ICS, Civ V style

Rathelon said:

Are you sure? Because I had Professional Army and the Pentagon in one game, and I still had to pay a little gold to upgrade units.

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For gold there's a cut-off, for happiness there isn't. You can easily tell this by playing India: Having the policy and Forbidden Palace only brings them down to normal, which sucks.

alpaca said:

No, because you don't set it up. You replace the +50% science modifier from a university by having twice as much population. Similarly, you replace the hammer modifiers by just having more raw production. I'll give the post a read.

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I'm not doubting the power of ICS, just highlighting a tradeoff. Even though the tradeoff might be in ICS favor it's still there and worth discussing IMO. Especially in a game where large percentages (+50%) are frequent.

Rathelon said:

You all need to learn VA math. Nothing is free. -50% happiness + -50% happiness = -75% happiness (not 100%). The first 50% cuts it in half. The second one reduces what's left in half, so it is another -25% total.

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This is the sort of thing where having a better Civilopedia would really, really help. The bonuses in this game all add in different ways, and it's hard to figure out how they really add up.

In this case, the civilopedia blatantly lies, and both forbidden palace and order just give a fixed -1 unhappiness.

alpaca said:

No, because you don't set it up. You replace the +50% science modifier from a university by having twice as much population. Similarly, you replace the hammer modifiers by just having more raw production. I'll give the post a read.

There's one thing I forgot to mention: Your wonder production will be slower with this strategy because most cities won't be so productive (which isn't to say you can't set up one or two pretty productive cities with >10 pop at the fringes of your empire). However, this is offset by a faster research speed so I haven't had huge trouble getting the wonders I wanted. National Wonders are obviously out of the question except maybe for the Library and Monument ones.

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Actually I still had a lot of hammer multipliers. Every single city had the +50% railroad bonus and the +25% order bonus to building construction, and the most productive cities all got factories and windmills. I did have a few big cities like my capital, which built the eiffel tower in 12 turns.

I did skip a lot of science buildings, but that's because I already had more research power than I needed.

This is interesting, you stated that in your game that you skipped the +1 happy per city policy and waited to pop communism to bloom. But by the below math, wouldn't Meritocracy (+1happy per city) be equivalent to 50% reduction to city number unhappiness. Thus, couldn't you bloom well before the industrial era?

pi-r8 said:

This is the sort of thing where having a better Civilopedia would really, really help. The bonuses in this game all add in different ways, and it's hard to figure out how they really add up.

In this case, the civilopedia blatantly lies, and both forbidden palace and order just give a fixed -1 unhappiness.

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xcalibre0 said:

This is interesting, you stated that in your game that you skipped the +1 happy per city policy and waited to pop communism to bloom. But by the below math, wouldn't Meritocracy (+1happy per city) be equivalent to 50% reduction to city number unhappiness. Thus, couldn't you bloom well before the industrial era?

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With only 6 cities, that's just +5 happiness, so not really enough to do anything. I could have used it to found more cities, but then the SP cost increases and I wouldn't be able to get communism.

pi-r8 said:

With only 6 cities, that's just +5 happiness, so not really enough to do anything. I could have used it to found more cities, but then the SP cost increases and I wouldn't be able to get communism.

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I see, so if one wanted to bloom sans hammers then all they need is forbidden palace and meritocracy. If there was some way to create a gold based economy that could win off Commerce far before the industrial era, or if by chance all your cities were coastal you would get (or coastal and republic for +4 hammers )

xcalibre0 said:

I see, so if one wanted to bloom sans hammers then all they need is forbidden palace and meritocracy. If there was some way to create a gold based economy that could win off Commerce far before the industrial era, or if by chance all your cities were coastal you would get (or coastal and republic for +4 hammers )

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Nothing prevents you from taking both policies and the Forbidden Palace. It's actually more useful to calculate the total amount of happiness you get for these policies than to look at them as an "infinity enabler" because you still need to factor in unhappiness from population in these cities - so it's a continuous progression. They both yield +1 happiness per city/connected city so they are almost equivalent. I think there is a difference for occupied cities because the Order policy halved the population unhappiness from occupied cities, too, if I remember correctly so it's a bit more powerful all in all. +1 happiness per city will be something like +20 or +30 happiness in a normal game. Theocracy yields about the same with this style of play, maybe a bit more.

I wouldn't overestimate the +x hammers per city bonus, either. Communism is nice but the commerce version and republic aren't that great and I'd rather take other things above them. Although +1 hammer per city is worth maybe 10%-20% or so of your production without it the cost of social policies is very high if you have a lot of cities so you're better off focusing on things you really need.

xcalibre0 said:

I see, so if one wanted to bloom sans hammers then all they need is forbidden palace and meritocracy. If there was some way to create a gold based economy that could win off Commerce far before the industrial era, or if by chance all your cities were coastal you would get (or coastal and republic for +4 hammers )

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Yeah, if you could get big ben + commerce you could get nice production just from buying stuff with gold, which would work well with lots of small cities. But, if you go this route, or the coastal + republic route, you're going to have a hard time getting enough culture in a reasonable time. Going for the industrial era synched up nicely with saving the amount of culture I needed. Nonetheless, if you can figure it out a way to do it this way (perhaps involving stonehenge or oracle) then it'll be interesting.

i still don't think you could win "far before the industrial era" though, unless maybe it's a small pangaea map. Even with pangaea and big ben, rush buying is expensive- you need about 400 gold to rush buy a riflemen, so to get one every turn requires 200 trading posts. With communism and railroads, I could build 2 or 3 infantry every turn and immediately upgrade them to mechanized infantry.

Just trying to think outside the box a little, since we are often trying to do fun "broken" things. Which sort of led me to another thought. Is it possible that Gandhi is a great Civ for an ICS bloom?

Bear with me, I understand that the Forbidden Palace and Planned Economy don't scale with Gandhi as the text of the abilities would leave you to believe (who wrote the manual for this game seriously). However, mathematically, would his UA outpace the negative impact? In the beginning of the game you' would have a few larger cities (maybe not cause you are cranking settlers?) that benefit well from this UA. Once you bloom you might be ok as well. What is the net effect of his UA on a size 1 city on Emperor? What's the effect on a size 2? Population unhappiness still exceeds city number unhappiness right?

xcalibre0 said:

Just trying to think outside the box a little, since we are often trying to do fun "broken" things. Which sort of led me to another thought. Is it possible that Gandhi is a great Civ for an ICS bloom?

Bear with me, I understand that the Forbidden Palace and Planned Economy don't scale with Gandhi as the text of the abilities would leave you to believe (who wrote the manual for this game seriously). However, mathematically, would his UA outpace the negative impact? In the beginning of the game you' would have a few larger cities (maybe not cause you are cranking settlers?) that benefit well from this UA. Once you bloom you might be ok as well. What is the net effect of his UA on a size 1 city on Emperor? What's the effect on a size 2? Population unhappiness still exceeds city number unhappiness right?

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Gandhi is balanced when the City is pop 4
Gandhi= 4 city+2 pop
Everyone else=2 city+ 4 pop

so its not the best for this strategy with a lot of cities at 1-3


Gandhi's UA benefits bigger cities

Arabia, France, Iroquois and Rome have UAs that benefit multiple Smaller cities
Egypt, China, and Persia have the best UBs for multiple Smaller cities

Maybe a newb question, but how do you skip a social policy?

The one time I wanted to do this to pick the two techs after I finished researching my current one I wasn't able to find out how. I couldn't hit the end turn button because the adopt policy covered it, and hitting enter wouldn't end the turn either. Your strategy relies on saving them up, so need to know how in the UI I could make this happen.

Right click on the pink icon.

Purple!

Just to point that our friend Sullla pretty much agrees on what we discussed here. See his last report

r_rolo1 said:

I must thank Firaxis for making ICS so easy in civ V ... it was so hard to mindless spam cities in civ IV ... [/sarcasm]

Probably firaxis should get back to the drawing board on this ... the happiness as the new maintenace is clearly not working as intended ... and the OP result is just a consequence of that ( without taking merit to the OP , OFC )

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Well, it's not really mindless spam here. In order to spam cities, it required quite a bit of planning (as well as not being surrounded by enemies). The key in almost every balancing feature is to ensure that one strategy doesn't reign supreme, not to eliminate something as a strategy.

BTW, I haven't really done much experimenting, but wouldn't large populations in cities favor science at least because you can afford to put more specialists in science buildings?

If you did this on immortal or higher, you got ridiculously lucky. There is no way the computer will let you expand like that without a military. They will attack you starting at around 2000 BC, especially if you settle anywhere near them, and with that many cities you are bound to ruffle a couple feathers.

Louis XXIV said:

Well, it's not really mindless spam here. In order to spam cities, it required quite a bit of planning (as well as not being surrounded by enemies). The key in almost every balancing feature is to ensure that one strategy doesn't reign supreme, not to eliminate something as a strategy.

BTW, I haven't really done much experimenting, but wouldn't large populations in cities favor science at least because you can afford to put more specialists in science buildings?

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In theory yes, but with civ V food yields + the way maritime cities food works, you get far better served with a lot of size 4-6 cities.

Ok, mindless was probably a little too much, but you really don't have much to think on. If you have some happiness in the bucket and a spot that can sustain 4-6 pop, found a city. This is civ III style ICS almost in it's pure form ...

vendur said:

If you did this on immortal or higher, you got ridiculously lucky. There is no way the computer will let you expand like that without a military. They will attack you starting at around 2000 BC, especially if you settle anywhere near them, and with that many cities you are bound to ruffle a couple feathers.

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I point you to the link in my last post.

He said he was isolated.

Interesting strategy. Not sure how it would work in a normal game, but hey at least it makes isolated starts more fun than civ4!

I thought about Gandhi as well and I might try it some time. Most cities won't grow well past 6 pop but there Gandhi already has +1 happiness over a normal civ. On the other hand, +2 culture, or +3 gold are probably a more useful bonus.

Louis XXIV said:

BTW, I haven't really done much experimenting, but wouldn't large populations in cities favor science at least because you can afford to put more specialists in science buildings?

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You might be prone to think that but the total population of multiple cities is higher than that of a single, larger city. In the limiting case of being governed by happiness, you can have one extra copy of each happy building, so the 2 cities will have an additional happiness of +4, corresponding to a population size of 4 more citizens, at the time you depend on colosseums. An error most people make when claiming that, scientifically, larger cities are better, is to assume that a single city will have the same population as two smaller cities combined, which it won't.

Another reason is that you won't usually be in a static case with large cities. You'll always want them to grow, which means those specialists hurt. For smaller cities, I will impose a fairly low max cap on population and enforce that by giving each city two scientists. Three cities with size 6 and two scientists each yield 45 science while a single city with pop 12, two scientists and a university yields 36. I think this is a roughly realistic scenario considering the small cities grow to size six in a very short time.

In my games, I've found I always research a lot faster if I go for a massive amount of cities than when I have a smaller number.

vendur said:

If you did this on immortal or higher, you got ridiculously lucky. There is no way the computer will let you expand like that without a military. They will attack you starting at around 2000 BC, especially if you settle anywhere near them, and with that many cities you are bound to ruffle a couple feathers.

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Who said you don't have a military? I usually start pumping out horsemen at about the time I build my third city. It slows your expansion down a bit but you can easily combine ICS into a rush strategy if you like. In fact, I often destroy one or two opponents if I feel they are too close, then settle all that nice land.