ICS, Civ V style

I've seen plenty of games where the aI either doesn't declare or can be fended off with few units. My question is, if you're non isolated and don't have some obvious peninsula choke point, how do you prevent the AI from settling all your space you want to plant cities come industrial era?

Well obviously if you're playing continents, start on your own continent, and can ignore military, it's a lot easier to peacefully build up. I doubt things would be so peaceful on immortal with any AIs nearby.

On anything below deity an aggressive AI can be pretty easily handled. I usually go for horsemen pretty quickly (about the time I settle my third city) and if you just have one horseman you can handle pretty much every early game assault the AI can throw at you. That's basically the same strategy as on deity but I think you're well-advised to build a second warrior on deity.

I thought I'd share the power of the early version of this approach with a screen of a France (Emperor/Pangaea/Standard/Normal) game in turn 100 - note that I settled strategically towards luxuries and to plug Egypt which is the reason why my empire is so strung out. Also note that I currently play with a house rule of not conquering anyone and not declaring war unless an AI is getting out of hand. Otherwise Egypt would have been wiped out by my horsemen long ago.



I have done many games like this on Immortal. I was just playing Emperor in this one because I was benchmarking against another game with a strategy I'm not yet so good at.

But if you're forced to war that early and can/need to destroy the AIs for settling space, you don't really need a slingshot for late production do you? If you've already cleared the continent with horsemen back in the BCs, the rest is just picking your mopup style.

tibbles said:

But if you're forced to war that early and can/need to destroy the AIs for settling space, you don't really need a slingshot for late production do you? If you've already cleared the continent with horsemen back in the BCs, the rest is just picking your mopup style.

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I was referring to tuning ICS (not general gameplay) to early declarations from AIs. ICS has to be tweaked to accomodate for a hostile environment.

Part of the problem with ICS is the diminishing returns on buildings. You can only have a max of 15 happiness from buildings (3 of which is the circus) from any city. The strongest of these is the colosseum, since it gives 4 happiness for only 150 production and 3 gold maintenance. In contrast, a stadium gives the same 4 happiness for 450 production and 6 gold maintenance.

With how strong the city tile is, the best strategy is to spread out your population among different cities, so you can build more colosseums instead of stadiums and theatres.

In a pure ICS in civ V you only need to have enough for 6 citizens in each city, so obviously you don't want the higher buildings for nothing most of the times

andrewlt said:

Part of the problem with ICS is the diminishing returns on buildings. You can only have a max of 15 happiness from buildings (3 of which is the circus) from any city. The strongest of these is the colosseum, since it gives 4 happiness for only 150 production and 3 gold maintenance. In contrast, a stadium gives the same 4 happiness for 450 production and 6 gold maintenance.

With how strong the city tile is, the best strategy is to spread out your population among different cities, so you can build more colosseums instead of stadiums and theatres.

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This is actually the strongest reason for ICS. Since you don't want to build more than a colosseum and the occasional theatre, you can easily do that in each city if you settle them closely. A colosseum (assuming meritocracy) will provide enough happiness for 3 citizens including the penalty for the additional city. If you don't let the cities grow further, for example by using specialists or switching to hills, the city will not cost you any happiness at all. Since you get a huge lot of money with this strategy, after the first 20 cities or so you can almost always buy a library or market and a colosseum in your cities if you want to. Once you get the Forbidden Palace you get an additional happiness per city, which should by now be something like 20 or more.

In contrast, if you want to keep your huge cities happy you need to go for the stadium and a lot of other specialisation buildings you don't need if you sprawl endlessly because you'll just replace quality by huge quantities of everything. Turns 150ish and 175 attached.

Why not jump 2 policies into liberty to set up your ICS, then after you bloom, switch to autocracy for phase 3 the conquest. Certainly you don't need to make more settlers at that point and you can stand to lose the workers bonus if you just end up capturing those later. You won't need the 1 culture per city to buy more policies if you just reduce the total you buy pre industrial era. Or if you charge down the piety line you get a rebate at the end.

pi-r8 said:

Tech rate was never an issue for me. I burned through most of the renaissance with research agreements and great scientists. In fact, after getting to the industrial era I still had to wait a few turns before I founded any cities, because I needed a little more culture to unlock communism. Then, before I could go to war, I reached electronics for mechanized infantry. The tech rate in this game is just so fast, that's why I wanted to do a strategy that maximized hammers.

Piety would help. I actually entered a golden age that lasted for the rest of the game from there, because I got one form happiness, than another from the taj mahal, then 2 from great generals, and I captured the chitzen itza at some point. But I struggled with unhappiness from conquered cities, and piety would help with that.

Given a choice of extra social policies, I think I'd rather have autocracy (too bad I can't get it with liberty!). The unit costs from my army were crippling. Also, I never got the "Meritocracy: +1 Happiness " civic from liberty, which would have been nice too.

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xcalibre0 said:

Why not jump 2 policies into liberty to set up your ICS, then after you bloom, switch to autocracy for phase 3 the conquest. Certainly you don't need to make more settlers at that point and you can stand to lose the workers bonus if you just end up capturing those later. You won't need the 1 culture per city to buy more policies if you just reduce the total you buy pre industrial era. Or if you charge down the piety line you get a rebate at the end.

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The big point is +1 happiness per (connected) city. These two policies can be expected to add > 30 culture and > 30 happiness on a standard-sized map.

You can go for Theocracy but the happiness from this isn't a lot more than what you get from Meritocracy in this style of play since most cities won't have more than 6 or 7 citizens. For 6 citizens the Theocracy bonus (0.2 less unhappiness per citizen) yields a net 1.2 happiness per city but the prerequisite for this is taking Organized Religion and Piety itself which isn't so great here because you're not aiming for large happiness overflow and +2 happiness are negligible.

The worker speed bonus, on the other hand, is very much worth it because you're going to get a lot of land that's all being worked. The culture bonus is also nice because it's unlikely you're going to end up with an average culture of more than 4 per city without it unless you invest heavily into it (favouring it over science, that is) or are playing Songhai.

All in all I prefer Liberty + Order over Piety + Autocracy. I also like to go for Commerce - the discount for buying stuff is great if you get +300 g per turn. Combine with Big Ben for an even larger boost.

@ Alpaca

I'm not convinced, but you might be right. It just doesn't feel right to me. You'll be able to squeeze maybe twice as much cities with ICS as I do with regular city sites (I tend to do them with 4 hexes between), but you'll end up probably with just around 50% more due to terrain features (mountains, barren peninsulas etc.) 10 highly productive cities are worth more than 15 weak ones in my book.

I just finished a similar game with France

Liberty - Piety - Order.

A couple of points

> Liberty and France go together like fish and chips in the early game. The speed you expand and can settle neer by luxury resources before your enemys is immense. Expansion is simply relentless, social policy cost scaling up is hardly an issue and when forbidden palce and planned economy start kicking in there really isnt any reason not to keep smacking citys down. I would only grab the 3 rightmost social polices however and leave +1 production and +50% first pop growth alone.

> Piety vs Commerce. I chose piety (chiefly for the 20% population reduction). I am not entirely sure if this was the right choice, sure happiness is an issue from time to time but sheer cost of supporting that many railways, buildings and standing army late game can be problematic. Late game production wasn't really an issue, I literally had to have every single city on gold focus with stock exchanges just to stop me going under. Now I probably needed to cut back on certain less than essential buildings but money was a real issue in the end. However, by not going piety I would be somewhat concered about having sufficent happiness. I presume simply spamming every single happines building around the clock kept you a float?

> Autocracy. I did consider late game actually ditching liberty to take the first SP of autocracy to support my massive bloated military. I'm still trying to work out a way of effectively synergising autocracy into a playstyle. Its bonus are fairly powerful, espeically if you can somehow work elements of commerce and order into it.

Very clever. Looks like my old Yang games did in SMAC, except you build stuff other than Colony Pods. Nice job of abusing the + X Hammers Social Policies on city tiles.

Maritime food bonus is really what makes ICS work as you're getting +2/+4 food to every city tile way too early in the game (Communism is late enough that it shouldn't really be a balance problem) allowing the small cities to get to size 4 very quickly and build infrastructure fast because they don't need farms.

Bibor said:

@ Alpaca

I'm not convinced, but you might be right. It just doesn't feel right to me. You'll be able to squeeze maybe twice as much cities with ICS as I do with regular city sites (I tend to do them with 4 hexes between), but you'll end up probably with just around 50% more due to terrain features (mountains, barren peninsulas etc.) 10 highly productive cities are worth more than 15 weak ones in my book.

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Within radius two you get 19 tiles per city, with radius one you get 7. So you get almost three times as many cities, not twice. In a more realistic scenario with coasts, city states and other surfaces you probably get maybe 9 tiles per city.

There are a few important observations: Firstly, city growth food requirements scale very strongly with population, I think almost in a square fashion. This means for cities to grow above size 10 or so takes a long time so you won't use half of these tiles anyways.

Secondly, the maritime city state bonus is per city. This means that two small cities grow a lot faster than a single larger one. The number of citizens that can work tiles will be much larger and the amount of science you generate will probably be larger, especially if you add libraries and set two scientists per city.

Thirdly, the bonus from the city tile itself isn't too shabby. You get +2f +2h +1g which is roughly equivalent to an additional citizen that generates no extra science. Once you build the forbidden palace, assuming meritocracy, this is essentially a free yield.

Asymmetric said:

I just finished a similar game with France

Liberty - Piety - Order.

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Welcome to the forums.

I'm unsure about the best choice, too. For me it's clear that you want to pick up liberty, at least for the settler production bonus. The 20% discount on buying stuff is very powerful because you'll buy a lot of stuff. Basically, it means you get a boost of +20% on whatever surplus gold you get.

Less road maintenance isn't that useful but nice, you save 0.2 per tile but we'll only have a bit less than two road tiles per city on average so you save maybe 0.4 gold per city per turn (let's say 10-20 gold). It's a bit more interesting for railroads. Last but not least, mercantilism will give you something like 10 happiness.

On the other hand, Theocracy will give you quite a lot of happiness, at least 30. So I could see skipping Meritocracy in favor of Theocracy. The problem is Theocracy has two pretty lame prerequisites and the rest of the policies in piety are very much not worth it. The +2 free SP is only useful if you go for a cultural victory because it will give you itself and its prerequisite for free.

In the modern era you'll probably not be able to afford to go both Autocracy and Order. I can see the sense in both but I haven't tried this often enough to testify which I find more useful.

Autocracy means you have to go for Theocracy at the start and lose the +50% settler production bonus (not very tragic at that point). What you get is a 33% discount on unit maintenance and bringing down your unit purchasing cost from 80% to 47% (or from 60% to 27% with Big Ben). You also get a nice -50% for occupied city unhappiness but I'd rather raze most cities and build my own instead.

Order, on the other hand, gives you +5 production per city, which is awesome, and another -50% to number of cities unhappiness. This is very powerful and iirc it's applied to occupied city unhappiness, too. You also get a 25% production bonus for every building you hard-build which is also good because we'll still be doing that quite a lot.

Overall, I lean towards order but could see being disproved.

uberfish said:

Maritime food bonus is really what makes ICS work as you're getting +2/+4 food to every city tile way too early in the game (Communism is late enough that it shouldn't really be a balance problem) allowing the small cities to get to size 4 very quickly and build infrastructure fast because they don't need farms.

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I agree that the way maritime city states work makes ICS a lot better. However, I think it would be feasible without abusing this because you would enter a regime where the free city tile production begins to matter a lot.

alpaca said:

Within radius two you get 19 tiles per city, with radius one you get 7. So you get almost three times as many cities, not twice. In a more realistic scenario with coasts, city states and other surfaces you probably get maybe 9 tiles per city.

There are a few important observations: Firstly, city growth food requirements scale very strongly with population, I think almost in a square fashion. This means for cities to grow above size 10 or so takes a long time so you won't use half of these tiles anyways.

Secondly, the maritime city state bonus is per city. This means that two small cities grow a lot faster than a single larger one. The number of citizens that can work tiles will be much larger and the amount of science you generate will probably be larger, especially if you add libraries and set two scientists per city.

Thirdly, the bonus from the city tile itself isn't too shabby. You get +2f +2h +1g which is roughly equivalent to an additional citizen that generates no extra science. Once you build the forbidden palace, assuming meritocracy, this is essentially a free yield.

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This is very interesting. Did you read this post about small vs bigger cities in the Granary discussion, it fits right into this discussion i believe.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=9735471&postcount=48

Small cities will have a higher raw output + growth due in large part to the city square, but the the multiplier infrastructure will be very expensive compared to large cities...

EscapedGoat said:

This is very interesting. Did you read this post about small vs bigger cities in the Granary discussion, it fits right into this discussion i believe.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=9735471&postcount=48

Small cities will have a higher raw output + growth due in large part to the city square, but the the multiplier infrastructure will be very expensive compared to large cities...

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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.

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.

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 reduced what's left in half, so it is another -25% total.

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No... in Civ most of those %s are % of the Original... so they do Add.
(Free Cities, and Free unit upgrades are possible.)

Krikkitone said:

No... in Civ most of those %s are % of the Original... so they do Add.
(Free Cities, and Free unit upgrades are possible.)

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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.