Play With Me: Rome - infinite style

Thanks alpaca for a good read and a confirmation of how powerful an ICS-strategy can be. I have a few comments / questions.

I have been experiencing with this stragey as well lately, but unlike you I have been capping all my spam-cities at size 4. To me it seems that at this size you can get the most science/gold out of your city with the least ammount of expenses (happiness/maintenance). At size 4 you can run 2 scientists or work trade posts. It seems to me that bigger cities will consume too much happiness, and if you try to remedy that by building theatres (= more maintenance) you would be better off settling another size 4 city. What is your take on this?

This brings me to the next point. If you can get the best amount of science/gold at the lowest cost possible of happiness/maintenance at size 4, you should not ally with more than 2 Maritime City States, because this will cause your size 4 cities to grow even if you aren't working any food tiles.

Since food is usually covered by MCS I tend to settle my non-spam cities around as many hills as I can get. Hills are the best tiles in the game in my opinion, as well as river tiles. I just build trade posts all over the place and these cities get good production and commerce.

I also wanted to point out that once my spam cities have finished constructing monuments/libraries/colosseums + any gold building it can use and/or circus I like to have them spam scouts, which you can delete for money. This is better than building wealth. After a while scouts go obsolete, and you have to choose something else though. If a spam-city is coastal it can build work boats for 30 production. When you delete it for 10 gold that is at 33% the worth of production.

When it comes to Social Policies I agree with most of what has been said. Liberty for Meritocracy is very good, and in addition I think 1 point in Freedom and 2 points in Rationalism for Secularism and +2 science for every science specialist is optimal. In my opinion The Order tree is good, but not as useful as the ones mentioned. Production has little value in the later stages of the game as you will mostly be fighting with bought units or upgraded units produced earlier. In addition to that the game is usually in the bag before the +5 production bonus gets to play any part.

Tredje said:

Thanks alpaca for a good read and a confirmation of how powerful an ICS-strategy can be. I have a few comments / questions.

I have been experiencing with this stragey as well lately, but unlike you I have been capping all my spam-cities at size 4. To me it seems that at this size you can get the most science/gold out of your city with the least ammount of expenses (happiness/maintenance). At size 4 you can run 2 scientists or work trade posts. It seems to me that bigger cities will consume too much happiness, and if you try to remedy that by building theatres (= more maintenance) you would be better off settling another size 4 city. What is your take on this?

Click to expand...

Because of the following reasoning, all happiness building in this game are cost efficient.

Even the most costly happiness building (like staidum) doesn't cost 2 gold per 1 happiness.

1 happiness can get you 1 citizen or 2 specialists (this is the real deal with rationalism/freedom social policy invested)

1 citizen can get you at LEAST 2 gold from vanilla trading post or more.

And now why have cities grow after 4 pop instead of settling... because higher pop cities scale better with improvements like market, allow for more specialists, and having more cities and having cities grow beyond 4 pop are NOT mutually exclusive with maritime city states.

Welcome to the forums. I'm with you on this one, actually. Capping your spam cities is better but for this game I didn't actually do much heavy micromanagement. I didn't micro specialists for beakers and I didn't micro my cities and instead let the AI handle it when I got into unhappiness.

In principle, capping your growth and directing it towards your primary cities should be a fair bit stronger and even allow you to run a happiness golden age or two. It's important to work as many tiles as possible, though, to get the money flowing. I would let the cities work the best tiles (more than 5 total yield and possibly some production) and have a few cities churn out settlers that work some more tiles than normal. If the city has the production available to build a theatre, I would still do that and let it work a few more tiles.

I would like to try Gandhi with Freedom. If it works like I think it should, specialists should then be happiness neutral for him. So if you choose Civil Society, you can get a really large number of specialists in each city.

There are other reasons for wanting to annex a well developed city asap and avoid the science lost in the time it takes to raze & replace. These are, to control builds to ensure the core ones get built (esp. LIBRARY); and to control pop growth, especially important in the late classical-medieval phase.

I'm at researching telegraph in the current France trial game, (1800's), and this is the first game I've played where teching is not far outstripping the ability to buid the new buildings/units. I think that is because more (developed) cities == more throughput bandwidth, i.e., there will always be some advanced cities available to switch to the new stuff immediately while the others play catchup. This is not substantially different from my Civ4 experience BTW.

This suggests that those who complain about long build times being outstripped by the tech pace are playing the game "wrong". That's Firaxis' fault, and not their own, for naturally exploiting the big military imbalances in the early game, and quick fixing the happiness mess by razing everything down, leaving the justifiably unsatisfactory empty continents with a few splotches here and there, along with the narrow build bandwidth.

alpaca said:

If I may make a suggestion: If you REX with conquest, why not let the cities stay at puppet but refrain from researching Bronze Working? That will seriously cut down on the number of useless buildings they can build but still allow you to go for the cavalry unit types up until knight. Research agreements might still pop it, though.

Click to expand...

Yes, the interesting thing is, that the part that happiness-neutral ICS breaks the tech pace vis-a-vis the AI's (The reports tell me that I am 10 techs ahead of the next highest AI, the dominant one on the other continent as yet not hosed by me, it's like playing Babylon!), is the same approach that is optimal for maintaining your own tech/build balance. So I don't think it is the happiness mechanism per se that is broken, but the AI's inability to respond accordingly with its own "ICS" (however modified).

That would confirm Sulla's point that the developers were unaware of this approach. Unfortunately. But in terms of human civ build/tech balance, it feels right to me! I only dreamed for a minute that this is how the clever developers intended it. Silly dream.

alpaca said:

Yep, a result of the maritime city state food. I don't think the game is actually badly designed for the most part, it's just that there are some problematic oversights making these broken things possible. As is often the case, I think that the Civ 5 designers tend to play the game like it's meant to be played, so they don't actually realize many of these issues until the game goes public and a million sets of fresh eyes and brains dissemble every nook of the game.

Some things are inexcusable, though, like horsemen or the maritime CS. Everybody who tries a rush with them once or twice should realise they're too strong

In this case, the designers probably overlooked the influence of providing happiness buildings without prerequisites for each city.

Click to expand...

One last thing: yes, this is yet another way to demonstrate the brokenness on Maritime food. If that is nerfed as it should be, you'd actually have to make granaries, waterwheels (or whatever it is called) and some farmed rivers part of every city's core builds to realize this approach.

gaiko said:

There are other reasons for wanting to annex a well developed city asap and avoid the science lost in the time it takes to raze & replace. These are, to control builds to ensure the core ones get built (esp. LIBRARY); and to control pop growth, especially important in the late classical-medieval phase.

I'm at researching telegraph in the current France trial game, (1800's), and this is the first game I've played where teching is not far outstripping the ability to buid the new buildings/units. I think that is because more (developed) cities == more throughput bandwidth, i.e., there will always be some advanced cities available to switch to the new stuff immediately while the others play catchup. This is not substantially different from my Civ4 experience BTW.

This suggests that those who complain about long build times being outstripped by the tech pace are playing the game "wrong". That's Firaxis' fault, and not their own, for naturally exploiting the big military imbalances in the early game, and quick fixing the happiness mess by razing everything down, leaving the justifiably unsatisfactory empty continents with a few splotches here and there, along with the narrow build bandwidth.

Click to expand...

Well, the tech pace is still insanely high, especially if you rely heavily on research agreements. In my Persia game I'll be researching my third industrial era tech before the year 1500 rolls around, and I don't even have Rationalism because I wanted to go for happiness golden ages and picked up Theocracy. My tech speed is something like 5 to 6 turns but I have four stable AIs I can sign trade agreements with, which adds another tech every seven turns or so, almost doubling my research speed. I can sign all of these because of the golden-age empowered ICS money, of course, and apart from research the Persia game goes stronger than the Rome one, even though the land is worse.

gaiko said:

One last thing: yes, this is yet another way to demonstrate the brokenness on Maritime food. If that is nerfed as it should be, you'd actually have to make granaries, waterwheels (or whatever it is called) and some farmed rivers part of every city's core builds to realize this approach.

Click to expand...

I'm contemplating playing a few games without city states at some point. It nerfs small empires but the maritime CS are so broken I'll have to swallow that.

I started a game with china doing this. Paper maker + collesium + monument + market + bank in every 6/7 max pop city is proving lucrative. Only 11 cities in I'm +200gpt also having won two defensive wars vs ghandi/arabs and also capturing wonder rich dehli. This is on king too. Only allied with 1 maritime atm, got unlucky on that front

uberdubersoldat said:

I started a game with china doing this. Paper maker + collesium + monument + market + bank in every 6/7 max pop city is proving lucrative. Only 11 cities in I'm +200gpt also having won two defensive wars vs ghandi/arabs and also capturing wonder rich dehli. This is on king too. Only allied with 1 maritime atm, got unlucky on that front

Click to expand...

Grats. China is my favourite civ, too. The military bonus is quite powerful (and the generals can do double duty as golden age food) and the Paper Maker provides an excellent economic bonus. In my opinion the Paper Maker is one of the best UB simply because of this reason: you're going to end up with libraries in all cities anyways, and this means it provides 4 free gold per city and turn. Rivals are the Burial Tomb and the Mud Pyramid Mosque, which are both temples with no prerequisites. Although, since I lately started using more artists, I'm considering to downgrade my opinion of the BT a bit.

This was a great read. I have yet to pursue ICS in CIV V and used to use it devastatingly in conjunction with early republic in Civ 2 MP/SP

good job

Im currently doing an ICS as Japan on Continents/Standard/Deity/Standard. I got stuck on an island but decided to ride it out. Are there any benchmarks I should aim for. Like 'such and such Tech/Era by this date' kind of stuff?

S.K. Ren said:

Im currently doing an ICS as Japan on Continents/Standard/Deity/Standard. I got stuck on an island but decided to ride it out. Are there any benchmarks I should aim for. Like 'such and such Tech/Era by this date' kind of stuff?

Click to expand...

I'm curious about these kinds of things too. Also about timings on taking Social Policies. ICS doesn't seem to be my natural playstyle judging by my first attempt.

I went Persia, standard size continents, standard speed on King and just got handled. My first three cities weren't terrific, but the land I was on was pretty bad, so I took what I could get. I got gangbanged by England and India before I could really get going.

I hadn't taken any Social Policies by turn 140 and was juggling to keep neutral happiness. I'd gotten Acoustics and Astronomy heading for Biology while neglecting the bottom tree except for Bronze Working for Immortals. I'd also skipped Civil Service so I could make a few Immortals before upgrading them to something else. Maybe I should have just used the 4 horsemen. One problem I had was that there were no maritime city-states on my continent, and I had no boats that could travel open water.

I'll probably try again and hope for a better start/continent, but I would like to hear more about timings for techs/SPs etc.

S.K. Ren said:

Im currently doing an ICS as Japan on Continents/Standard/Deity/Standard. I got stuck on an island but decided to ride it out. Are there any benchmarks I should aim for. Like 'such and such Tech/Era by this date' kind of stuff?

Click to expand...

ccubed said:

I'm curious about these kinds of things too. Also about timings on taking Social Policies. ICS doesn't seem to be my natural playstyle judging by my first attempt.

I went Persia, standard size continents, standard speed on King and just got handled. My first three cities weren't terrific, but the land I was on was pretty bad, so I took what I could get. I got gangbanged by England and India before I could really get going.

I hadn't taken any Social Policies by turn 140 and was juggling to keep neutral happiness. I'd gotten Acoustics and Astronomy heading for Biology while neglecting the bottom tree except for Bronze Working for Immortals. I'd also skipped Civil Service so I could make a few Immortals before upgrading them to something else. Maybe I should have just used the 4 horsemen. One problem I had was that there were no maritime city-states on my continent, and I had no boats that could travel open water.

I'll probably try again and hope for a better start/continent, but I would like to hear more about timings for techs/SPs etc.

Click to expand...

I can't really help you with timings because I usually go by feel. By turn 200, on Immortal, I could reach the Industrial era but that's pretty fast research and you'll already have half an era over the AI. You can see some screens of the tech tree in this game, the research speed here was fairly high but not extraordinarily so because I couldn't sign a lot of research agreements due to Bismarck rolling over everyone.

As for SPs: The sooner the better, obviously. I would try to get Freedom ASAP because the flexibility is just awesome, so try unlocking your choice of Meritocracy or Theocracy before the Renaissance era.

After I overcame my excitation about Freedom (still excited about it but not too much to stop me from writing), I compiled a last write-up of my notes from this game.

It's not quite won yet but seeing that I have more of everything than the Germans at the end and a quite severe technological lead, the game has come to a mopping up stage. Since I'm one of those people who only plays through these last stages of a game a few times to get a feeling for when a game is certainly on dry land, this will be the final chapter of this PWM.

Seeing your positive reactions, I may decide to make another one some time soon if I have an interesting idea to share or can shamelessly steal one from somebody else. What do you think about trying this trade-post-less idea somebody posted just a little while ago?


----------------------------------------------------

Defeating Up Germany

Losing Berlin must surely have been a severe blow to the Germans, it's a shame that it doesn't affect their fighting morale. I finished the Himeji castle and extended my golden age with a Great General for an additional 12 turns. Rome will finish Big Ben in a few turns and Arpinum starts on The Louvre for more golden age feeding.



The war against Germany is going slowly, Lancers die like flies on both sides, but I'm moving towards München. I razed Düsseldorf to shorten my front: I never planned to keep it anyways but I like having some place near the front to heal so I usually only raze once I conquered a city further in or after I signed peace.



I got Biology from a research agreement with Wu while I myself am researching Replaceable Parts. The only oil I have is next to Beijing, and only worth two units. The desert next to Beijing can support quite a number of oil wells, however. Another source is in the three-tile radius, which is immediately bought by me. Six oil is still a bit light (Oslo has 2 in the vicinity),



We took München, which has the Porcelain Tower. I thought I was still going to raze it, as the tower isn't worth much once it's built, but then saw that München also has an oil well (already improved). Since the railroad bonus is great for such a large empire, I decide to research that next. My research speed at this point is about 4 turns.

Wu was mad at me for settling near her (understandably, but she could as well be a bit more grateful because that "near" wouldn't even be near if I hadn't gifted her back Guangzhou).




Bismarck, frightened for his new capital Hamburg, made me a peace offer that was just too sweet to refuse. Yes, that's 12432 shiny pieces of freshly minted coin. I may or may not attack him again later but this gold can buy 12 artillery pieces or so, just another stupid AI decision. In the mean-time I can destroy Japan who had the cheek to steal a source of coal from me. I know that accepting such peace treaties is ridiculously close to an exploit but at least he didn't offer me all his cities.


The biggest clock of the world



I love Big Ben! It's hands down the best wonder in the game, even with the bugged Taj Mahal, and especially so for an ICS game where you buy tons of stuff. The amount of money you save when you have Big Ben is just incredible. I usually combine it with Mercantilism but I explained my reasoning for skipping it this game earlier.




With the 12000 money from Germany I will now proceed to buy some nice things, such as factories and science boosting multiplier buildings in my best cities. Rome will build the Statue of Liberty.




Japan was quickly wiped from the map. I will slowly work my way down the tech tree to get the Robots.


Freedom for the dumb!

I just realized that I never really looked at Freedom properly: Seeing that I'm running about two specialists per city, this Policy, without any prerequisites I might add, will provide me with something like 1 free happiness per turn and city. If I pick up Civil Society, I can run an obscene amount of incredibly powerful specialists. Enter: Statue of Liberty.




I found two artists hidden somewhere inside my new Louvre and threatened to expose them until they agreed to contribute to my golden age. Now, I'll build Cristo Redentor to combat my policy problems somewhat. Not that it'll be incredibly useful because I'm zipping through the tech tree.




So the Unmet Player was Washington! Aha!




After playing with Freedom for a few turns, sign me impressed. Freedom in this set-up is so incredibly flexible that you can generate 30 happiness and more out of thin air just by assigning specialists. Two applications, apart from the obvious creation of cities that manufacture happiness, are to absorb war unhappiness effects and to generate a large excess of happy faces to bring about a golden age, then switch to the minimum while it's going. This is probably the policy I've been looking for to enable happiness golden ages for the ICS strategy.

----------------------------------------------------

So, that's it. I hope you enjoyed PWM:Rome. I certainly enjoyed flexing my writer muscles a bit and, as I wrote above, might do something similar again in the future. I also immensely enjoyed the discussion

this is my last attempt at ICS as Arabia



I already played a bit more forward, it's pretty interesting game since I am on continent with Germany, Greece, Roman, Iroquis and Washington which proved to be a hectic configuration...

It's peacefull expansion (well actually after settling 7 cities I got dowed by Wash, but defeating 3 out of 6 warriors was enough to get breathing room from him) so maybe someone will find it interesting.

Btw around 1200+AD I got dogpiled by Iroquis and Germany after they wiped Greece and Rome out , but I think I will survive.



I burned first GG for GA since i need hammers and gold more... AIs are totally crashed with me having over 140gpt peace time (280 GA), they get something like 50 max.

Good thinking about the freedom bonus! So many ways to boost each city in this game. I usually have a library and 2 scientists in almost all my cities, so freedom is basically another +1 happy per city. You could even run 4 speciialists for +2 happiness. In theory, with freedom, planned economy, meritocracy, forbidden palace, and military caste, you could get +6 happiness from each city without any happiness buildings at all!

pi-r8 said:

Good thinking about the freedom bonus! So many ways to boost each city in this game. I usually have a library and 2 scientists in almost all my cities, so freedom is basically another +1 happy per city. You could even run 4 speciialists for +2 happiness. In theory, with freedom, planned economy, meritocracy, forbidden palace, and military caste, you could get +6 happiness from each city without any happiness buildings at all!

Click to expand...

Yeah but there's even more to it: The freedom bonus is the only truly flexible happiness bonus in the game, similar to the culture slider in Civ4. If you are conquering and need some more happiness, pull some workers off the fields and put them in temples to manufacture happiness. If you want to get a happy GA, do likewise and when the GA is on, put the workers back on the fields and let your cities grow a bit because you don't need the extra happiness anymore. This flexibility makes it a lot stronger than the total happiness gain would suggest.

Unfortunately it also requires finally stepping up my micromanagement to measurable amounts. It also induces huge fluctuations in all your empire's key figures, which is annoying for reasons of comparison. Your science rating can jump 50% up within a turn, your gold and production some 20% down. Maybe we should start comparing tech tree position at a certain turn rather than science gain at a certain turn (the tree position is integrated, the science per turn fluctuates wildly), or calculate the average science per turn (but this would require much more detailed notes than I'm currently taking)

alpaca said:

Unfortunately it also requires finally stepping up my micromanagement to measurable amounts.

Click to expand...

This is a game with 1 upt and ranged units ... if someone is afraid of MM, they should choose other game...

r_rolo1 said:

This is a game with 1 upt and ranged units ... if someone is afraid of MM, they should choose other game...

Click to expand...

Did you ever micro-manage 40 cities? It's no insubstantial amounts of time I'm talking about

I played a lot of ICS games in civ IV And yes i already MMed more than 40 cities .... I know it is not that easy as that, I'm just pointing that this game is MM intensive