T-hawk Wrote:It's not identical to Civ 3. Both 3 and 5 push towards ICS, but in very different ways. In Civ 3, ICS was mostly a matter of working around the tight hard caps on city size, 6 pre aqueduct and 12 pre hospital. The only way to add more tiles was to add more cities. If not for the caps, one Civ 3 city at size 15 would be better than three at size 5, because the former needs only one copy of each building and its maintenance.
Civ 5 pushes towards ICS because of all the per-city benefits. Maritime food is the major offender of course. But also there's so many buildings that produce without caring about city size, like the granary and water mill and stone works, and most of all the happiness buildings. Adding an extra city in order to add new copies of the colosseum and theater is always more efficient than building a stadium. And social policies mostly add benefit per city as well, like the Liberty culture and hammer policies.
City builds are not identical between Civ 3 and 5. Civ 3 cities always labored to get their production multipliers up: granary (food multiplier), a culture expansion (available tile multiplier), then the library and market series. Civ 5 cities first want to leverage the direct production of the granary and monument and happy buildings, and care about multipliers only later.
About the only thing Civs 3 and 5 have in common towards ICS is the escalating food cost. In both games, growing to size ~7 is very efficient but then the pace of growth slows down. It's cheaper to add another city for another 7 size than to grow the first city from 7 to 14. Civ 4 avoided this by scaling the cost of food growth more slowly and smoothly. But in both games, this concern is only a sideline and not primary.
Million Dollar Question though: What model of city growth & production do you think makes for a better game?