Well I am getting some interesting, and largely positive, results so far in my experimental "ICS based" Commerce/Order variant. I am not going to go into the actual game playdetail here, I may save that for opening a thread devoted to a detailed analysis of a future such game. For now some general observations:
1) Premise: For ICS-based strategies to be optimal, it should be optimal on a variety of randomly generated non-Archipelago maps, and for any civ. Archipelago is considered beyond the limits of this scenario, which does contain an important land-based component. What if the RMG gives a map with a high coastline / landmass ratio, and or a (young or arid or both) landmass? The assumption here is that this will constrict TP spam, a linchpin of ICS based strategies (or ICS-BS
). As you hit the TP-able hex limit, a long term tendency for gold surplus to stagnate will emerge and can be countered by gold multiplier buildings in certain cities and cash sales or warmongering (for both cash and TP lebensraum). In addition TP spam will keep your average ICS city population low, lowering the average gold yield from trade routes. Finally, these same map limitations will lower the efficiency of the overall ICS matrix topology, as one works around the coastline, mountain and desert limitations.
2) Test Specs: All-Standard, Small continents w/ Low sea level & Old earth, Temperate; Mongols. We want to examine the effects of coastlines in isolation from those of deserts and mountains, therefore Old earth, non-Arid. Unlike the latter, coastlines allow seaborne trade routes without roads via Harbors, whose maintenance is constant over distance. We also want to minimize early AI interference in order to focus on the early strategic setup, and Small continents tends to disperse the AI enough to accomplish this. (Aside: A neighboring Songhai across a strait won't hesitate to swarm you over water early game, including with several triremes, I found out in a precious game). OTOH we don't want the coastline / landmass ratio to approach archipelago limits, hence the Low sea. Why Mongols? Well, just because I hadn't played them yet, and their UA/UU is rendered a largely useless novelty as I want to leverage CSs and remain peaceful as long as possible. IOW, they meet the requirement of "any civ", although I got a great sense of security deploying 4 horse + 2-3 Keshiks (high mobility Catapults!) + Mongke GG on the large stretch of desert that separated my large peninsula start from the nearest AI (Siam).
3) Key strategy moves:
- Approximating an ICS matrix as closely as possible, spread out along the coastline, targeting hexes close to sea resources (fish, whales). Farm all the landward space to raise the average ICS city pop. Chop all nearby forest except "deer parks".
- Save you SP's for a bit, don't go into Liberty!
- At the same time, beeline Civil Service (Great Lib sling gambit if possible) - this opens Commerce SP branch. If no river farms, just try Great Lib sling to Compass, or tech to it directly to accomplish the same thing. Build Harbors and build no roads. Rush buy Harbors as necessary.
- Now spend SPs to get to Merchant Navy: 5 hammers / city hex. If you can sling to it, you can boost hammers quite early in the game!
- Next switch to beeline obligatory Construction tech. Then beeline Metal Casting for early Workshops. With the patch, engineers add +2 hammers/ engineer, and with your higher average pop you will be able to stuff an specialist in there along side library specialists. 7 raw hammers / city hex, ~8 w/workshop for building build purposes. Lots of direct builds of Coliseums and Harbors.
- Beeline Astronomy or Banking in either order. Then Acoustics for the Biology beeline.
- Seaports for +2, +4 hammers where applicable, from the Biology beeline. Potential 11, even 13 raw city hex hammers possible w/Navigation.
- Take opening Freedom SP to leverage specialist happiness. Then to Order as usual.
- Finally, settle any inland where good coastline is exhausted. TP spam, road link inland cities as usual.
Note: My previous post was wrong on the era that opens Commerce, a pleasant surprise. Also wrong on the raw city hex hammers, forgot the 2 base city hex hammers, another favorable error.
3) Downsides:
- Maintenance, apparently: ICS roads = 2 Gold/turn for 2 hexes (correct if wrong); Harbor 3 Gold / turn.
- Gold multiplier buildings don't multiply trade gold
This has to have been a design kludge, assuming that when they found out that trade gold yields were OP, instead of properly scaling back the yield to fit, they just made trade gold a "different kind of currency". Nevertheless, I've never had gold problems in this current test game. As compensation, spam workboats to sea resources for gold, that does get multiplied. (BTW, I like that
4) Upsides:
- Early benefits of fast tech, specialist GP bulbing due to coastal farm spam, overall more pop massive ICS matrix to compensate for land shortage.
- Early beeline down top tier tech line is fast track to renaissance and beyond and syncs well with the other Pottery tier for Biology.
- The above also sync well with early coastal/ocean exploration/settlement of those oil/coal resources that may be in short supply at "home", well before the AI.
- More flexibility with overseas CSs.
- AI hostility management: Although it is thought that the AI turns more hostile simply in reaction to your city spamming (in any direction, supposedly, making ICS inheriently prone to much warmaking in its insatiable thirst for land), I'm wondering if this isn't related to the number of HEXES under your cultural control (note how touchy the AI can get about hex buying in its vicinity), rather than number of cities. IAC, I have had no trouble peacefully building to 14 cities (soon to be 16) by Steam Power. About 1/3 of the cities have gone into "overseas ICS" via Harbors.
- Less pressing need for communism. In fact, its +5 hammers is just the cherry on the sundae.
- You should be well positioned to crank out a high tech edge military for the inevitable latter game AI smackdown, with the bonus of lots of offshore naval battery fire support.
