chauncymo:
The issue is timeliness. You don't need 5 units 20 turns into the future, when you have better techs. You want them now. You either rush-buy with Gold Economy, or you produce with a more balanced one.
A size 20 production city should be able to produce a Modern unit in 6-7 turns. You ideally should have 3 such cities, so you get your three Modern units in about 7-8 turns allowing for discrepancies in production capacity. Then you use them.
Getting three times as many units when you have better units to build isn't useful unless you're fishing for the upgrade path.
Bigger cities are better for production of all manners of things. Wonders are the only ones you can't Rush-Buy, but they produce units for cheaper, too, since you don't have to pay the Gold premium for rushbuys.
Bandobras Took:
Unfortunately, I'm neither very good nor aware of how to post pics on the 'net without an account. Do you really want to see my crappy, normal-looking Civs?
lossofmercy:
lossofmercy said:
Color me unimpressed. Giant cities by 1926? Sure, but ICS gets that kind of power by 1500.
That really depends on what you want out of the game. Do you want to win with a Spaceship in an anachronistic time period or do you want to see big cities?
lossofmercy said:
Can you stop and think about the benefit of this strategy and what it means to a strong player rather than just use one logical fallacy after another? The horseman rush can be easily balanced and cut apart. This is a different beast.
I don't see any fundamental difference. If you just want to win and do it faster, then using Conquest is the fastest way.
lossofmercy said:
Whatever, they get monuments and theater. Besides, so what? You get higher production and teching. You won't win by culture, but all the other ones (space, score, war, diplomacy) only require 2 things, money and research. Guess what? Those things aren't effected by ICS at all. Thats because Library/Colosseum is cost for cost more effective than its later counterparts.
Production is an iffy thing. I am sure you can have 1-2 cities that are relatively huge, even, with ICS. Besides, with communism, ICS beats any other strat in production.
If you have large cities working large tiles, that is no longer ICS. That is simple a large Civ, and large Civs have always been stronger in Civ games. There is no exception to this, not even Civ IV.
Late game policies make large Civs even better, but this has always been true of Civs, again. Civ IV's Corporations meant that the only limit you should put on making Cities was how close you could put them together on the map. They won't actually need to work tiles or anything.
lossofmercy said:
Wrong, it takes you 125x2 (maybe 3) turns to get from 10-20. Vertical growth gets a cap really fast, much faster than horizontal ones.
Basically, you can get 3 cities to size 6 in 1/2 the time it takes you to get one city to size 24 (and with less farms).
I'd be more interested in facts and reproducible results rather than showing which of us has a bigger epeen. If that interests you, I can tell you you're a better player right now, or whatever the heck it is you want to prove.
It does not take 250 turns to grow a city to size 20, since I can grow a city to size 20 in 260 turns, and that involves playing in distinctly non-optimized manners. I'm sure stii could achieve it sooner.
I'm talking about Standard Speed of course. If you are interested in the specifics, I could look at my save files and tell you how I did it.