ICS civ 4 style?

What are your thoughts on using an infinate city sprawl type city formation in civ 4? What would be the benefits and the downsides of such a strategy?

I would imagine that such a style would involve taking advantage of the multiple trade routes that would be available, and founding multiple religions, but I would like to hear the communty's thoughts on the subject.

what is 'infinate city sprawl' in Civ4 terms?

Are you taking about city overlap?

About rapid expansion, aka REX?

Due to the game design of city maintence more cities is not always better.

ICS in Civ IV would be something like:

CXXCXXC
XXXXXXX
XXXXXXX
CXXCXXC
XXXXXXX
XXXXXXX
CXXCXXC

It is doable..... it relies seriously on things that give bonus per city , like the religious wonders or Mercantilism and it has a huge potential for drafting. Give this SG a look

Yes, a group did an ICS game. It's not really feasible with just any kind of strategy, it requires its own. It is certainly weaker than it was in Civilization III and Civilization II.

Infinite Corporation Spam

It can be fairly good, if i intend to play a fully peaceful game i don't usually have that much land. So every tile should be used at least and indeed trade routes often let you break even under communism or better. With corps it's even better, just spamming corps make useless empty shells suddenly moderately productive. As rolo said ap buildings and religious wonders make it better. Drafting is good too but that suggests building the cities relatively early which is costly.

So especially on isolated starts i often spread cities x..x..x or at least leave room to fill in in such a manner later.

Early game it's too costly, on the other hand if you have GLH and (enough) foreign trade routes, go ahead.

lordmacroer said:

What are your thoughts on using an infinate city sprawl type city formation in civ 4? What would be the benefits and the downsides of such a strategy?

I would imagine that such a style would involve taking advantage of the multiple trade routes that would be available, and founding multiple religions, but I would like to hear the communty's thoughts on the subject.

Click to expand...

I never really used this tactic. I'm in favor of simply grabbing as much land as possible even if I have to space out my cities far enough. I also don't like founding cities in areas with poor terrain just because they "fit in" with an ICS style strategy.

I bet it'd be pretty sound in a modern era start (or any where you have communism already)

Communism + Spiral Minaret + Shrine + Corporation = instant profit for every new city and a large profit once you get a temple and courthouse built.

That's even before you consider the value of any tiles worked.

This has been my most successful approach so far, usually winning a Domination victory in the 16th century involving tanks in the cleanup, having outproduced the entire rest of the world for some time (reliable outcome up to Immortal. On Deity, hilarity might ensue before I get there).

Making infinite cities affordable breaks the game in half. While earlier per-city bonuses are nice and can establish a dominant position, I don't believe I ever lost a game in which I was the first to found a corporation. 1-tile cities in the Arctic outclassing my opponents' capitals? Yes please!
Mass drafting would probably be a quicker alterntive that doesn't even depend on infrastructure, but I haven't explored that without corporation support for the final push. Well, on non-Pangaea maps at least.

On most maps the Great Lighthouse is a very important wonder to me. Even without it, a few island cities will make domestic trade routes account for enough that I can ofund more cities and focus on production without crashing my economy.
Later on, having more and better developed cities renders AI bonuses moot.

***

On higher levels, I try to claim land quickly if I can't block off the AIs... however, my spacing is optimised for future filler cities, which I will settle as soon as I've run out of land and there's no easy victim in sight.

popejubal said:

Communism + Spiral Minaret + Shrine + Corporation = instant profit for every new city and a large profit once you get a temple and courthouse built.

That's even before you consider the value of any tiles worked.

Click to expand...

No.
Replace Communism with University of Sankore and you are correct.
Of course, the Oxford, WS, and NE cities should have all 20 tiles available.

I presume corporations are a BTS thing? I only have up to warlords so I don't know what alot of you guys are talking about with the corporations.

Magma_Dragoon said:

No.
Replace Communism with University of Sankore and you are correct.
Of course, the Oxford, WS, and NE cities should have all 20 tiles available.

Click to expand...

No. Replace Communism with Free Market once you have the appropriate corporations formed if you choose to do so and use Communism if you don't hit the Corporation Jackpot(tm) and Oxford and NE cities are almost entirely irrelevant since your empire will be so enormous that individual cities will play almost no part in your empire's progress. My original assertion was valid.

Only Wall Street has a significant impact since each city's religious income is at least partially directed to the shrine city and multiplying that wealth has an enormous impact on your empire's wealth as a whole. Once you set the slider to 0% cash/100% science, any tiny amount granted by University of Sankore will be swamped by the rest of the city's commerce that gets directed toward science while the Spiral Minaret will still play a significant part in defraying the costs of your empire to allow you to keep that slider at 100%.

If you generate that many beakers you should be using FR.

The problem with this is the same as always:

In an ancient era start, you will get killed by #cities maintenance unless you have GLH and some offshore settling. Also, you have neither strong workshops nor a way to consistently farm all your land. Doing this with cottages eliminates the point and you're probably better off with just settling resource clumps then.

This is certainly viable later but not right away.

One thing I've been playing with is bureaucracy cottage capitol with lots of caste/guild workshop or mine cities otherwise (other than a GP farm). The outlay in new cities goes way down...you need a barracks and a forge early on and can concentrate on hammer tiles. It seems to tech slower (logically) although it's not too bad if you hike the slider via building wealth and apply the strong commerce capitol's potential with all those multipliers and such. The advantage is that you can shift out of this and spam units like no tomorrow.

It suffers the exact same problem though. How do you get there? Workshops are utter garbage early (though forges can be nice), and marginal food cities are useless until civil service.

Ultimately, I find myself just splitting time between a GP city, the capitol, and hammer cities all over again.

Where ICS might make sense is if you get a large amount of land to settle after teching for a while. Some fractals, terra, and some of the more obscure maps have the tendency to hand these types of lands out (where you can get 4 cities or more on them). In this case, if you're gunning SP anyway workshop/farm spam and just hammer modifiers before using the cities for units or to boost the slider makes more sense - workshop cities develop faster than cottage cities and later on that's what you REALLY need.

I've never found a better way to fund an empire than cottages though, other than those /city wonders, which ALSO require you to tech there....

Huge map with 4 civs?

brb :3

Arboria or planet-wide jungle map... Play Hannibal (financial/Charismatic). Settle on a CxxC square grid and cottage everything including resources (except for one of each so you get happy and health benefits). Run scientists on top of pop 8 in case of need. Find a few happy resources or revolt to Monarchy somewhere along the way. I bet you'd get pretty far like that.

Its completely viable and it works at least up to and including Immortal - given one of two constraints.

1) GLH with a lot of coastline. I've had 13 cities packed together in an ICS formation by 1AD, with a strong economy and plenty of production capability.

2) Financial leader - early on a financial leader is going to be limited by health and happy caps to cities of size 10 or less - but you can easily afford lots of those cities. Just 5 hamlets will generate 15 commerce - more than a city could possibly incur in maintenance.

Generally I will try this only with financial and organized leaders now - and usually with the GLH. It sets you up for a strong rush to rifling followed by an awesome drafting cycle and rapid military expansion. Add corps after your military expansion and you can shoot to space.

Another variation without the GLH is to get the religious trifecta of Spiral Minaret, UofS and Apostolic Palace. Its extremely powerful once you get going, but its harder to pay for early expansion - it works better if your expansion is later. Awesome for non coastal isolated starts where you can delay your expansion.

Corporations are the thing that makes it beneficial... on the Next War map, which is very large, but set as Standard(giving good corp benefits) this is the way to go as corps give the biggest per city bonus

Also a number of the maintenance costs are partially based on population, so 20 cities of pop 10 are less than 2x the cost of 10 cities of pop 20

Benefits are the percity bonuses of
Happy/Health cap
Trade Routes
Mercantilist Specialist
Religious buildings/Industrial Park
Espionage
Shrine/Corporate Income
Corporate Benefits

Downside are the per city costs
Buildings that need to be built (include also Missionaries/Corporate Executives, and the initial Settler)
Maintenance (corporate and otherwise)


So doable, but only in the case of corporations would it be the best strategy