anti ics mod?

[vorlon_mi]

That's kind of my problem bamspeedy. While I certainly could just not do ics(like you said it can take the fun out of the game) there will always be a thought in the back of my head nagging me that I'm holding myself back. I wouldn't have a problem with Ics being a viable strategy in civ 3. I just have a problem with it being the clear dominant strategy. I wish there would be a few more drawbacks to it like in civ 4.

I'm sorry if I'm being dense here. Why are you convinced that it is the clear dominant strategy? A couple of very experienced and hall-of-fame players have posted that they don't use ICS, but rather have a productive core of cities with wider spacing. Are there other HoF games that seem to use ICS?

Although I've seen ICS mentioned in a few strategy guides in the War Academy, the majority of the articles are advising other methods for city spacing and improvement. If I've missed something, I'd like to read it so that I can evaluate it.

 

[Bamspeedy]

I don't think he means ICS as in city spacing, but ICS as in too many cities. I don't think he likes it that it is always beneficial (at least in the long term anyway) to expand as far as you can, as early as you can. I sometimes find myself wondering when to stop putting out settlers and start building (such as on a pangea map....an island map is easy since you just fill up your island first)

Communism is about the only thing that would undermine that due to adding another city increases corruption in all other cities, but that government sucks and I can't think of another way to prevent wanting to add more cities. I wonder if it's possible to make each city have negative unit support........but the AI probably wouldn't realize it and would not adjust it's strategy accordingly.

ICS for city spacing can be powerful in certain situations, but I wouldn't say you can't do just as well or sometimes better without it (even if you do ICS at the start you can later abandon some of those cities when you want to make the remaining ones more powerful and when 'milking' the game for a high score).

 

[I. Larkin]

:>///////

 

[vorlon_mi]

It's return-on-investment; a 30-shield settler allows one to claim resource tiles more quickly than a 60-shield temple and waiting for the culture border pop. As long as the little town is not a net cost to your empire -- and they're not, even the hopelessly corrupt ones, then it is beneficial to build small towns. Perhaps the corruption model could be modded so that there is no return from towns built after some large number. The AI already builds its towns so that the radii don't overlap, so it would not have to be changed.

Since the ROI of the 51st little town is so small, it would not be a great loss to *not* build it. At some point, one runs out of empty land and needs to begin conquering the towns that the AI has built for me. Throttling one's expansion is sub-optimal, but not very sub-optimal.