Any high level strategies besides ICS or rushing?

[futurehermit]

I'm just wondering if any other meta-strategies have been developed that don't hinge on ICS or rushing (warrior, sword, or horseman primarily). I've had a lot of success with both approaches at immortal level, but things seem fairly repetitive after awhile.

Any interesting strategies in the cultural victory approach?

 

[DaveMcW]

Any interesting strategies in the cultural victory approach?

Gift away all your cities after rushing and ICS.

 

[Slowpoke]

I'm just wondering if any other meta-strategies have been developed that don't hinge on ICS or rushing (warrior, sword, or horseman primarily). I've had a lot of success with both approaches at immortal level, but things seem fairly repetitive after awhile.

Any interesting strategies in the cultural victory approach?

Nope. Honestly you gotta play a mod or restriction play to add some variety.

 

[aimlessgun]

What do you mean by high level? Like, to be able to win as quickly/easily as ICS/rushing? Currently I don't think any exist. ICS and rushing are both very general things that are so broadly useful that fabricating an 'optimal' strategy without them would be pretty difficult.

If you only objective is winning, you don't have to employ either of those things, even on Deity. It'll just be harder. You might even lose

 

[LordTC]

Try and win under the following conditions:

Deity Difficulty.
Must declare war on every civ and every city state you meet. Map must be large pangaea with default number of civs and city states. Huts off (I've played it this way ever since I got 3 unit upgrades on the same unit for ancient era rifleman, what a way to spoil a game). Raging Barbs.
One City Challenge Enabled.

There isn't enough benefit to an early attack that can't keep the city and you obviously can't ICS so the game gets a lot more interesting.

Best result I know of so far is surviving to 2050AD but not winning, I'm currently trying this for a cultural victory as the Aztecs, given the lower culture costs of staying small and the culture bonus for every unit kill, I also find that upgraded jaguar warriors make for brilliant units, and if you get some iron and some jungle you can do very well.

 

[Lanstro]

I'm playing at immortal and try to win using the unique abilities/units of the civilization that I'm playing. That often means not much rushing, and occasionally turns out to be a completely defensive, low city count game. It's still perfectly possible to win at immortal, at any rate.

 

[pi-r8]

Try to win without using any workers at all. It's possible!

 

[alpaca]

Good question, I'm not sure there's a good "medium empire" strategy with loosely spaced cities because the game mechanics don't seem to lend themselves well to it. That's the only other kind of game I could see happening between the puppet (rush) strategies and huge empire (ICS) strategies. It's interesting to try, though, and you can win with it. It's just a lot less powerful.

However, ICS is a very broad term, kind of like "bread". Many of the discussed strategies (like Martin Alvito's spaceship victory) aren't actually ICS in the original sense of slapping down as many cities as you can. Instead, you found cities at good locations but still quite closely together so they can share tiles. And you stop at maybe 15 cities. It's more of a dense settling policy rather than ICS.

 

[Mutineer]

Strategy and civ V are contradictions.

 

[alpaca]

Strategy and civ V are contradictions.

I seriously don't get why people post useless stuff like this. If that's your opinion, why are you posting in the strategy forum for Civ5? If the game is so bad in your mind, please go away and don't bump legitimate threads just to vent your frustration.

 

[budweiser]

Stop calling it ICS. Its finite, call it FCS, or just rex.

 

[Snapp]

I think are there are plenty of "fairly" optimal strategies that don't play out like ICS or rushing.

I have been having some solid success with a 5-7 base strategy until getting the order policy and then expanding/conquest from there.

One thing to mention that there seems to be some confusion about is that simply having a lot of cities is not ICS. At some point in time all almost all strategies should want to posses a large amount of land and cities.

But really when it comes down to it, ICS is optimal for science and gold (diplo victory), cultural victories are typically optimal with a conquest puppet strategy and the limited base builder strategy for a cultural victory is incredibly boring. So whats left if you want to play optimally?

Right now Im having some fun trying to optimize a "Standard" play build to be close to ICS at certain benchmarks in the game. Right now it seems I can be ahead in research early game and be on par at around turn 150. At this point it starts to slow up, so Im working on trying to improve that.

 

[DaveMcW]

Stop calling it ICS. Its finite, call it FCS, or just rex.

With scientists giving 5 and costing half food/unhappy, it's more efficient to build extra cities and libraries than try to grow existing cities.

 

[HermannLombard]

Stop calling it ICS. Its finite, call it FCS, or just rex.

It's been called ICS since at least Civ 2, trying to change what everyone already knows and uses isn't going to work. It's like trying to fight the use of "normalcy" when it should be "normality." The presidential blunder (OK, blame it on a speechwriter) can't be eradicated...even though I fight it.

 

[bryanw1995]

Try and win under the following conditions:

Deity Difficulty.
Must declare war on every civ and every city state you meet. Map must be large pangaea with default number of civs and city states. Huts off (I've played it this way ever since I got 3 unit upgrades on the same unit for ancient era rifleman, what a way to spoil a game). Raging Barbs.
One City Challenge Enabled.

There isn't enough benefit to an early attack that can't keep the city and you obviously can't ICS so the game gets a lot more interesting.

Best result I know of so far is surviving to 2050AD but not winning, I'm currently trying this for a cultural victory as the Aztecs, given the lower culture costs of staying small and the culture bonus for every unit kill, I also find that upgraded jaguar warriors make for brilliant units, and if you get some iron and some jungle you can do very well.

that sounds more like cIV deity...

It's been called ICS since at least Civ 2, trying to change what everyone already knows and uses isn't going to work. It's like trying to fight the use of "normalcy" when it should be "normality." The presidential blunder (OK, blame it on a speechwriter) can't be eradicated...even though I fight it.

yes, that and "nukular"

 

[gaiko]

Stop calling it ICS. Its finite, call it FCS, or just rex.

No, the acronym is very appropriate. Actually I call it incremental city spam since true ICS should proceed nonstop from turn 1, and it's only to game the civV happiness/culture system that the pause variants exist for. But theoretically it IS infinite and only practically limited by map extent or (in civ) by shoreline.

REX is a completely different beast. ICS is location insensitive, while REX aims to rapidly claim as many resource optimal locations as possible. One could plan a combination of the two, where first you REX, then ICS fill in the resulting gaps to the extent possible. This would not likely be a "pure" ICS matrix however.

 

[Slowpoke]

As far as ICS and FCS, to quote the simpsons "And hillbillies want to be called dwellers of the appalachia. But it ain't gonna happen!"

 

[MuteWolf]

I play on Immortal and I don't ICS or rush. I do occasionally take out a neighbor if he is ridiculously hostile but for the most part I set-up a few initial cities play the politics, ally close CS's, and eventually grow by taking some cities from whoever is being dog piled on. Eventually I pick what my goal victory is going to be and go from there.

One of the things I don't see much of on the forums is allying all CS's. I usually keep as many CS's allied as I can, I almost never kill one. I find they are very useful for war deterrent/reinforcement. When you have CS's all over the world and you get declared on suddenly your opponent is being swarmed by units that you don't even have to pay for, at least not directly. I do this regardless of who I am playing as.

Do you guys think CS's are really cheap or what? Why don't I ever see much in the way of CS lovin?

 

[Slowpoke]

People don't mention CSs much because they're no-brainers XD Except for military CSs.

 

[MuteWolf]

People don't mention CSs much because they're no-brainers XD Except for military CSs.

But do you consider them cheap? And I don't think they are necessarily no brainers. TheMeInTeam seems to neglect them a bit in his videos.