ICS still works (trading post spamming too)

[Pazyryk]

I'm in reality an anti-Civ, Firaxis-hating troll, but I'm trying to play the devil's advocate here.

 

[Civanator]

Who cares what someone does in their own SP games? The only real problem with ICS is its ease of use, aka basically MP is the only reason ICS is a problem.

 

[Ddude97]

Um, I'd like to point out that single player is a very large part of civ, perhaps larger than multiplayer, and those people care.

 

[Martin Alvito]

Just because it works doesn't mean it's optimal. Based on wholly inadequate playtesting, it seems to me that you want to go vertical for a while, then ICS once key infrastructure is in place.

 

[Civanator]

Um, I'd like to point out that single player is a very large part of civ, perhaps larger than multiplayer, and those people care.

What I'm saying is the AI won't ICS because it doesn't know how. You are the only one who can ICS in the game, so if you do ICS, you are the one causing your own problem. Yes, there needs to be better balancing and more incentive to entice players to stay away from ICS as opposed to punishing players who like to use it, but not by punishing those who do ICS

 

[firecat318]

Who cares what someone does in their own SP games? The only real problem with ICS is its ease of use, aka basically MP is the only reason ICS is a problem.

Maybe because multiplayer is extremely broken and very hard to play without encountering bugs and crashes.

 

[PaperBeetle]

Um, I'd like to point out that single player is a very large part of civ, perhaps larger than multiplayer, and those people care.

Yes, but why do they care? This applies to both the ICS 'problem' and the stored culture 'problem'. Nothing in the game forced anyone to do either of these things, so if they didn't like those strategies, all they had to do is .... not use them. But no, we had people repeatedly posting write-ups of games played in a style they explicitly found boring, just to show off how much boredom they were having.

@Firaxis: you need to fix this broken game so that I can't spoil my own fun, no matter how hard I try. Even if that fix spoils the fun of other people.

So if ICS still works, I say good. They turned culture storing into an option; seems like a waste of time, it was already an option. But if the multiplayer community was having these arguments too, then I guess it's necessary for them. But tbh, I personally feel like sp and mp are so very different* that they really want to be seperate sub-franchises; Civ for sp, put mp under the CivRev brand?

*Different because, contrary to Soren's assertion, Civ is not a symmetrical game between human and AI, like beat-em-ups or FPSes with bots or chess. The AI requirements to play like a human in Civ are so much higher than those more symmetrical games. The Civ-specific Turing Test won't be broken for a long while yet.

 

[Helmling]

There's no need to balance them, because they aren't in competition with each other. You have the "maritime CS" game mechanic and you have the "cultural/military CS" game mechanic. There's no more need to balance them to each other than there is to balance any other two completely unrelated game mechanics.

They're not unrelated since you are usually weighing which a better way to spend your 1,000 gold in bribery money.

 

[atteSmythe]

What I'm saying is the AI won't ICS because it doesn't know how. You are the only one who can ICS in the game, so if you do ICS, you are the one causing your own problem. Yes, there needs to be better balancing and more incentive to entice players to stay away from ICS as opposed to punishing players who like to use it, but not by punishing those who do ICS

ICS isn't something you can just turn off, really. I wrote some thoughts on that in an earlier thread, and I still stand by most of it.

That said, I'm of the camp that says ICS should work. Don't make it completely worthless, just bring it in line with other (mostly non-expansionist) strategies.

 

[Slowpoke]

Well, the city maintenance mod fixed ICS easily, but apparently the patch broke the modding functions that allowed it to work. Back to the drawing board I suppose.

 

[BubbaYeti]

That said, I'm of the camp that says ICS should work. Don't make it completely worthless, just bring it in line with other (mostly non-expansionist) strategies.

I agree and I think that's what the patch was intended to do (its shocking how targeted the patch was to nerfing a particular strategy). However, even now I don't see reasonable alternatives to ICS unless you are going for a cultural victory. Otherwise, you are handicapping yourself. The patch is a band aid but it can't fix the fact that the game is poorly designed (in other words, the designers were going for one thing and got something totally different).

 

[NKVD1938]

Okay, here's what I have always thought about ICS since I read Sulla's in depth breakdown of how to pull that exploit off: YOU DON'T HAVE DO DO IT!!!!!!!!!!!

Seriously, it seems to me like a lot of people have been saying something to the effect of "Civ V sucks because I can exploit a game mechanic and build a hive of 800 cities all two tiles away from each other."

Well, yeah, but find me a game that does not have at least some mechanism that can be exploited by powergamers.

I go at Civ from kind of a role-playing standpoint. I pretend like I'm trying to build a civilization across the course of history. Uh, kind of like what the whole point of the game has always been.

My developing civilization is not trying to be the Borg collective. I build farms in advantageous terrain, I don't build cities with the idea of limiting them to 4 population, and I don't come on here and whine about how my clever little exploit renders the game somehow deficient.

 

[ClarenceSeedorf]

First post-patch game...played so far until 1000AD.

ICS and trading post spamming are alive and well. Maritimes still give plenty enough food that you can ignore farms and spam trading posts everywhere. There's still enough food and happiness resources to support a lot of cities. My pace of expansion may not be quite what it was, but it's not far off. Circuses and coliseums still work because most of my cities aren't allowed to grow over pop 6 or so. Lack of specialists in libraries don't seem to be hurting my research any, maybe the beaker carry over is making a big difference.

Way ahead of AI civs in technology. Way ahead in pop and land area. Making about 100 gold a turn.

Congratulations. You are a very good civ player.

 

[Soronery]

If maritime CS gets nerfed to not provide food to other cities you could always build a granary for a unworked +2 food.

 

[lolno]

To nerf martime CS they could just make it so other civs more actively compete for alliance

 

[lordsurya08]

Oh, I agree that there are plenty of ways to address ICS. But the Maritime Problem offends my sensibilities on a personal level. Sid Meier's name is on this freaking thing and they don't have any game designers who understand that you can't balance one bonus which scales with empire size with two other bonuses which do not scale with empire size? This should be in game design 101.

Firaxis should hire you.

 

[alpaca]

There's no need to balance them, because they aren't in competition with each other. You have the "maritime CS" game mechanic and you have the "cultural/military CS" game mechanic. There's no more need to balance them to each other than there is to balance any other two completely unrelated game mechanics.

This is exactly what I wanted to say. In games there's no need to make everything equally good in all situations (this would just make the game boring). Maritime CS are better if you run many cities, cultural city states and military up to a point are better if you run few.

Anyhow, ICS still works and we predicted it would. However, as Martin and other showed, it wasn't really the optimal strategy. Yes, you want as many cities as you can have but only if they can work two hills or so.