ICS. Why is it sooo good?

[MJW (ya that one)]

In Civ2 I have heard that ICS is totally broken. In civ-3 it was still very good. It was so good that T-hawk said it was soo good that people did not use it because it so good that if it was used it would be the only uberstrat. In civ4 the problem was solved by de-facto capping the number of citites you could have until spaming more in your core would be a bad idea.

In civ 2 I have read that the game makers did some things that would be ICS suck. But it still was the uberstrat. They did even more bad things to ICS in civ3 (Corruption, 2-pop settlers) but it was still overpowered. The only winner in epic 12 used ICS. In civ4 they killed it but at the cost of the boring, dull growth curve we have now. I don't understand why ICS is so good and game-breaking. Can you tell me?

[MJW (ya that one)]

Also what are the "weak points" that Sirian is talking about and how do they work? One last thing. How much mirco is in civ4 compared to civ3 when your a hardcore power gamer?

Adventure Thirteen -has- been enlightening for me as the tournament director. We do have here a class of players who have figured out the game's weak points and are hitting them in every game. There is not one single weak point, but five or six. I must say that I'm not losing patience with the repeated use of these tactics so much as I am with the eye-rolling, the sarcasm, and the general mood of discontent from the bulk of this subgroup of players for whom our events really are "too easy" -- precisely because the events have been designed for general play, and not for those who MUST HAVE the silliness of higher difficulties to counteract the silliness of maximizing things like the CS Slingshot or systematic use of the 2-pop axe whip.

[Sullla]

As far as Infinite City Sprawl (or ICS), the reason why it was such a powerful strategy in previous Civ games was due to the way in which corruption and city costs were implemented. In Civ3, for example, it costs nothing to found additional cities - the city improvements (libraries, markets, etc.) are the things that cost maintenance. Civ3 also featured limitations that capped the size of cities until you reached certain points on the tech tree (most notably, cannot grow past size 12 until reaching Sanitation in the Industrial Era). If you play the game "normally", the way the designers intended, that means a very large amount of tiles will go to waste until relatively late in the game - after most games are decided, in fact.

With settlers being dirt cheap (a city under the right conditions could produce one every 4 turns), and cities costing nothing to found, therefore the right strategy became spamming as many small cities as possible all over the map. Each city required little to no infrastructure, increased your unit support (in certain governments), got ALL of the tiles into play immediately, and so on. Not to mention that cramming the cities together often allowed the savvy player to reap disproportionate benefits from certain aspects of the terrain (such as Urugharak placing THREE cities on the only freshwater lake in Epic 12, allowing them all to grow past size 6 without an aqueduct). ICS was the dominant strategy in previous Civ games just because if having 5 cities is good, then having 20 small cities is even better. The designers tried to reign in ICS for Civ3, but the effort was simply a failure. If every city past a certain point is going to be hopeless corrupt, then you might as well have 100 of those 1/1 cities packed together, whipping out stuff whenever possible, instead of 10 "normal" sized ones.

If your point is to argue that the cure was worse than the disease for Civ4, I'll have to disagree with you. ICS was bad bad bad for game balance, and it made for exceedingly boring games. You can in fact still play that way in Civ4, with lots of small cities - it just doesn't offer any real benefit to doing so.

[MJW (ya that one)]

There are other reasons why ICS is good. (in Civ3)
1. 2 small cities together grow twice as fast as one big city. This is so broken that this alone more than pays for the settler.

2. Way more culture. Also power is based on the number of citys you control so we can terrorify the AI without building any miltary.

3. The Draft/ Pop rushing

4. And if one becomes cramped one can just abonden the city.

I should think more before I post.
I think ICS was worse then how the system works now. Way more. But de facto limiting the number of cities your control is bad. It kills lots of gameplay. Read Sirian's rant about in epic 4 part 2. I was asking Is there a better way to kill ICS? In the first post.

[Blake]

I don't find upkeep is THAT limiting. It just creates resistance against expansion. It has no "optimal city count" or anything and that's great.

What is unfortunate is that More Land = More Power. It does take until currency and courthouses for this formula to hold true, because until the economy can be improved upkeeps tend to limit expansion. But once you're into the medieval you can "ICS" all over the place (either your own cities or with conquest) and typically this will result in a faster "peaceful" victory, except for culture.

There are many benefits to giant empires, they encompass many health/happy resources so all cities are larger, they have a massive population base for pumping out units, they have a tremendous ability to soak up damage due to a massive buffer of non-essential cities protecting the core - the non-core cities can be drafted into oblivion and such. And the giant empire researches faster.

What I think is that giant empires should research more slowly, as a form of global corruption, lets call it tech stagnation. It *shouldn't* be yet another upkeep (further overloading the commerce vector, as I believe Sirian would put it), instead it should just reduce the final beakers generated by a flat percentage. It should work that up to "1" average civ size there is essentially no stagnation, or say no more than 5%. Then it'd start increasing to about 40% at "2" empires and then tend towards 60% as the empire size approaches infinity. Tech stagnation would be not counter able at all (since if it can be, it defeats the purpose).

What this would do is make space race a less effective fallback if you grow giant - if you want to grow giant then go ahead, but be committed to a domination or diplomatic victory and don't expect to use that giant territory to research your way to an easy space victory.

Corruption type stuff is always unpopular, but this would not result in any cities being useless or anything. The curve should also be such that there isn't really an optimal size for maximum research speed. This shouldn't be very hard to manage, since in the late game the science rate approaches 90% (or even 100%), as expenses are nullified and also dwarfed by sheer income. As such a double-size, with a ~45% penalty, would research at about the same speed as the single-size empire. To a degree the optimal size for research speed would be a "fair" amount of land, with larger empires providing little additional research but much more production.

This would also create a realistic possibility of an empire become stagnant, if it conquers a lot of territory and doesn't bother improving it, the poor fringes would tend to dilute the research power of the rich core. Of course winning domination through sheer momentum would still not be at all difficult.

[MJW (ya that one)]

I wonder if somehow ICS fundiemeantly breaks the civ model. In Civ1 and 2 it was totaly broken. In Civ3 it was almost always the one right choice. In Civ4 it is a realtivly weak vaible strat. But it killed many areas of gameplay. Two-pop whip is much more powerful. I was just wondering if ICS is broken on a basic level or the makers of the game where just bad.

Speaking of the two-pop whip I think that Sirian made the wrong choice. Everyone must do the 2-pop whip trick during events in order to win. The 2 pop whip requres almost as much mirco as not wasting sheilds AND breaks SP. It also inblances MP by making it an overpowered civic. The casual player if he's willing to mirco will do so without wasted sheilds or two pop whip. The causal player that is not willing to mirco will not do so ether way.

So both choices have both the same mirco but one breaks the game and the other does not.