Ideal distance between cities?

Slynky333 said:

Sorry, but what does ICS mean. Thanks!

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Finally found an explanation somewhere. Thanks anyway.

Slynky333 said:

Sorry, but what does ICS mean. Thanks!

Click to expand...

Infinite City Sprawl (sometimes people prefer Spawn or Spam for the S). It's when you build as many cities as possible, packed in tightly (sometimes as tight as possible, sometimes just very tight) and keep building them in preference to growing up. There were variants in earlier versions of Civ, in Civ5 you have to manage happiness (Happiness building + small size, Forbidden Palace, Planned Economy, Meritocracy, and Piety are all used in different variants) and be ready to stop getting social policies once you start the sprawl.

France and Arabia both work well for it in 5 and India has a hard time, but any civ can pull off some flavor of it. (France gets their policies quicker before starting the sprawl, Arabia gets a lot of benefits from multiple tightly-packed trade routes)

Pantastic said:

Infinite City Sprawl (sometimes people prefer Spawn or Spam for the S). It's when you build as many cities as possible, packed in tightly (sometimes as tight as possible, sometimes just very tight) and keep building them in preference to growing up. There were variants in earlier versions of Civ, in Civ5 you have to manage happiness (Happiness building + small size, Forbidden Palace, Planned Economy, Meritocracy, and Piety are all used in different variants) and be ready to stop getting social policies once you start the sprawl.

France and Arabia both work well for it in 5 and India has a hard time, but any civ can pull off some flavor of it. (France gets their policies quicker before starting the sprawl, Arabia gets a lot of benefits from multiple tightly-packed trade routes)

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Thanks for a more in-depth explanation.

Arabia just gets +1 gold per city. China is better because with their Paper Maker they get +4 gold per city, which becomes +5 gold when you build a Marketplace and +6 gold once you also have a Bank.

Egypt is also pretty good for it because their UB is a temple without upkeep that gives +2 .

Another thing to note about ICS is that you generally want to stop growth at size 4 and that you only want to build a few buildings: Library, Coliseum, Market, Bank.

ICS = Infinite City Sprawl/Spam
edit: oops, didn't realize there was a next page until I posted!

Pantastic said:

Infinite City Sprawl (sometimes people prefer Spawn or Spam for the S). It's when you build as many cities as possible, packed in tightly (sometimes as tight as possible, sometimes just very tight) and keep building them in preference to growing up. There were variants in earlier versions of Civ, in Civ5 you have to manage happiness (Happiness building + small size, Forbidden Palace, Planned Economy, Meritocracy, and Piety are all used in different variants) and be ready to stop getting social policies once you start the sprawl.

France and Arabia both work well for it in 5 and India has a hard time, but any civ can pull off some flavor of it. (France gets their policies quicker before starting the sprawl, Arabia gets a lot of benefits from multiple tightly-packed trade routes)

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I assumed you started right out (let's say turn 50) doing this...there's an optimum time?

I've been kind of thinking about trying something which could maybe be called an "urban center" strategy. It's a bit of a variation on the ICS strategy (which I've never tried). Basically, you have "urban centers" of 3 - 5 cities, one of which is the 'core' urban center (strong producer of hammers, gold, culture, etc, as appropriate based on terrain and empire needs), the others of which exist mostly to grab somewhat nearby resources more quickly, provide coastal access, and otherwise augment the core strength of the urban center they surround. The group of supporting cities could be called 'suburbs'.

In terms of trade routes, the suburbs would be connected to the urban center, and the urban center to the capital.

Anyway, this may just turn out to be a redundant, neutered form of the ICS, but I thought it might be an interesting way to organize the core of a mid- to large-sized builder empire that doesn't rely on conquest for early - mid game expansion.

Slynky333 said:

I assumed you started right out (let's say turn 50) doing this...there's an optimum time?

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You can't start right out, as you don't have the techs or policies you need - you can't deal with happiness, and once you start the spam you won't get any more policies. You need to at least have coliseums before you can start, and you probably want to get some social policies too (meritocracy for early, piety for middle, planned economy for late). You want to build more than one city, but just expanding is not ICS; once you've started ICS you start building settlers and don't stop until you run out of land (or get bored).

One variant that someone posted step-by-step directions involved playing as France. You build a few cities to get you through the early years, make sure to get Forbidden Palace, and stockpile culture without expanding until you get to steam power. Once there, you go all the way down to Communism and start spamming cities with zero penalty for city size and +5 production in each new city.

It depends on the situation but I normally space them 4-5 hex apart.

ICS can be done just fine with just Meritocracy and spamming cities early is stronger than waiting for Industrial age and enough culture to get Planned Economy. Especially now after the patch when the "avoid growth" checkbox actually stops city growth. Grow your cities to size 4 then make them stop growing. Coliesum + Meritocracy + Forbidden Palace then makes the city happiness neutral. And the 1 unhapiness per city that you'll have before FP can be temporarily covered with luxuries.

The general procedure for me is:
1. get Horseback Riding (for Horsemen)
2. get worker tech for whatever luxury I have nearby
3. conquer one or two nearby civs with Horsemen
4. meanwhile get Masonry (for Coliseums)
5. wait until I have Meritocracy, then start spamming cities
6. get all worker techs
7. get Writing (for Libraries)
8. get Chivalry (for Knights)
9. get Banking (for Forbidden Palace)

Big Ben is also very good to get because it saves you 170 gold per purchased Coliseum. Other wonders I like to get are Chichen Itza, Himeji Castle, Machu Pichu, Taj Mahal (make sure you build it after Chichen Itza for maximum effect), and the Statue of Liberty. Sidney Opera House is also cool because it's pretty much the only way to get another social policy once you really go wild with city spamming. But none of these are really essential, the only wonder that you really need to build is the Forbidden Palace.

I normally space them 2 or 3 tiles apart since my cities never seem to go above 10 pop. 4 is definitely pushing it unless I'm going culture. In that case, 5 or even 6 tiles is fine.

Pantastic said:

You can't start right out, as you don't have the techs or policies you need - you can't deal with happiness, and once you start the spam you won't get any more policies. You need to at least have coliseums before you can start, and you probably want to get some social policies too (meritocracy for early, piety for middle, planned economy for late). You want to build more than one city, but just expanding is not ICS; once you've started ICS you start building settlers and don't stop until you run out of land (or get bored).

One variant that someone posted step-by-step directions involved playing as France. You build a few cities to get you through the early years, make sure to get Forbidden Palace, and stockpile culture without expanding until you get to steam power. Once there, you go all the way down to Communism and start spamming cities with zero penalty for city size and +5 production in each new city.

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Ahh, thanks for the clarification.

Slynky333 said:

Ahh, thanks for the clarification.

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You actually CAN start your ICS at turn 50...that's what REX+ICS is all about.

It produces spectacular games when it flies, but it's very unstable. Starting that early makes policies beyond Meritocracy irrelevant. You may pick up Freedom down the road if you are France or build Monuments, but it doesn't actually matter that much. If you can juggle the happiness and have 50+ cities by turn 150ish, no delayed ICS strategy that relies on the Order tree will ever catch up.

I find the best civ for this is the Iroquois. Lots of 'free roads', units that fly all over your territory at rocket speed, and a great reduction in the number of worker turns needed to connect everything which makes things like happiness and gold bonuses kick in faster.

The Paper Maker gold bonus is certainly nice.. but getting your +1's early on, and saving early turns on workers + saving worker maintenance does a lot more for me than some +4's well down the road (libraries take a long time to kick in).

It's also nice to have the early UU and be an MP playable civ (not Babylon) if you're trying this for multiplayer.

Here some graphics to see the optimal position for the cities with range 3:


If you want a smaller range:


But dependend to your strategy it may not be the best positions or they simply are not possible!

Trickster7135 said:

For ICS/honeycomb, keep to 2 tiles away as much as possible.

For 'normal' playing, 4 tiles is fine.

For small empires (such as cultural victories), five or six tiles, as high populations + high culture to pop borders = a lot of land being worked per city.

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yeah 6 hexes ist actually what i did for the bollywood achievment.

in normal games i would suggest 3 max 4 tiles away. if theres desert, tundra or many mountains you must ignore this.

for imba traderoute income with arabs i build 2-3 cities as close as possible.

Paeanblack said:

No, it's not. Space does not constrain you; happiness does. You never find yourself in a situation where you have excess happiness and not enough tiles to work.

If you want to get the most production out of a finite happiness allotment, you want to work the best possible tiles, and those are the city tiles. Even though there is a baseline penalty of 1 extra unhappiness for "working" a city tile, it's worth more than 2 regular tiles.

Working lots of city tiles with a finite amount of happiness means lots of small cities. Small cities don't need land, and spacing them farther apart just means extra road costs.

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I have 2 words for you: ghandi. wait, that's only one word. um, ok, I have one word for you...