ICS, Civ V style

I don't care whether or not it's realistic, it's just no fun.
To this very early point in my Civ V experience, I've found the tradeoffs very interesting, so I emphatically agree that things have to be tweaked (or violently wrenched) to put some balance back in order to challenge the most skillful players. [I'm not one of them, BTW.] From this thread it's apparent that even within the world of ICS there are tradeoffs and disagreements about the best techniques, and even some disagreements about whether ICS is the best strategy.

I'm certain that you know this (I'm not trying to teach granny to suck eggs), but if you're not a multi player then if ICS is no fun, play in a style that is fun. I'll have to give ICS a try, just as I've tried an India culture win, a horse rush, and so on, but as a micromanager from way back (i.e. Civ II), it's likely that I'll find ICS as tedious as you do. Then while waiting for those tweaks I'll switch to the builder style that I prefer. Anyway, have fun!
 
To this very early point in my Civ V experience, I've found the tradeoffs very interesting, so I emphatically agree that things have to be tweaked (or violently wrenched) to put some balance back in order to challenge the most skillful players. [I'm not one of them, BTW.] From this thread it's apparent that even within the world of ICS there are tradeoffs and disagreements about the best techniques, and even some disagreements about whether ICS is the best strategy.

I'm certain that you know this (I'm not trying to teach granny to suck eggs), but if you're not a multi player then if ICS is no fun, play in a style that is fun. I'll have to give ICS a try, just as I've tried an India culture win, a horse rush, and so on, but as a micromanager from way back (i.e. Civ II), it's likely that I'll find ICS as tedious as you do. Then while waiting for those tweaks I'll switch to the builder style that I prefer. Anyway, have fun!
I guess the problem is that, even though I don't play multiplayer much, I still have a fairly competitive nature. I like to feel like I'm getting better each time I play, or at least trying to get better. I don't mind skipping specific thigns that feel like exploits, like horsemen rushing, but this is more than just a cheesy exploit. This is just how the economics of the game work. I wanted to do this because I knew it would create a powerful economy. I honestly can't think of any other way to run the economy which would be anywhere close to the same power (and I have tried other approactes, too). If I try to forget about ICS and just play "normally", I'll feel like I'm just screwing around. It would be like trying to do warfare without any promotions, or with only one unit at a time.
 
pi-r8,

Have been lurking here for years, but never responded before. Just finished my first game of Civ V and had a pretty good experience with spamming cities and taking over the world--with the added complication of a archipeligo world and the need to develop the naval techs. Anyway, My question is about the Social Policy Tree and saving up the culture points to do it all at once. Is there a particular benefit to waiting? I understand waiting to build the cities till you are ready, but why not apply the policies as you go with your 6 cities and get the benefits as they accrue?

Thanks!
 
(it looks like you putted half your cities from the screenshots, Japans empire in the top right)

Its fun, but not exactly game breaking to wait until Steam/Railroad to start spamming these citys.

I bet that you were so far ahead that it didnt matter what you did at that point you had the game won. You managed to steam roller the biggest nation Japan in less than 100 years with apparent ease.


So in summary, I dont think this style of ICS gives any sort of advantage, and probably took more time to set up than it did to win the game. However, it does look fun. We should have a contest to see who can have the most cities and still have positive happiness!
 
(it looks like you putted half your cities from the screenshots, Japans empire in the top right)

Its fun, but not exactly game breaking to wait until Steam/Railroad to start spamming these citys.

I bet that you were so far ahead that it didnt matter what you did at that point you had the game won. You managed to steam roller the biggest nation Japan in less than 100 years with apparent ease.


So in summary, I dont think this style of ICS gives any sort of advantage, and probably took more time to set up than it did to win the game. However, it does look fun. We should have a contest to see who can have the most cities and still have positive happiness!


The problem is ICS works excellently if you do it from the get-go. Contest should be at standard everything, map of your choice (continents is probably easiest). My current record was 61 after which the game started crashing a few further turns in, with +20 happiness or so.
 
There's nothing left to learn, except minor details to optimize this. With civ 4 I'm still, after 5 years, learning new ways of getting the economy to work. But I'm fairly confident that, with the way things are in Civ 5, nothing will be better than some form of small city spam.

It seems evident that ICS will maximize production, as measured by Gold/Hammers. The issue is that city tiles are buff to start with, there are many Social Policies that buff them further, and you can resolve the +3-4 Happiness hit from a classic ICS city with a single building.

If you want to maximize research speed, ICS is suboptimal. You want a bunch of midsize cities with Science improvements, and you want to run Rationalism rather than the ICS Social Policies. While the ICS player gets more raw population, turbocharged Scientists and Trading Posts produce a lot more Science that in turn gets laundered through Science buildings.

There are two key differences between this game and Civ 4. There were only two paradigms in Civ 4 - win on Culture, and win on anything else. There also were a lot more choices in the process of managing your economy. How you went about it varied sharply between the two paradigms, but either way there were a lot of meaningful choices to be made along the way due to the depth of the tech tree and the substantive penalties associated with accelerated production decisions (whip/chop).

Here, the major choice in empire management is simply Social Policy selection. Since the choices are irrevocable, you have to pick a victory condition and associated line of play early in the game and stick with it. This reduces flexibility, which reduces the number of meaningful choices, and you therefore get a game that is much closer to Master of Orion 2 (which started with irrevocable racial attribute selection and was dominated by a few local optima as a result), rather than a true successor to Civ 4.
 
There are two key differences between this game and Civ 4. There were only two paradigms in Civ 4 - win on Culture, and win on anything else
Couldn't disagree more. I don't see any diference between winning by culture and any other win in civ Iv in terms of paradigm. Care to develop this point ?
 
pi-r8,

Have been lurking here for years, but never responded before. Just finished my first game of Civ V and had a pretty good experience with spamming cities and taking over the world--with the added complication of a archipeligo world and the need to develop the naval techs. Anyway, My question is about the Social Policy Tree and saving up the culture points to do it all at once. Is there a particular benefit to waiting? I understand waiting to build the cities till you are ready, but why not apply the policies as you go with your 6 cities and get the benefits as they accrue?

Thanks!
I had to wait until the industrial era to get the order policies, which are the really powerful ones for this style. You're right, I could have taken some policies in commerce also, while I was waiting. However, I wasn't sure I'd have enough culture points to get 4 policies in order and 3 in commerce, so I saved all my points to be sure I had enough for order. This is just because I didn't bother to calculate how much culture everything would cost. If you wanted to, you could calculate everything in advance and do like you said.

(it looks like you putted half your cities from the screenshots, Japans empire in the top right)

Its fun, but not exactly game breaking to wait until Steam/Railroad to start spamming these citys.

I bet that you were so far ahead that it didnt matter what you did at that point you had the game won. You managed to steam roller the biggest nation Japan in less than 100 years with apparent ease.

So in summary, I dont think this style of ICS gives any sort of advantage, and probably took more time to set up than it did to win the game. However, it does look fun. We should have a contest to see who can have the most cities and still have positive happiness!
It's true you could probably win earlier with some sort of military rush strategy. I was just tired of doing those, and I wanted to win with pure economy. I guess I like the building part of the game more than the war part. I don't think I was too much slower though- I got to the industrial pretty fast, and grew so quickly after that Japan didn't stand a chance, even though they did have a lot of units. An alternative instead of going for steam power/railroad is to shoot for artillery instead, which gives you good defensive units while you're teching, and allows you to go on the offensive as soon as you get artillery.

Other people like alpaca seem to think that it's better to just ICS right from the start, instead of waiting for the industrial era. That might be true, I'm not sure. I think either way is extremely powerful.
 
It seems evident that ICS will maximize production, as measured by Gold/Hammers. The issue is that city tiles are buff to start with, there are many Social Policies that buff them further, and you can resolve the +3-4 Happiness hit from a classic ICS city with a single building.

If you want to maximize research speed, ICS is suboptimal. You want a bunch of midsize cities with Science improvements, and you want to run Rationalism rather than the ICS Social Policies. While the ICS player gets more raw population, turbocharged Scientists and Trading Posts produce a lot more Science that in turn gets laundered through Science buildings.
I really don't like using rationalism in this game. The problem is that, with research agreements, multiple cities running max scientists, and a high population, research speed is already so fast that my production can't keep up. You start building a musketman, but before it finishes you've unlocked riflemen and infantry! This can actually be a bad thing, if it prevents you from building units which are older but still useful. Meanwhile the list of buildings left unbuilt gets longer and loner. Production and gold is always what I want more of, I very rarely feel like I need to research any faster. To put it another way, what's the point of researching combustion in 5 turns when it takes 50 turns to build a tank?



There are two key differences between this game and Civ 4. There were only two paradigms in Civ 4 - win on Culture, and win on anything else. There also were a lot more choices in the process of managing your economy. How you went about it varied sharply between the two paradigms, but either way there were a lot of meaningful choices to be made along the way due to the depth of the tech tree and the substantive penalties associated with accelerated production decisions (whip/chop).

Here, the major choice in empire management is simply Social Policy selection. Since the choices are irrevocable, you have to pick a victory condition and associated line of play early in the game and stick with it. This reduces flexibility, which reduces the number of meaningful choices, and you therefore get a game that is much closer to Master of Orion 2 (which started with irrevocable racial attribute selection and was dominated by a few local optima as a result), rather than a true successor to Civ 4.
I really disagree with this. Sure it's possible change civics in Civ IV, but you try to avoid doing it as much as possible. Not only because of anarchy, but also because your empire is usually set up to take advantage of a particular set of civics. For example, if you've built a lot of workshops to take advantage of state property, it's not easy to change into something else.

The trick is to find a "narrative" for your civ that will be strong for the entire game. You have to find strategy that starts out strong, but also transitions well into a solid late game that gives you a win. it doesn't work so well to constantly shift between wildly different strategies. I think social policies are a natural extension of this- some social policies are good early, some are good in the end, and you have to balance them.
 
I'm not sure, either, whether spamming early or spamming late is the way to go. Spamming late does have the advantage of having more SPs while expanding early gives you a larger amount of production, gold and research. In fact, I don't really build cities everywhere immediately but instead try to go for the good locations first, then settle the intermediary space to save road upkeep and increase trade income.

A result of this is that I rarely even get order, though. I think Freedom is more useful. The 1/2 happy face per specialist easily beats what you get from Planned Economy because by that time a lot of your cities are able to run four or five specialists (more if you pick up Civil Society). The big thing with order is +5 hammers per city, of course.

I agree about Rationalism, by the way. What's the point of getting another 25% or 30% science when you're already researching current techs in four turns? In my PWM:Rome game I was researching cutting-edge techs in three turns soon after the last update. Of course, you can argue that science is what it's about because it allows you to get to the better weapons and such faster but it's not a lot of fun if you never build a unit because by the time it would be finished it's transformed into something twice as expensive while in the queue. I usually buy units, anyways, to get the bonus from my one or two barracks/armories that I invest in in some good hammer city - or to get them to the frontline faster.
 
I think Alpacas' purpose here is not to advocate a pure mechanical ICS from the get-go as a strategy, but to build a use-case that shows Firaxis that 1) ICS is possible and 2) the game can be broken by this means. And produce a mind-numbing gaming experience to boot, as has been correctly pointed out.

I only hope that the fix is not the cheap and easy one of cranking up the unhappiness, as this would only exacerbate the other key game imbalance, land conquest speed vs. speed in which that (empty) land can be brought into production - this analogous to the tech speed / production speed imbalance, and in inverse relation, btw, the more you balance the former, the more unbalanced becomes the latter. This quick fix would only be acceptable in connection with a horseman nerf + general improvement in combat AI so that there would be a real opportunity/risk cost tradeoff between grabbing more (largely empty) and settling for less land and less military economic strain in exchange for a lower happiness expansion barrier for a smaller territory.

Otherwise the way to efficiently fill the continent you will at present inevitably clear is an aggressive REX based (and made possible in my case) by the ICS principles Alpaca has revealed. Because the alternative of largely empty continents with a few city/CS splotched about while your eternally preindustrial army conquers the world is just as unsatisfying as a mindless ICS. Especially as it is impossible to do any city specialization (and therefore utilize certain specialized buildings) with so few cities.

However in my French trial game I've been able to specialize cities for the first time, with cities focused on military, a jungle science city where I wold never settle in the past, and even a desert culture city where artists are generated and then settled in the otherwise worthless desert hexes, forcing me to farm over more productive hexes after building all the food buildings to keep it going. Plus Nat'l Epic, broadcast tower and 2 Louvre artists , and this city will be cranking well > 100+ culture / turn all by itself, just the thing after an aggressive REX post communism late game.

But it is the REX that made it possible.

To this very early point in my Civ V experience, I've found the tradeoffs very interesting, so I emphatically agree that things have to be tweaked (or violently wrenched) to put some balance back in order to challenge the most skillful players. [I'm not one of them, BTW.] From this thread it's apparent that even within the world of ICS there are tradeoffs and disagreements about the best techniques, and even some disagreements about whether ICS is the best strategy.

I'm certain that you know this (I'm not trying to teach granny to suck eggs), but if you're not a multi player then if ICS is no fun, play in a style that is fun. I'll have to give ICS a try, just as I've tried an India culture win, a horse rush, and so on, but as a micromanager from way back (i.e. Civ II), it's likely that I'll find ICS as tedious as you do. Then while waiting for those tweaks I'll switch to the builder style that I prefer. Anyway, have fun!
 
Yup, ICS needs some work to be effective in Civ V, but it is less work that you needed for it to be effective in any civ game after civ II, including civ III. That is to say a lot.

By the way, I noticed in a test game that ICS makes for very resilient defense if needed ... simply because cities are close enough to cross fire and in the pure ICS there is no tile inside your borders that can't be bombed from a city. Until artilery comes by that makes for a pretty stiff defensive buff. It also means that, if you have troops in garrison duty , that your troops inside your land always have formation bonus ...
 
I am doing this with China. Looking back on it, France would have been way better, as you need some of those policies. Sure, I make a paper maker. To match France's ability, you need to have a monument in every city. Even then, they have that, then a monument on top.

I am making ~250 gold per turn at 300 AD. It's really fun to buy a building every 3-4 turns on Epic. Building walls, an archer, and 2 horsemen instantly when someone declares war on you is fun.

The biggest reason that it's a really resilient empire is you just don't care if the coms take a city. Each individual city isn't worth much at all. So even if you're losing at a war, it will take a long time for you to feel the damage. With a small empire, you're done after 1-2 cities fall.
 
Yup, ICS needs some work to be effective in Civ V, but it is less work that you needed for it to be effective in any civ game after civ II, including civ III. That is to say a lot.

By the way, I noticed in a test game that ICS makes for very resilient defense if needed ... simply because cities are close enough to cross fire and in the pure ICS there is no tile inside your borders that can't be bombed from a city. Until artilery comes by that makes for a pretty stiff defensive buff. It also means that, if you have troops in garrison duty , that your troops inside your land always have formation bonus ...

I am doing this with China. Looking back on it, France would have been way better, as you need some of those policies. Sure, I make a paper maker. To match France's ability, you need to have a monument in every city. Even then, they have that, then a monument on top.

I am making ~250 gold per turn at 300 AD. It's really fun to buy a building every 3-4 turns on Epic. Building walls, an archer, and 2 horsemen instantly when someone declares war on you is fun.

The biggest reason that it's a really resilient empire is you just don't care if the coms take a city. Each individual city isn't worth much at all. So even if you're losing at a war, it will take a long time for you to feel the damage. With a small empire, you're done after 1-2 cities fall.

Yes, I pointed out the defensiveness somewhere else some while ago but forgot to mention it in the Rome thread. It's quite interesting that if a unit marches into your land, there will inevitably be at least two cities that can fire on it.

The second reason is that city tiles have a zone of control so with close-packed city placement, the opponent has no good chance to go around your cities and surround them. So you can safely station units behind the city front-line without the enemy being able to attack them.

The third reason is that cities are excellent at keeping ranged units protected from enemy attack. Not only the city itself can fire upon the enemy sieging your other city, but the unit stationed inside of it will, too! Without the opponent being able to damage or kill it like he could in field battles.
 
Continuing my China game, I won't play like this again. It's completely overwhelming. There's just too much micromanagement needed to run an empire like this! It wouldn't be so bad if my cities were spaced far apart, but having them close together is just harsh. They are at about size 10 each, with only about 8 workable spaces (sometimes more due to ocean).

For example, consider a city in the centre of a landmass. It has marble, and lots of forests, and no other resources. Luckily due to maritime city states it's size 12 and perfect for wonders. Well, when I need to build a wonder I go to it, and toggle over a LOT of tiles so it has more production to work.

Now consider having to do that for every city that's building something halfway important. I can toggle a crazy crazy number of tiles. One city builds a theatre, then I switch the production tiles to the next city so it can build the theatre, then the next city, and so on. The cities are just TOO compact compared to how far out they work that it's driving me insane.


Another note is the grow speeds. My capitol, with good food and being around the entire game, is only size 12. I just put up a new city and with no policies to help, it skyrocketted to size 3 in 4 turns. I check back in another 20 turns and it's size 7! With maritime city states, the way global happiness works, and how much food is required for big city sizes, all of your cities cap off very very fast. Before my capitol can grow another city size, a smaller town quickly grows and gobbles up the excess happiness. I don't like it.
 
Continuing my China game, I won't play like this again. It's completely overwhelming. There's just too much micromanagement needed to run an empire like this! It wouldn't be so bad if my cities were spaced far apart, but having them close together is just harsh. They are at about size 10 each, with only about 8 workable spaces (sometimes more due to ocean).

the point of ICS as I see it, is limiting the population of your cities so they dont get extra unhappiness or require too many tiles to function.
 
the point of ICS as I see it, is limiting the population of your cities so they dont get extra unhappiness or require too many tiles to function.
The only time you should limit your growth is to gain golden ages.

Each one population nets you:
- +1.25 trade route gold
- +1 science
- +1 tile worth of goods
- -1 to your golden age total

With so many cities making so many colosseums, you get happiness FAST. It's definitely better than a small empire.
 
I really don't like using rationalism in this game. The problem is that, with research agreements, multiple cities running max scientists, and a high population, research speed is already so fast that my production can't keep up.

You're racing the AI to your win condition. If it isn't culture, your win condition on a sufficiently large Deity map involves advanced tech. Either you're going to win in the UN, or you're going to build a spaceship, or you're going to drop a bunch of GDRs (or similar massive military disparity) on the AI, or you're going to nuke the snot out of it.

The more you can accelerate the time to reaching your win condition, the less opportunity the AI has to do anything about it. Rationalism increases the efficiency of your Science specialists by 67%, which is substantial. It also triples the Science productivity of any pop unit working a Trading Post.

Clearly you like to build things; your ICS approach demonstrates that. But when you can end the game right after turn 200 and stay a full tech level ahead of even a juggernaut AI, there really isn't any reason to build a lot of stuff. If the juggernaut is on another continent, it will never have time to reach you. If you share a continent with it, early Artillery will make anything it throws at you look just silly.

Couldn't disagree more. I don't see any diference between winning by culture and any other win in civ Iv in terms of paradigm. Care to develop this point ?

Optimal behavior varies. In a cultural game, you have a minimum threshold of number of cities that you need to achieve. Anything beyond that is superfluous. You need a few late game techs and not much else, those techs result directly from the standard Deity beeline anyway, and you pick up sufficient military techs along the way. So expansion is not really a priority; the marginal impact on completion time is minimal, because you don't really feel the effects of +pop -> +research all that much.

For any other victory condition, expansion to the limit of your ability to finance it (and still keep the research bar moving) is always highly desirable. Domination requires doing so. Spaceship requires keeping the Science bar moving, and appropriate expansion through conquest (no lengthy wars against hardcore unit-spammers) will always increase research speed. Diplomatic wins require votes; conquering citizens directly increases your vote count, and there are ways to game who you target to improve your diplomatic relations as needed in the process of expansion.

I can't speak to anything after vanilla, as I didn't play it. But that doesn't really matter here, since comparing Civ4 + xpacs to Civ5 is a blatantly unfair comparison. We should be comparing vanilla to vanilla.

I really disagree with this. Sure it's possible change civics in Civ IV, but you try to avoid doing it as much as possible. Not only because of anarchy, but also because your empire is usually set up to take advantage of a particular set of civics. For example, if you've built a lot of workshops to take advantage of state property, it's not easy to change into something else.

You're talking extreme late game, and you're stacking the deck by discussing a Civic that requires significant investment to exploit. Most Civics don't work that way. You would prefer to run many of them for brief periods, but not always. Anarchy is indeed a significant cost that precludes brief swaps for non-Spiritual leaders; a Spiritual game plays quite differently. Some Civic choices are obvious (Hereditary Rule, Slavery on acquisition); others are much less so.

There are just a lot more opportunities for meaningful choice along the way under the Civics system. With the Social Policy system, optimal play always requires determining your endgame early and selecting policies accordingly. If you want to win by Domination, you need to build a lot of stuff in a lot of cities. If you want to win by Diplomacy or Science, you need a small number of big Hammer producers and a lot of Science output. Culture is its own SP animal; the proper approach is fairly obvious.
 
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.

On a related note, the russian Krepost and Angkor Wat does not stack at all; when my city (which had Krepost) built Angkor Wat the cost of the next tile was just halved (as expected when going from 50% to 75% reduction)
 
You can combine principles of ICS play with principles of large city play to create an empire that's remarkably like the way you might have played Civ IV in the past.

Cities are specialized according to how they're needed. Large cities are production, military, and science centers. They gets lots of tiles, and they get Granaries and Watermills to prioritize growth in them rather than in secondary cities. They also get farms.

Secondary cities are for securing the frontier, getting oddly placed luxury or strategic resources, or just to use a few extra odd-placed tiles when you have gratuitous happiness excess.

There is no need to micro the larger cities. They behave as they normally would. There is no need to micro the smaller cities - they never compete with larger cities for tiles.

Key Social Policies are in Freedom, which is opened in Renaissance. Freedom helps the large cities grow larger, and it boosts the productivity of the smaller cities. Meritocracy + Forbidden Palace is still key to keeping happiness manageable and to allow the larger cities to grow truly large.

I have not been able to combine it effectively with a truly large-city focus. General benchmark for large city play is a city in the 20s (and growing) at turns 260-280. With more cities, it's harder to reach that goal while also juggling production and gold costs. Theoretically, it should be possible, but getting more happiness in a timely manner is an issue. Might be possible with Egypt.
 
Top Bottom