ICS-Infinite City Sprawl. Building cities really close together (2-3 tiles apart), so each city uses 12 tiles at most (often times less than this, an extreme ICS uses about 5-6 tiles/city). Typically used for an early advantage (pre-railroads/hospitals) for defense, unit support, low corruption of the cities that are close to your capital, workers and settlers don't have to travel so far, improved tiles can be shared between cities as your population goes up and down from settler production, etc. ICS players usually don't build too much infrastructure. And they disband some cities by their capital (to allow the other cities to grow larger) later in the game if they need to build tanks and stuff. But done correctly (especially on the lower levels) the game will be over by knights or at least cavalry.
OCP-Optimal city placement Trying to build your cities so you have no unused tiles and very minimal overlapping of tiles. These become powerful cities after hospitals when they can start using all 20 tiles and all the improvements make these cities more efficient. And you have cities farther away that can be more productive.
Cromagnon- Be watching this forum at the beginning of next month. Zachriel posts a very detailed summary of his game loaded with good tips (he won't be doing a summary every month, though, so I don't know if he is doing one this month). And after/shortly before the deadline (the 2nd of the month) more people post more details about their summary. And there is the QSC that Cracker started that will give the logfiles (detailed moves up to 1000 BC) where you can follow along and duplicate the opening moves of those that submitted their log files.
We, MOOers, have to stick together, you know.
but I managed to grab 5 cities nonetheless and got one more from the peace settlement. Now I am #1 in productivity.
