Can someone Explain ICS?

[KinslayerDG]

I've looked at the war academy but I can't seem to find it. Reason being as I see screenshots of players with small islands with large amounts of cities in the while i only get a couple cities per continent. What is ICS and how do you properly initiate it.

 

[AlanH]

It's just a way of deciding how you will place your cities.

There's a pattern of city placement called Optimum City Placement (OCP) which will ensure that all tiles on tthe map fall within the 21 tile radius of one city, with a minimum number of tiles shared by two cities. I believe OCP achieves a single overlapping tile per city.

If you put cities closer together than the OCP pattern then you get bigger overlaps - more tiles are shared between two or more cities. If you put them extremely close together - with only one tile between two cities you have "Infinite City Sprawl", aka ICS.

ICS gets you a lot of cities in a small space, but each city will have problems growing to a large population because it can't work all the tiles in its radius without starving other cities. ICS requires a lot of careful micromanaging to ensure that all cities are working the best combinations of tiles to achieve your objectives. Its benefits are that lots of cities are close to the capital, so corruption is lower, and you can move units from one side of the empire to another in less time before rail. And the road network takes a lot less time to build, of course. Also, during the early game, you can only work a few tiles per city, and always less than twelve before hospitals. So having 20 available is not really necessary.

 

[zerksees]

There is an optimal number of tiles for each city in ICS - I believe the key is to have just enough tiles for population to get up to 12. However I am not sure how many tiles that is...

 

[AlanH]

For a population of 12 all to be busy producing gold and shields you simply need 12 tiles per city, and there must be a total food production from those tiles of at least 24 food per turn. ICS can put the cities much closer than that, however, and I believe there are some key benefits you can get from doing this that are almost exploitative.

 

[anarres]

Well, 12 tiles per city is certainly not ICS at all. For me that's a fairly 'medium' build. Any more than 12 tiles I consider to be 'wdie spaced'.

ICS (in a strict sense) is where you build cities 2 tiles apart (1 tile between them). This is always useful in your 'corrupt' zones, regardless of how you have your core cities spaced, since a 95% corrupt city only needs 3 tiles to be a good worker factory or wealth factory.

People use ICS nowadays to describe any build where your cities are 2 or 3 tiles apart. My 'normal' pacing of 3 tiles (2 tiles between) is considered to be ICS by some, but not by me.

The 'exploitative' benifits of ICS are that your power is calcualted in a large part by the number of cities you own. With true ICS you have 100+ cities and this means your power rating is through the roof. This means AI's treat you with a measure of love and respect - they fear you. I really don't consider ICS exploitative unless you have 100+ cities though, and not many people use ICS like that these days.

 

[DaveMcW]

The main benefit of ICS is fast growth.

Every city tile produces +2 food, so the more cities you have the faster your empire grows. Also, your settlers don't waste as much time walking long distances.

Eventually though, the city number corruption will kick in and make your ICS cities less productive than more spaced out cities. The key is to get a winning advantage using ICS before it becomes obsolete.

 

[Bamspeedy]

12 tiles/city is more of a 'dense build'. ICS is more like 6 tiles/city. 4 is the absolute minimum possible I believe, so I would say 4-7 or 8 tiles/city is ICS. 9-15 is a dense build, 15+ is 'wide spaced', IMO. There is no absolute rulings on what constitutes the different city placement definitions, as everyone has their own opinions. OCP can be either taken very literally by meaning the exact placement like AlanH is describing, or can be defined more loosely as a 'wide-spaced' type of build.

The benefits of ICS:

1. Faster growth, like Dave said. 10 cities producing settlers/workers is going to get you more of them than 3 cities. this is more powerful on a huge pangea map with minimal civs where you can have a 'settler flood' of having 100+ settlers on their way to build cities. In the CFC HoF there was Aeson's deity game (63,000+ pts), and my regent game (nearly 27,000 pts) that incorporated this tactic.

Also, since the city center tile always produces 2 food, using ICS on desert, tundra, hills, etc. can add more food to your empire (the extra food helps in score, too).

Settlers don't have to travel far (often founding a city the same turn the settler was built if you had roads built ahead of time)-allowing cities to impact your civ growth sooner and sooner and if given enough room, this has a steamrolling effect a.k.a. 'settler flood'.

2. Free unit support (in despotism and monarchy. ICS will really kill communism, so don't do this in communism). 100 towns in despotism lets you have free unit support for 400 units.

3. Each of those cities producing a minimum of at least 1 gold/beaker and can provide more by making specialists in those cities (irrigate everything in those max corrupt cities). 100's of those cities can provide 100's and 1000's of extra gold/beakers per turn to your civ (if you don't build infrastructure in those cities that drains the profits).

4. Movement of units/defense. Units can easily go from 1 city to another to counter where you are being attacked from. Your opponent will take forever to fight their way through all those little cities, even if they are undefended, that your main army will have lots of time to react before the AI can ever reach your core cities.

5. Score/happy people. When connected to your trade route and these cities are so small they won't need temples, cathedrals, etc. to keep everyone happy. Since you don't need infrastructure you can spend everything on workers/settlers/barracks and military.

6. Power rankings as anarres described.

7. Gold. You'll make lots and lots of gold with ICS.

8. Corruption due to distance is lower, but corruption due to # of cities will hurt you more. In the early game, the distance corruption is what usually hurts me the most, so ICS has a powerful early advantage here.

9. Those 1-shield cities can build wealth, workers, settlers. Or if you have 100 of those cities building cannons then 40 turns later you have 100 cannons.

Edit: Almost forgot another good reason for ICS

10. Cultural powerhouse. Rush a temple or library in 100 cities and what do you think will happen to your civ's overall culture?

 

[apparition]

ah, so that's what it is. I've sort of done this with out knowing it's name. Later on in the game, if I'm in agood position I build a few cities in my home area and populate them with my massive excess of workers.

 

[zerksees]

Thanks for the replies.

I plan to put them to use in my current PBEMs and next game/HOF attempt.

I will probably go more like 7-8 tiles per city on my next few attempts, which I would consider moderate ICS, and see how it goes. I have been making cities closer in the early game on emperor, which limits the size of some core cities later in the game (teens to 20 pop)

Assuming ICS gets you control of the game, what are bad side effects of using ICS to milk the score?

It seems to me that if I size my cities to max out at 11 or 12 citizens, that marketplaces and luxuries alone should be enough to keep all citizens happy (at least on emperor).

 

[Bamspeedy]

Originally posted by zerksees

Assuming ICS gets you control of the game, what are bad side effects of using ICS to milk the score?

It seems to me that if I size my cities to max out at 11 or 12 citizens, that marketplaces and luxuries alone should be enough to keep all citizens happy (at least on emperor).

Negatives of ICS (when milking for score)

1. More marketplaces/aqueducts to build/rush (but those are certainly cheaper than hospitals/mass transits and you can somewhat limit the # of aqueducts needed to build by building on rivers and lakes). But if built dense enough after you get railroads some cities won't really need marketplaces as they have enough specialists to keep everyone happy.

2. Micromanaging all those cities is a pain and watching 511 cities go into WLTK day slows down the game.

3. Each city center provides 2 food, so the 4 food from terrain like irrigated-railroaded grass (if you built on this) hurts your score. The city center also just provides food for a specialists, but doesn't let a happy person work that tile. So the more city centers you have, the fewer tiles are actually being worked on. HOWEVER, the faster growth almost always makes up for that little difference. Since the score is figured by your 'average' for all turns, having fewer city centers (if everyone is happy) has the potential for more points (higher score on the last few turns), but the ICS player will achieve the high score sooner in the game so ends up with a higher score at the end.

4. By building densely, you give up territory points early in the game so you fall a little behind in overall points early on, but it doesn't take too long before the population points easily make up for this (secure as many luxuries as quickly as possible, as each luxury will add 100's of happy people, even without marketplaces in your cities). You can forget about trying to buy luxuries from the AI as they will charge just totally obscene prices since just 1 luxury will add so many happy faces to your civ.

 

[zerksees]

Bamspeedy - thanks.

I learned about the 2 food per city tile this past weekend when I was trying to cram a few more cities in to add a few more population, and replacing irrigated grassland with a city nets you less food.

I think I would still build those marketplaces later in the game - because happy citizens are worth 2 and specialists are worth 1. Correct me if I'm wrong.

 

[Bamspeedy]

But if you build dense enough there are no tiles to work except make specialists, there is no choice in the matter (post railroads when you have excess food from everything being irrigated). My typical city had 6 citizens and 6 specialists. Building farther apart does allow more happy people (which are worth more points), but if you accumulate more of those specialists sooner, you end up with more points.

Some of us had a discussion about this a long time ago. There is only about a 10% difference in score potential between an OCP type of build and an ICS build, but if the ICS player maxes out his population 10%+ faster than he will score more points at the end of the game. I wouldn't go with the 'extreme' ICS of 4-5 tiles. But 6-8 tiles is good (but it depends on terrain). Maxing out the cities at size 11-12 is good, IMO.

 

[zerksees]

Since I am late to the game, I missed your earlier discussion (I just started playing Civ 3 in January). I tried some searching on ICS - which is actually what brought me to this thread - but it did not get me the answers I wanted. Maybe I needed better search criteria.

I see your point about getting the specialists faster.

Anyway thanks for sharing, and I plan to create a thread for my next HOF attempt so you can see how my next HOF attempt goes with a size 11-12 city ICS.

 

[Bamspeedy]

Originally posted by zerksees
Since I am late to the game, I missed your earlier discussion (I just started playing Civ 3 in January). I tried some searching on ICS - which is actually what brought me to this thread - but it did not get me the answers I wanted. Maybe I needed better search criteria.

Don't worry, there is a better search engine (me!).

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?postid=238258#post238258

That is a link to a post by Sir Pleb where he studied the difference in score. There is a little more on it 2 posts later when he makes another reply.