A Solutions to ICS

[Cartouche Bee]

All these elaborate schemes just reduce the number of cities a player builds.

Why not just limit the total number cities to 1 city per 21 squares of land and coast?

 

[warpstorm]

I think we should "wait and see". Right now, if you want to use ICS or not, that's between you and the AI. This is not a problem to be fixed. As nobody (excepting Firaxis and their beta testers) has ever played a game of Civ3 PTW against another human, we don't actually know if this will work against a person with a clue. It works against the AI, but there are many, many threads about how weak the AI is. Before coming up with "Solutions", we first need to see if there is a problem to be solved.

 

[Grey Knight]

Larger cities already get a bonus - ROI on marketplaces, banks, factories, powerplants, etc. which cost a fixed $, but yield a +% return. For example, a marketplace in a 8 gold/turn city yields +3 gold, in a 10 gold/turn city yields +4 -- all for the same investment. It would be very simple to nerf ICS by upping the settler production by 50% -- this would give the non-ICS player time to entrench while the ICS player works toward critical mass. However I don't favor this - it would reduce the strategic value of ICS and push players into a smaller "strategy space". Better would be to provide reasonable responses to ICS. Reading through the various ICS how-to guides, it would seem that getting a modern defense in place (trumping the masses of older units) is not feasible. In my opinion making that feasible for the non-ICS player should be the real goal. Upping the HP bonus for veteran units would seem the most natural path (change HPs from 2/3/4/5 to 2/3/5/6), seeing as building barracks is anti-thematic for the ICS player.

Cheers,
Shawn

 

[Zachriel]

Originally posted by Beard Rinker
A simple modification to negate this strategy would be a penalty of one unhappy face for every tile that is overlaped by another one of your cities.

Each city is currently allowed a number of contented citizens, depending on the level. You could allow a few exempted tiles of overlap, too, depending on the level.

Monarch level with one luxury and no garrison

http://www.zachriel.com/gotm5/

 

[Bamspeedy]

Upping the HP bonus for veteran units would seem the most natural path (change HPs from 2/3/4/5 to 2/3/5/6), seeing as building barracks is anti-thematic for the ICS player.

If the ICS player is a militaristic civ, barracks are easily built.

Also, everyone is talking about ICS players using horseman/knights. Horses are a necessity on the Huge maps because of how much land you must cover, especially when you attack in the BC's when most of the world doesn't have roads. MP will likely be played on Standard or smaller maps. I have one word for you......

IMMORTALS

You can build a ton of warriors in between the production of your settlers. Only need to research to Iron Working, then set science to 0% or 10% and have money to do some massive upgrading. Cut off iron to build more warriors, reconnect iron, upgrade. Rinse and repeat until enemy is defeated. They do cost more to upgrade than going from chariot to horseman, but not as much as horseman to knight and immortals have the same attack power of knights.

 

[Grey Knight]

So your solution is to rush a civ-specific unit? That doesn't exactly sound balanced to me.

Shawn

 

[hr_oskar]

He didn't mean that as a solution to ICS; he was putting it forth as a hypothetical ICS answer to walls and so forth, and it's a good point.

If I ever face Bamspeedy in MP, I'll be shaking (and honored) 'cause I think he's a very strong player.

And yeah, Bamspeedy, yours is the funniest signature that I've seen on this forum, IMO - I sometimes chuckle to myself while smashing Babylon in my games, "Culture assimilate this... hehehe"

 

[Grey Knight]

Over the past week, I've been considering upping settler cost as a counter to ICS. Trouble is, the basic advantage of having 1-2 square city spacing is still there, and while it will take longer for the ICS player to ramp up, the ICS player will still have an advantage over the "standard spacing" player.

Thoughts?

Cheers,
Shawn

 

[MAS]

becouse banks, market places, lib's, uni's, and lab's work better in OCP than in ICS i think upping the settler costs to 3 citizens will really hurt the ICS guy.
ICS is only good for unit support, if you have time to build all those city's, when units are still cheap (early game) and against a very stopid player! (like the AI)

I think the BEST way to place your city's overall in most situations is a dense build (allowing size 12 city's) and not ICS.

Firaxes alreaddy did something about ICS by making settlers cost 2 citizens.

If you don't think that is not enough then i think making it cost 3 will certainly do the trick!

I really don't see how ICS will be more imbalancing, especially not if you play against anything more intelligent than the AI!

 

[MAS]

I have played Diablo2 for a long time, and i can tell you from playing it on battlenet (TM) that if there is anything a cheesy player can do to make the game even more cheesy, he would not hasitate to do so!
But still the most lamest and boring thing i have seen a lame and cheesy civ3 player do is reloading the game to get a tech from every goody hut!
No one exept for some of the better civ3 players tell about using ICS to make the game easy!
Sun Tzu said: being a good strategist means you can turn a losing situation into a winning one!
That said, an ICS guy will lose often enough against good players!

 

[Bamspeedy]

(a) It needs an absolutely ideal start position (lots of grassland). I wonder how many times he started a game, played a few turns and decided the start location was wrong. I'd bet it was a fair few, and these all (IMHO) count as ICS losing...

Depends on what you call a loss. For the amount of time it takes to milk a huge map to 2050 A.D. for a HoF game, I would not want to waste all that time (100+ hours) on a map that did not have the best start and cut my scoring potential a great deal. I had several maps that I played the first 40 turns or so and were still winnable, but I wouldn't have scored a whole lot of points (no luxuries nearby for example).

On MP any start in the middle of the jungle, desert, or plains with no river will be an automatic loss regardless of your play style unless you are playing a very poor player or they had an equally bad starting location.

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MAS -

MAS, obviously you've never witnessed the power of ICS. Maybe you are right and ICS will not win games in MP, we can only hope that is the case. I'd rather spend 100 shields building military units than spending that on a marketplace.

Building ICS you can mass-produce scouts and have a MINIMUM 20 of them out exploring and on a huge pangea map with only 8 civs you can easily get all the ancient era techs before 2500 B.C. without reloading. Difficulty level also affects what you get from huts. On Chieftain, just about every single hut will get you a tech or settler, while on Deity most will be empty.

Obviously MP won't be played on huge maps, but imagine if I you were building other units instead of scouts, as they wouldn't be really needed. The other thing about ICS is since the cities are so close to each other you don't need as many workers to get those cities to max production. If you also build roads, you could get the second city built on the same turn the settler was built, while the spaced city builder is spending 4 turns (or more) of having that settler walk to the city site. This 4 turns keeps getting compounded as time goes on, and the ICS builder would have 10 cities by the time you have 4. The 10 cities would each be having time in between the production of settlers to build military units to defend the city and all cities would be able to help defend each other. The spaced city builder needs some more reaction time to get more than 1 or 2 extra defenders at each of his big cities when an emergency comes up.

It won't be easy to attack the ICS player even if he has weak defenders. If he has only 3 warriors in a city, you end up using 3 units that turn taking just one of his many cities. Then your attackers (horseman, archers) are all open for a counterattack from all different directions. Actually, I think some players may leave a bunch of units outside of their cities (except the captial), so you can't take a peek at their garrison from the embassy spy option and know exactly how many units they have defending.

The only reason I think ICS will not survive against a human player is that the human is more likely to defend his capital with 5 veteran spearman instead of 2 or 3 regulars like the AI does, the human would be more prepared militarily and even possibly launch the first offensive. And a human would go for faster tech pace, but I doubt if they would reach Fuedalism (for pikeman), before the ICS player attacks. It would come down to who makes the first offensive and who gets the better start (terrain), IMO.

 

[Bamspeedy]

Actually, I just thought of something. How exactly does the turns work with MP? I thought it was something a little different, like when you have more cities, you get more time/turn. If it worked so that the player with 3 cities would be able to make 2 moves, while the 6 city player can only make 1 move, that would really KILL ICS.

 

[MAS]

So you build your first couple of city's in ICS mode and then futher expand OCP mode! At the end you din't really played ICS, just a couple of city's 1 tile appart! What is wrong with that? how does that make the game boring? How is the game "not seposed to be played that way"?

Hell, even a player like "Sirian" does that!

That the AI doesn't do it is of a diffrent matter!

One of the things that are on my wishlist are a smarter AI for higher diffeculty levels rather than a production bonus for the AI!

What if the AI is programmed so that, for example, in diety it will build its first 4 city's 1 or 2 tiles from each other! Just becouse that is what an experianced human payer would also do! Here is an idea for civ4!

 

[bbaws]

I haven't tried ICS yet but I will give it a go my next game. What I'd like to see is the ability to merge cities together. OCS IS and ALWAYS HAS BEEN terribly wasteful in CIV. In the ancient era perhaps 70% of your territory is unused. That's not the way it happened in real civilizations, villages glom together into towns and those towns then glom into city, and in some parts of the world cities are already glomming together into urban sprawl.
What I'd like to see is th abiility to build an improvement in one city out of 5 or 6 that would draw together a larger group of settlements. Perhaps adjust the courthouse so that when it is built in one city all the villages in the classic city radius are combined. Not just pop combining but cumulative temple benefits, three temples making one cathedral perhaps. Super marketplaces more powerful banks.
OCS is one of the good points of CIV, you have to find the right spot, glomming would make OCS even more important but also force ICS.
Another stage could be provinces combining the might of several cities.
It's a simple enough tweak but I don't expect to see it B4 CIV4.

 

[MAS]

I like your idea, i have been thinking of it aswell!

In real life, no city is being build in an lesser spot becoue 2000 years in the future that spot would be better and allows the city to be bigger! But ppl who make city's OCP style and don't use any ICS like strategy at all do just that!

however, this would make it a completely diffrent game, so it would still have to be in civ4 or maybe even not related to the civ series!

 

[Agamemnus]

Yeah, I posted this idea early on.. a lot of people have had this idea..

But you have a few problems/unresolved issues with this:

*What is the bigger city? Does it matter by population, culture, or both? And what would the general equation be to figure it out?

*You can't assimilate a city with wonders.

*How would you handle the land ownership? Two cities one tile away from each other can control 32 tiles.

3...---
6..------
7.--*----
7.----*--
7...------
3.....---
32

You could have several solutions without abandoning the city system as is:

(1)

a) Place settlers (1 settler/2 tiles, or depending on cost of settler)for any extra tiles. (not covered by the other city's radius)
b) Place a worker on any extra tile.
c) Just put all the extra citizens into the city and put 'farming establishments' on any city tiles that are essential and out of cultural range at the same time, so that you don't lose any tiles by this effect to rival civs.
d) Combination of the 3: Place farming establishments plus workers plus settlers and extra citizens up to a city size of 20.

*Placing citizens above a size of 20 would be useless, or else you'd have to set the tax/scientists to local cities to get the city tax/science/wealth bonuses.

(2)
You could also/or set the 'bigger' city to absorb immigrants from the 'smaller' city until the 'smaller' city has an arbitrary number of citizens left. Perhaps across cultural lines as well.

Well? Well? Where are the holes?

 

[MAS]

I was thinking about making the wonders on the terrain, like an improvement! You could then assign workers to it!
The idea here would be that workers are like other specialist!
You pick up a citizen in the city screen and a worker appears in the unit area!
The city will have to support the worker even if he is on the other side of the world, untill you do "join city" when he is in an other city! Slaves cost only 1 food and no upkeep, but HAVE to join one of your city's befor they can be used. (adds to the chance a city will riot)
The workers in my plan are also ablo to make a harbour on the coast when the city is for example 1 tile away from the coast!
The city's would only be consentration points for a certain amount of people!
The normal cityzens would produce food mostly, and maybe 1 shield depending on the terrain, and 1 or 2 gold!
Scientist and traders (i don't like to call them taxman) would produce like 4 gold or sci. A worker would produce 4 production but is also moveble.

You can order a worker to build: road, rail, irigation, fortress, and you can order him to mine the land within a city radius! (not "build a mine") as long as he is ming the land his 4 production + what the terrain gives when mined (that is 8 production for mountains) will go to the city production. Untill you select him again and order him to do somthing else!

Special resources would have to be mined by a worker, not just connected by a road. It doesn't really matter if the land is onder your culture.

I was also thinking of a military specialist where one of such a specialist would be able to man 4 units. After all, the army is made out of people who need food and wealth as well!

It would be fun if military units get the command "patrol the land" So that you can claim land without having to have a city near! great to controll an island or a peninsula (sp?) that you don't want to build a city on! If a unit partolls the land he would not be able to fight but make 4 tiles of land "yours". This would also be the only way to get control over city's you have conquered. after you beat the units from your opponent! It will take a number of turns before you can "unpatroll" your units after you have "assimilated" the locals!

As i said, this would make it a completely diffrent game!

 

[Agamemnus]

I just made a very long reply and discussed all your points. But when I submitted, I had to re-log-in and it said 'no valid link'. I went back and lost all my data....

Search for the game 'Colonization' (Pre-Civilization I). It contains some of your ideas. It's really a lot of micromanagement, what you described, but could be fun, and would make a different game.