require a city size 3. Once a marketplace is built it increases gold by 50%, equivalent to a city 4.5. Then a bank increases by 50% to 6.75 (Is it compound interest?). In such a setup the production exceeds that of ICS. One city of size three will take up less land area and be able to produce more than three size one cities. As the city grows further the net 125% bonus will be more greatly felt - a city size ten gets 10*1.25 = 12.5 extra (equivalent) workers - it would make ICS ten extra workers insignificant.

Also, if you only allow certain units to be built in cities with certain improvements it becomes even more important.

Comments?

[This message has been edited by Big Crunch (edited October 01, 2000).]