alpaca
King of Ungulates
- Joined
- Aug 3, 2006
- Messages
- 2,322
The problem on Deity is it's always about exploiting the AI rather than doing anything on your own. I think it's likely that on that level, you will simply continue spamming units and killing AIs, leaving them one city so that you can farm for gold (by selling surplus luxuries, which they will still buy) and settlers. In fact, this is probably already true on Emperor.*angrily demands updated math thread*
It seems fairly obvious that once again ICS is going to be optimal on lower difficulties (sub-Deity surely, and possibly sub-Immortal, have zero time in on that level) until we get some balancing patches.
The reasoning boils down to this: districts generally don't yield enough extra yields relative to the investment cost, so you're better off going wide and pushing pop. It also doesn't hurt that you can push Cogs via Factories in an ICS setup in order to actually build districts despite increased build costs. So long as you can settle your own empire, you're better off relying on the geometric progression that we've known and loved since Yang.
How this works at Immortal/Deity is less clear. It seems evident that building an early military is more efficient than settling things. It's less clear how we should handle conquest, or to be more precise just how much of the AI's inefficient decisions we should live with and how many we should tear down.
As for whether ICS is optimal, this really depends on what victory condition you go for. Boosting pop seems the go-to strategy for getting scientific and civic progress, and new cities will do that for you. I think it's possible to build at least one or two additional districts in those small cities, especially if you leverage chopping and harvesting (combine with overflow bug if that is your cup of tea), and then you get a situation that is very similar to the initial CivV build where you only created cities to get a library and university so you can spam great scientists. While the latter aren't that useful anymore, population and possibly building campus and theatre is still the best way to get science, and we should not forget that you get two free pop that don't need amenities or additional housing in every city. Of course science in itself is only really useful if you go for the rocket.