Infinite City Sprawl, FFH Style

Much of the early strategy discussion in Civ4 revolved around comparing the cottage economy (CE) to the specialist economy (SE). There were dozens of discussion/flame war threads on this topic. In many cases people didn't even agree on the definitions of the terms. Over time, the picture got muddled further as people began to explore more facets of the game, and terms like trade route economy (TRE), espionage economy (EE), wonder economy (WE), settled specialist economy (SSE), shrine economy (SE also?), hammer economy (HE), and food economy (FE) became vogue.

Ultimately the meta moved to a point where people realized what was important was the synergy between tile improvements and supporting civics, and that really dictated what kind of "economy" (economy as the primary source of and ) you were running. For example, you could build mostly cottages and run free speech/universal suffrage/emancipation--known as FEUSS--or you could build mainly farms, buffed up by pacifism/representation/caste system, known as PARCS.

Early on, there was also a lot of discussion of city specialization. The Civ4 developers had stated that the days of infinite city sprawl were coming to an end, and players would be rewarded for building fewer, better cities focused on a specific purpose instead of small lousy ones. Experimentation by players like UncleJJ (who also posts here), Iranon, and Invisiblestalker challenged those statements, and revealed that unspecialized, closely-packed cities were very viable. Essentially, their strategy revolved around accumulating as many per-city bonuses as possible, and building as many cities as possible.

I love to explore different mechanics in a complicated game like Civ4, and try to push the envelope in developing new or unconventional strategies. I spend a lot of time reading strategy threads as a result, especially old ones from the forums to see what is already out there. One of the things I realized over time was that a lot of the aforementioned economies are really misnomers--they are just sources of gold or beakers, and many of them are not mutually exclusive. Indeed a lot of them are complimentary, as demonstrated by UncleJJ/Iranon/InvisibleStalker's experiments with ICS. After reading their threads I wanted to see if I could apply these concepts to FFH. What did I find? ICS absolutely works in FFH and in some respects is more powerful than its BTS version, but as with all things in FFH, it depends on using the right leader and civ.

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Let's start by figuring out all the per-city bonuses we can stack.

In Beyond the Sword:

1) Trade routes/Great Lighthouse
2) Spiral Minaret/University of Sankore/Apostolic Palace+religious buildings
3) Espionage buildings (they generate raw in the form of espionage, while most BTS buildings provide multipliers)
4) Corporations
5) Happy/healthy caps*
6) Free specialists (Mercantilism, Statue of Liberty, Industrial Park, Research Institute UB)
7) Shrine/corporation HQ income

*I didn't originally think of happy/healthy caps as per-city bonuses. I just thought of them as an empire-wide limit. It took me a while to realize that these really are per-city bonuses... if you add a sugar resource you don't get +1 empire-wide happiness, you get +1 happy in each city connected to the sugar. For example, consider a happy cap of 10 per city. You have 30 tiles of land available. You can build 2 cities and leave a bunch of tiles unworked, or you can build 3 and have more total happiness to distribute over the same number of tiles.

In FFH:

1) Trade routes/Great Lighthouse (GLH is more expensive, but doesn't obsolete)
2) No equivalent in FFH other than the Infernal palace
3) No espionage buildings, but plenty of buildings generate raw and , including mage spells
4) No corporations, but Sacrifice the Weak is effectively a food bonus
5) Happy/healthy caps (overall less of both, so smaller cities are better in FFH)
6) Free specialists (Mercantilism, Liberty)
7) Shrine income (with some civs you can be almost certain to get a specific shrine in your capital, unlike BTS)
8) Wonders that provide free buildings in a city (Grand Menagerie, Catacomb Libralus, Nexus, Guild of Hammers, etc)
9) Certain powerful UBs that give per-city benefits, such as breeding pits/governor's manors and especially Planar Gates (!!)

At first glance, most of the benefits are actually stronger in FFH, like GLH not obsoleting, commerce-producing buildings and free specialists easier to acquire. Moreover City States almost wipes out distance maintenance and reduces # of cities maintenance significantly--like a very early State Property. But, in FFH you don't have the two strongest options--the SM/UoS/AP combo and corporations.

So what's the strategy?

Os-Gabella (Spiritual/Summoner) of Sheaim, in EitB/Terkhen modmod

Os-Gabella is almost the perfect leader to pull off this strategy. Let's see why:

1) AV temples give very good per-city bonuses, and Sheiam will usually get the shrine (which provides raw ) in the capital... leading to slider independence and strong research potential even without Aristocracy
2) Sacrifice the Weak is the strongest civic for tightly-packed cities with few tiles...natural synergies with the civ, and the health malus hurts less in small cities
3) Planar Gates are the ultimate per-city improvement
4) Thanks to StW, Sheaim can easily run Mercantilism for +2 specialists per city
5) Excess happy caps can be leveraged for heavy whipping/drafting, which can by cycled by a Spiritual leader... this is the core of the strategy

Essentially, Os-Gabella is well-positioned to utilize every per-city bonus in the game except for the free specialist from Liberty, which is mutually exclusive with Sacrifice the Weak. StW blocks Overcouncil, denying you simultaneous use of the draft and the whip, unless you are spiritual and can cycle Slavery and Military State. Fewer citizens per city and fast regrowth thanks to StW let you lean really hard on whipping/drafting to get a large army out fast.

Let's also look at the synergies with Planar Gates. To maximize them, IIRC you need:
Carnival - Chaos Marauder - free with Grand Menagerie
Mage Guild - Mobius Witch - free with Catacomb Libralus
Obsidian Gate - Minotaur - free with Nexus
Public Baths - Succubus - builds 50% faster with Stone in Terkhen modmod
Gambling House - Revelers - builds 75% faster with Undercouncil resolution
Temple of the Veil - Tar Demon - builds 50% faster with spiritual, and can be built by a Ritualist whipped in another city
Grove - Manticore - no bonuses, but manticores themselves are basically Tier 4 units... the more groves you have, the more Tier 4 comparable units you can have

Planar Gates themselves are reduced to 200 in Terkhen modmod and build 50% faster with stone. Grand Menagerie is almost impossible to get normally, but using Terkhen's new Wildlands setting, you have an outside shot at getting it on some mapscripts.

In my testing, this strategy works pretty well even before you get Planar Gates maxed out or any Undercouncil resolutions pass. Really, the hardest part is getting the Great Lighthouse. With GLH and City States, new coastal cities will almost pay for themselves immediately. Just make sure you settle a couple of offshore islands for good internal trade routes.

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Civic Choices

The key to this strategy is constant cycling of labor civics, and taking advantage of large happy caps to whip and draft extensively out of many cities. Pop regrowth is supercharged with Agrarianism (later Sanitation) and Sacrifice the Weak, and Granary/Smokehouse in place. Most importantly, the whip and draft unhappiness timers are independent--so if you whip once and draft once on the same turn, both of them will be gone ten turns later!

You need to start by getting slavery and getting your infrastructure up--granary and smokehouse are important to maximize whip efficiency, and then after that you want an archery range (for drafting), planar gate buildings, trade boosters (particularly harbor), and commerce generators/specialist enablers (temple of the veil, market, elder council, etc.) Early on you will be spending whip anger on infrastructure, and drafting archers just to keep your power rating up. Once you get Bowyers, drafting becomes a lot better with longbows. I know I said in my drafting article that drafting isn't good for Sheaim, but that was before Os-Gabella got Spiritual and before I thought of the ICS applications. Longbows are actually very good units to draft--an unpromoted longbow is actually a very decent city defender and a mediocre open-field attacker, while an unpromoted pre-mithril champion is mediocre at everything.

What you do is this: whip in all your cities, and revolt to Military State. Start drafting 3/turn in your cities, with the aim to draft twice in each city before you return to Slavery. So on turn 1 you draft in cities ABC, turn 2 in DEF, and turn 3 in GHI. You plan to return to Slavery on turn 11, so you do your second round of drafting on turns 9/10/11. This will stack +6 unhappiness in your cities for 2-3 turns, and when you return to slavery the rest of the anger will cool off. In the meantime you can aim to whip twice in each city during your 10 or 11 turn stint in Slavery, and let that anger cool off during your time in mil. state. The exact numbers depend on your happy caps. In my experience it's not that hard to get to 14 happiness by the mid-game.

Another source of happiness in the mid-late game is the slider. Ideally you want to build quarter-price gambling houses everywhere, which will give you +10 at the cost of 100% on the slider. Since your research is coming mostly from a strong capital with an Academy, Library, Alchemy Lab, and AV shrine, perhaps with settled sages and the Great Library, you don't really need tile commerce for research. You're using mostly farms anyway and no Aristocracy so you don't have much raw commerce to begin with. Your trade routes will provide gold for maintenance, and extra pop gets assigned as sages for research in your small cities.

I remember in one of my test games, one of my smaller cities had a mage guild (from Catacombs) and a planar gate. It produced 3 units in a single turn--it popped a mobius witch at the beginning of the turn, I drafted a longbow at size 8, and revolted to slavery and 2-pop whipped a Pyre Zombie with a few hammers preinvested in it. That is crazy production from a size 8 city working 3 coasts and 5 farms.

As the game goes on, the strategy just gets stronger. Sanitation replaces Agrarianism, so you don't lose a hammer on plains farms and you can adopt Mercantilism for +2 free specialists and +1 per spec. With the Great Library, each sage produces 4 and 1 , close to a Representation scientist. The Armageddon counter continutes to rise as AV spreads, and your planar gates get more infrastructure over time, so the total # of units increases at a faster-than-linear pace. Your happy caps also increase, which means more whipping and drafting. If you had time for a stint in OO, you may have been lucky enough to build or capture an Asylum. Asylum = lunatics from your captured slaves.

The main problem with using tons of drafted troops is that they will turn into free manes for Hyborem. In the late game, however, a switch to Order to make a lot of spiritual, mithril, blessed crusaders led by paladins can deal with demon armies. Alternatively, just kill Hyborem early.

In conclusion, there are synergies all over the place with this strategy and it works quite well, especially if used a supplementary strategy to a PZ rush to take out one neighbor and get room to REX. The hardest part is managing the early tech needs between getting PZs, Sailing for the GLH, and Knowledge of the Ether/Philosophy/AV in order to get the shrine. Finding enough hammers in a non-Heron Throne city to build the GLH is a pain as well. Bareke is a huge help, and in one game I was able to capture the Mines of Gal-Dur from the Amurites and run 3 engineers there to pop a GE.

Other civs can also use variants of this strategy. Any Spiritual leader can use the AV/Undercouncil variant. There is also an Overcouncil variant which forgoes AV/Sacrifice the Weak, but gains 1) the ability to draft Radiant Guards, 2) the free specialist from Liberty and 3) an additional -10% maintenance stacked on top of City States, for a total of -90%/-35%. Great Lighthouse and offshore island cities apply in all cases. Besides spiritual, Organized is a great trait for ICS.

- Neutral Calabim can get a lot of free food and hammers with breeding pits and governor's manors. Running Empyrean and slavery, you can draft RGs and whip vampires. I am not sure though if feasting out of a lot of small cities is better than feasting out of big ones. Feast anger dissipates fast. Overall though, I think AV Calabim > Order Calabim > everything else, drafting be damned (unless playing MNAI). I just don't know if it's better to have a few big cities or a lot of smaller or mid-sized ones.
- Amurites can draft a very strong UU, so it makes sense to draft as much as possible. Tya Kiri (Spiritual/Sage) can use a similar approach to Os-Gabella, but she doesn't have planar gates nor can she guarantee AV shrine in the capital. Valledia (Arc/Org/Ing) can draft firebows and whip adepts using slavery and overcouncil. Command Posts and Cave of Ancestors help with the loss of Apprenticeship. Ing gives cheap mage upgrades.
- Balseraphs are great with slavery, and can make up lack of XP with arena battles. They really want undercouncil though, so you have to ignore drafting unless you draw Spiritual with Perpentach. Changing traits also makes it easy to build a lot of half-price infrastructure in many cities.
- Elohim - Einion is Phi/Spi in modmods and tolerant may make different tactics available. Specifically, building the Infernal Palace effectively gives you a mini Univ of Sankore/Spiral Minaret combo.
- Mercurians - Neutral, OO then Empyrean, Slavery, Overcouncil. Draft RGs, upgrade to champions using Ing. Whip whatever. Slaves get sent to the asylum. Drafted, whipped, or slaved units all turn into angels when they die.
- Lanun are an interesting case. You could argue that they use something like an ICS strategy already, rexing along the coast to maximize pirate coves. But, as Falamar, one option is to use Slavery and Overcouncil together with Empyrean. You whip adepts out of Catacomb Libralus (nice for a charismatic leader) and draft radiant guards. Main problem is you give up the smuggling and gambling ring resolutions, which are both nice for Lanun.
- I've already written about the Kuriotate variant. That's ICS as well, but a very different version, pretty much using only free specialists.

Civs not to do this with:
- Khazad - anti-ICS mechanics, their UBs are all multipliers.
- Elves - Happiness/Health are nonissues for large cities, do very well with commerce multipliers.
- Sidar - I usually find it more efficient to build a few supercities. More cities = more micro required.

I will post some screenshots later.

For the most up-to-date RiFE (Ashes of Erebus IIRC), I think that Illians are better suited to big-city plays, as the biome change to Glacier (which is probably their biggest advantage - 4 food on Glacier/Crystal Plains w/out farms is amazing) takes quite a while.

As usual, I love your posts.

However, I disagree with some of your conclusions. First and foremost, I suppose, is the concept that ICS is in any way an occasional or optional thing. I am currently playing a Deity Khazad game in base MNAI (inspired, of course, by the thread on challenging deity) in which I made extensive use of ICS - although far less then I would normally have done, out of some latent desire to play thematically.

I'd want to avoid going into too much detail about this, even though it was a very interesting game, but briefly:


Anyway, my point is that this was a pretty unfavorable setup for ICS - Khazad, very limited resources and jungle-choked terrain, and settling in areas far away from the capital - and all of this done with half or less of the tech you are considering. (And no GLH possible either.)

And yet, throwing out cities was something I would do again - in fact, I would have done it moreso, in retrospect, as I was relying too much on traded resources and hadn't accounted for just how few tiles my cities would actually be able to work in a timely manner. Sure, I was losing money on 0% science for a time, but these cities were very easy to make profitable, with just the basic market (and courthouse in a stretch) and aristofarms everywhere paying for themselves, and quickly set up to produce an army (with conquest).

(Obviously I should add a caveat that AGG/Original FIN certainly boosted the effectiveness of this strategy [in EitB I imagine I would've gone CS/cottages/eventual FT - but then again +30% gold would've been a boon as well], but still, I imagine variations on the theme would be found with most civs, and I think my point stands.)

My point is, I suppose, that cities almost always pay for themselves from a very early point in FFH - simply because city specialization is generally sparse, cities grow fast via agrarianism and most buildings are very situational. All of which combines to make a city catch up to your core very fast, and become a contributor to the empire, with just the basic spammed aristofarms (or city-state cottages/farms). The developers, I think, realised this, and setup the cost of settlers so that the real investment is not if a city will be worthwhile, but if it is worth pouring that amount of resources into pushing out.

Whilst I love reading these posts of yours, and always come away with a different perspective on the issue, I wonder sometimes if you find yourselves too caught up in "cute" strategies, as it were, and would benefit a bit from returning to the basics - whilst a ICS may reach its height in the late-game with full-boosted specialists and a slew of buildings, but in much of FFH, whether it be high-level SP or competitive MP, you simply don't have the luxury of picking up all those techs, you just need to be boosting to gain your advantage as fast as possible, and then ramming it down your opponents throat whilst it lasts.

Sorry if that sounds like too much of a criticism, and I'm sure I'm reading more into this then is meant.
More then thinking that you were trying to advocate this across the board, I think I just wanted to mention that whilst strategies like this can be useful in pushing out an advantage in a more edge situation/leader, the majority of the time ICS is a viable and recommendable strategy in a more traditional format for the vast majority of cases.

I would like to disagree about ICS being optimal in most cases. In FFH2, tech costs are prohibitively expensive and cities generally need two escorts to prevent barbarian takeovers. To get the necessary tech to set up an aristo farm economy is difficult to do while expanding quickly and for the Khazad I would suggest going for an early religion, running God King and using the hammer bonus in your developed capital shrine city to push out settlers, with elder councils being used to push science up to hasten the research time for education. Of course, this may not be optimal play here, I am far from being the best, but this does work on Noble. Of course, a lot works on that level.

Hmm, I didn't mean that ICS is an occasional thing. I think it's quite underrated actually, and that was the idea behind my post. I just didn't do it before--I usually focused on having bigger, more powerful cities and that approach has worked fine for me in single player.

Other points are fair...you're right, I wouldn't try weird stuff like Lunatic spam, planar gates, or Sidar wane farming in a game over at Realms Beyond. I play single player though so I like to try unusual stuff to see if it will work. Maybe you are saying that the litmus test should be Deity difficulty, and if it doesn't work there, we shouldn't bother with it?

For me though, I just got bored playing a standard tech code of laws-->tech collateral-->win style of game. Part of the fun for me is exploring game mechanics to see if I can get different things to work. People never use drafting, so I tried to get it to work. People never use slavery, so I experimented with that. Nobody here talks about ICS, or at least not that I've seen, and even lurking the MP games on Realms Beyond, people usually focus on settling resource clusters and may or may not backfill later. For example, the Lanun/Amurites-Luchuirp permanent alliance/eliminated Ljosalfar game seemed like cities were settled around resource clusters rather than a CxxCxxC type of scheme. There's one game I'm following over there in which you designed



...that game doesn't look like intentional use of ICS at all. Admittedly I don't play MP, so maybe there's something I'm missing. I generally play on Emperor/Immortal in SP and can win most games using standard strategies, so I like to see if oddball stuff can work.

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FWIW, I tried an ICS with Khazad using a lot of small cities with fast markets and run merchants and never felt like I could get it to work right. The idea was to settle merchants in the capital along with multipliers to drive gold production. Even with a temple of Kilmorph, getting +8 gold per city wasn't enough to fill up the vaults in a reasonable amount of time because the # of cities kept growing. In my experience playing as Khazad, I'd rather have fewer better cities so you can leverage strong multipliers (+40% hammers) and you get more per-city happiness when you have fewer cities. However strong ICS is with a vanilla civ, it's flat out worse for Khazad because their unique mechanics work in the opposite direction. Unless you are saying that Trebs are so good, that being able to mass produce them out of two dozen cities is worth having -2 happiness per city? Possible..

One thing that might be interesting actually would be a Khazad challenge game. Game settings can be whatever, one of us plays a REX/ICS strategy, one of us plays to maxed vaults, and see which one reaches certain milestones faster.

If REX/ICS can work for Khazad, with or without GLH, then it should work for anyone.

ICS has long been the optimal strategy for the Infernals, a civ very near & dear to my heart, which to my surprise nobody has mentioned here. The latest version of EitB has only made this more so.

What changed in the latest version of EitB to help Infernals?

Several things. Firstly, cities now begin with more pop (the numbers escape me at present), and secondly the size of the Infernal civilization is much larger initially (as it is now dependant on the size of the opponent empires, therefore meaning it scales with gametime, increasing his viability).

I'll respond to the replies from a week ago shortly, I simply haven't had time to do so till now.

- I tend to apply the infinit city sprawl strategy, but it is not a priority in FFH2 at solo. Which is a true priority, it's to steal the cities from the A.I, not to plant yours which is more expansive and long to developp.

- So, if i have no A.I near me which I can attack (which is rare) with a traditionnal stack of catapults + warriors (or axemen, but axemen are expansives and we need only units to kill the damaged units by the catapuls), or If I am in a particular multiplayer situation (for exemple, if I am near a human what I don't want to attack or what I don't fear, then I go for an infinit city sprawl.

- As FFH2 lands are generally bigs, we got place to plant cities, moreover it's easier to reach high populations in cities in FFH2, compared to BTS (up to Renaissance era or after), so having some squares to exploit is usefull (contrary to BTS up to Renaissance or more). Off course, regims are crucial I tend to always pass from God King to City States when I got more than 5 cities.

- The exception to that it's the Sheaims. Someone say that it's to have more planner gates and he has right. With Sheaims it's better to plant the max cities as possible BUT only after you have the required technology : the tech to buy buildings with gold (to rush the plannar gates in the newest cities), the ether knowledge (to have one mage guild) and, very important, 25 in the Armageddon Counter at minimum (if not, spamming this planner gates cities is useless).

- About the Sheaims, it's crucial to never build any of the special spamming buildings (as the carnival) for the plannar gates. Why ? Because we want to have Moebus witch, and nothing other (which generally suck, except the Minotors, and moebius witch are still better). These craps buildings should really be avoided. If you got enough cities and AC (and a raising AC with the cities you raze), you should win the game, in solo or in multiplayer.

Making other planar-gate-unit buildings will not decrease the amount of mobius witches you can get.

Are you absolutely sure of that ? It is not what my intuition said to me.

Sources ?

What A_Moon said is true, but misleading. There is a count associated with planar gate units - Mobius Witches, and so on - which is connected to the maximum one can spawn of each type. But this is not related to the probability of one spawning, which does reduce for additional buildings as they go up as you cannot spawn more than one per turn.

- Thank you but I don't understand perfectly. What is the exact mechanism ?

- If I want the maximal number of moebius witch, have I interest to only build mage guilds, or I can build all the others buildings BUT suppress the non needed units, to don't reach the maximum number of spammed unit what I am controling ?

- For now, I cannot understand why it's not a malus on moebius spawn to have the others buildings in a city. Because, as you can only spawn one unit per city per turn, it means that another kind of unit (Chaos marauder for exemple) can take the place of spammed unit what the moebius witch could have, no ?

A breakdown of how planar units work:

I'm playing the Sheaim, I have 3 cities. Each city has a planar gate, and no other buildings. The armageddon counter is at 0.

I build a mage's guild (I believe that's the moebius witch building) in all 3 cities. My maximum number of moebius witches increases to 3.

I build a carnival in one of my cities. My maximum number of Chaos Marauders is now 1, and my maximum number of moebius witches is still 3. Like I said, building the other buildings does not reduce the maximum number of moebius witches you can get. It might slightly reduce the rate at which you can acquire them, but I certainly wouldn't call it "crucial" to avoid them. The benefits from gambling houses, for instance, is certainly worth having a few revellers running around. And if you go AV (which you probably should, to help pump up the AC) you're going to want temples of the veil to make priests, and for their bonuses.

- Thank you.

- So what I think is not totally false. If you want to maximise the frequence of spawned Moebius witch, you got a true advantage to don't build the others spawning building.

- If you have reiched the maximum number of moebius, you can still decide to build another building (as the obsidian portal, which is important).

- I continue to think it's crucial to have a control of the spawned unit. Having tons of crap units and not the units you want, is frustrating and bad for you.

Akatosh I wanted to thank you for this thread.

I have been trying to pick up the Sheaim, who I have never played through an entire game. I had dropped down the Monarch to pick up their mechanics. I'm using Magister Modmod, but this ICS style did the trick.

I started sandwiched between two good leaders (Ljos and Luchurp), wich is usually pretty brutal and stunts my growth since the Sheaim are slow developing.

Not so with ICS. I Took apart both civs in detail, vassaled them and force pressed them into AV. Then summoned infernals to eat their cities (In magister modmod there are 7 infernal civs with different leaders with different traits which makes them more interesting to play - or you can summon all 7 into Erebus).

At that point, I could pick a victory condition at my leasure to complete tonight.

Other civs can also use variants of this strategy.

Click to expand...

Grigori. Not original but slightly buffed Extramod-grigori.

One big city and the rest small-ish. Why? Every city can creat adventurer counter points via specific buildings and more cities=more adventurer points.

Testing it out now, works like a charm: from must have recources you only need marble at your starting location: switch to industrial with Cassiel, go for philosophy, build Bone balace, later your 1st engineer pops out, use it for the Great Lighthouse. after industrious, go for organized.