ICS: A list of factors that contribute to its success

[gaiko]

Right, in an aside, this is something that those who insist on viewing CivV through Civ4 colored glasses (Sulla et al), conveniently overlook: the general impossibility of early modern British, French or Spanish style empires. Not to mention Portuguese - settler carrying caravels were great - until you actually settled them w/o the GLH. Spinning off vassals was basically a kludge workaround. One could even enter bashing mode and claim that this was a 'fundamental design flaw' in Civ4. But what a waste of time...

In CivV OTOH I believe it was the designers intent not merely to make overseas empires possible, but to make it a competitive option to continental empire. Cheap early top-tier techs + early Commerce unlock as FIRST SP tree + early reveal and settlement of global Coal and Oil. And coal is much more important in CivV than Civ4, a good thing IMO, coal was pretty meh before. And that is because the only true limit to ICS is the coastline. Unlike SMAC. End of aside.

The mention of a hard # of cities cap is intended for rhetorical purposes: for ex. the proposal to escalate unhappiness with # of cities is at the limit == effective hard cap. Until then it progressively slows ICS, but does not eliminate it in principle. If limit > # of land hexes (high coastline ratio), the effective hard cap never appears. So scaling this to the coastline/landmass ratio would mask the appearance of the effective hard cap.

Otherwise, its just a question of, do you want to boil the frog immediately so it knows it, or boil it slowly so it doesn't?

But Roxlimn is right: ICS cannot be eliminated from any civ-type game in principle. Anyone thinking otherwise is dreaming of another type of game. Resistance is indeed futile here.

r_rolo1:
Anything that prevents or seeks to prevent ICS affects core Civ mechanics. For instance, the maintenance mechanic in Civ IV encouraged cottage spam, but also heavily penalized spread-out maritime empires (without the right Wonder, which allowed ICS) at the same time. Kind of weird considering that the largest human empire ever was exactly like that.

 

[running_bear]

I think there are two fairly simple solutions to the ICS problem (and I think it is totally appropriate to label one strategy being leagues above other strategies a problem); either nerf/rebalance maritime City-States, as they are essential to ICS, or make the relationship between number of cities and happiness non-linear. Say that, after your 10th city, cities cost progressively more unhappiness (11th costs 3, 12th costs 4, etc), then it becomes difficult to continue to expand. You could also have maritime cities act a-la representation from civ 4: the food bonus only goes towards your largest X cities. Either of these would still allow for a rapid, early expansion that feels fundamentally different from a different, more culture or military-oriented game, but which cannot be abused ad infinitum.

 

[MkLh]

But Roxlimn is right: ICS cannot be eliminated from any civ-type game in principle. Anyone thinking otherwise is dreaming of another type of game. Resistance is indeed futile here.

It was quite well nerfed in Civ4. It was possible, but it was just a marginal strategy that was useful in some special circumstances, not the way to play every game. The Great Lighthouse was just one imbalanced wonder and would have been easily rebalanced (which strangely did never happen), while in Civ5 the ICS is a result from core game mechanics.

 

[PieceOfMind]

Those are some good inputs, Celevin.

Thanks to the others also who have commented on the idea.

This is what I currently have, though I'm still looking for more suggestions/criticisms:
(Note that at present I am sticking solely to changes that are possible with the current modding limitations. Please keep that in mind)

Spoiler :

Buildings
-Colosseum 3 from 4, 3 maint unchanged.
-Theatre 5 from 4, 4 maint from 5.
-Stadium 7 from 4, 5 maint from 6.
-Circus 3 unchanged, 2 maint from 3.

Trade Routes (We are currently limited to a formula of the form (a + b*citysize + c*capitalsize)
Changed from (1+1.25*citysize) to:
(-1.3 + 1.5*citysize + capitalsize*0.05)
This generally makes trade route values from small cities smaller than the vanilla game, but they get more attractive as the capital grows (e.g. as the game goes on). With 0.05 in each city per population point in the cap, we have a situation where growing the capital by 1 point increases the total trade route values by 1.25 when there are 25 connected cities, or 1.5 when there are 30 connected cities.

The citypop multiplier of 1.5 means there is now more incentive than before (1.25) to grow cities. The -1.3 initial base is perhaps newbie-unfriendly, because it means that small cities will find it difficult to turn a trade route profit if connected by road or harbor. Cities will need to grow to probably at least 2 or 3 pop more than before, before they turn a profit. Later in the game, when the capital is large (size 15+), things get a bit easier for new cities.

Happiness Balance
-Unhappiness per city increased to 3 from 2. This is probably the biggest change (compare it to captured cities which have 5 per city). I'm not completely sure how it interacts with other modifiers. It's possibly too high at 3, if it means that captured cities with a courthouse go down to 2.5? Perhaps I could just set it to 2.5 and call it a day? The disadvantage would be that thanks to rounding, settling new cities would be either 2 or 3 extra alternating (I think?).

 

[h0ncho]

Good ideas all, but the prohibitive food costs of growing cities > 10 pop needs to be looked at.

 

[Renergy]

I don't see a problem with the fact that large empire is a powerful empire. I don't even like the social policies cost scaling up exponentially with the number of cities - it should be linear IMO (and the city count involved should include also the puppeted cities).

Anyway, the problem for me is that founding new cities is too easy/powerful.

To summarize again, when a city is founded, one gets:
* Road on the city square (instantaneously & for free)
* Improvement to the resource the city is on = quarry, plantation, mine (instantaneously/the moment the required technology is discovered).
* "archer for free" = you can bombard enemy around the city, the very same turn you found it.

No wonder ICS is so succesful then.


How to balance it:
* The founding of new city should take - say - 5 turns - at least the time comparable to construct a road. During this process, the city would only gradually gain combat strength, and would not be able to bombard. So, in practice, one would usually need a military unit to secure the area while founding a city.
* To work a resource on/improve the hex the city was founded on, there should be a command on city screen. I.e. instead of constructing a building, the city could be commanded to improve the hex it is on (construct a quarry/mine/plantation). One could also do this by worker positioned in a city.


With that, the ICS exponential would be much less steep.

Other thought:
* market should be required to get the bonus from trade routes.

---
Sidenote: My first post here. I have played civ1 - and then civ5. No civ2,3,4. Quite an unusual appearance, probably
Civ 5 > Civ 1, but seems rather easy at the moment. I was able to beat it at deity two weeks after I got it (ok, only archipelago + standard size). The good: Hexes, borders (no more units occupying coast one turn after signing a peace treaty as in civ1 , 1UPT, battle system, unit upgrades & promotions, great people. The bad: Not being able to hurry the production in a city (i.e. buy the reminder of something being built) - this make sense for wonders, but not for ordinary buildings. Weak AI.

 

[Eberon]

What if the hammer cost of settlers were to go up with each one built?

 

[Celevin]

PieceOfMind:
I think you'd have more luck changing happiness buildings from a static multiplier entirely. Is it possible, with the tools we have available, to change the colosseum to something like "+happiness equal to x% of city's culture output" or gold output or another currency? Theatres and Stadiums can also be changed to something similar.

This will:
1) Make colosseums worth more the bigger/better the city
2) More importantly, make it so colosseums in new cities don't do squat
3) Promote specialization

 

[PieceOfMind]

Not with just an XML mod I'm afraid. Basically the only thing you can do with xml is change numbers upwards or downwards.

By the way,
@ h0ncho

The growth parameters can be tweaked in the xml, but I haven't looked into how they work just yet.
Basically, we've got to work with:

<Row Name="BASE_CITY_GROWTH_THRESHOLD">
			<Value>15</Value>
		</Row>
		<Row Name="CITY_GROWTH_MULTIPLIER">
			<Value>6</Value>
		</Row>
		<Row Name="CITY_GROWTH_EXPONENT">
			<Value>1.8</Value>
		</Row>
		<Row Name="FOOD_CONSUMPTION_PER_POPULATION">
			<Value>2</Value>
		</Row>

 

[Eskel]

To prevent or weaken ICS strategy early buildings, units, and techs costs should be lowered as well as early buildings bonuses.
OTOH, bonuses for late buildings (well-developed cities) should be increased.
Simply, it should be more profitable to have one big city than two-three small cities. Combined with increased number-of-cities unhapiness, it should work.

Going back to buildings, my proposition would be:
- library >> 25% bonus instead 2sp per pop (this could be reserved for public school)
- market, bank, stock - 1gp maintenance
- bonuses for bank increased to at least 50%, stock even higher.

 

[Creepy Old Man]

It may even be as simple as settlers being too cheap. It's not uncommon for me to be in a position where a small city can produce a settler in 7 turns and a worker in 30. What's the point in building a worker to improve luxuries when I can get four of them hooked up in far less time by spamming cities?

Maybe expanding early should be a BIG deal...bigger than wonders. Increase the costs of training a settler drastically. Triple or quadruple them. Give bigger cities a bonus to settler production that scales with population. Give certain buildings a bonus to settler production.

Introduce 'Nomads': civilian units that grant reduced access to a resource (+2 happy on a luxury, 50% on a strategic resource) when fortified on top of them. Price them so they are the choice for expanding early on.

What if the hammer cost of settlers were to go up with each one built?

I kinda like Eberon's idea. If each successive settler were more expensive than the previous, then it would not influence early growth.

It would somewhat hinder non-ICS empires with many cities, but a non-ICS empire with many cities has many large cities, and therefore can afford to keep producing expensive settlers. (The fact that all of the cities are significantly productive is what makes the empire non-ICS). The investment is still good, because that (expensive) settler will turn into a strong city.

It would however nerf ICS. One of the strengths of ICS is that each of those tiny cities can produce a settler in a very short time. By increasing settler build time, ICS expansion would be greatly slowed. Weak cities settled by increasingly expensive settlers will take more and more time to justify their existence as the empire expands.

 

[Creepy Old Man]

I think the best place to focus on is improving the effectiveness of large cities. Strictly speaking, you don't have to nerf expansion, but it's certainly one way to go about it.

Just fiddling with some numbers today, I thought of changing colosseums to 3 (from 4), change theatres to 5 (from 4) and stadiums to 7 (from 4) with 5 maintenance (from 6), and circus to 2 maintenance from 3. It also makes the series of buildings get better as they advance rather than worse, assuming you are looking primarily at the maintenance and happy yield rather than the hammer cost.

This is not a very developed idea, but it's a start. It makes the circus a little more cost effective than the colosseum (which is fair because it's more situational, being resource-dependent), but the colosseum allows the later happiness buildings.

Building all 3 or 4 buildings will result in more happiness for the same cost and for less maintenance, so it might be necessary to counter balance this somehow.

This is very easy to mod. Do we have any volunteer playtesters?

 

[Lightzy]

ICS solution can't come from anything other than economy.
Nothing else makes sense for one, but more importantly, to have an anti-ICS mechanic you also need to have a mechanic that allows for truly large empires (non ICS). In short, a way to offset the penalties that are to be given to the founder of too many small cities.

Inflation according to number of cities is simple and elegant.

Then the counter-mechanism --- availability of strategic resources.


It's simple, it's elegant, it works.

It also makes real world sense -- and any mechanic that makes real world sense is actually pretty much bound to work in a game that's supposed to simulate a real world economy.
Centralization of production always lends itself to a better economy.
true across history (phillip of macedon for example, first thing he did when taking power was force an emigration of people from the country to his core production cities).



Along with that:

1)Terrain that is meaningful and forbids the planting of a city because that city will never be productive
2) major change to the way maritime CS work (max food or +15% food production per city, which forces cities to work food tiles, just a bit less - and the bonus is stronger when the city is bigger and well developed)

pretty much.



adding maintenance costs to buildings doesnt work because there is no mechanism to offset it.
It just makes some buildings less good and some more, without affecting ICS at all.
And as I said, the solution CANNOT come from happiness becuase you have no offseting mechanism there either. also because it makes no sense.
It affects all large empires instead of just ICS empires, which is not CIV worthy.

 

[Snapp]

Id like to see the science of in larger cities be buffed.

This would allow ICS to continue to be used as a get gold strategy, while larger population cities would be better at research.

Perhaps achieve this through a decent buff to the university. Possibly even reduce the base science of a city down from 2 to 1, then add the one back with the university while increasing the percentage increase on research as well.

I just don't see how a ton of small cities are better at research than a large population with a university and public schools.

 

[DiscomBob]

I haven't played a lot of Civ5, so maybe misunderstanding the exact issue... Does ICS only work if the cities can be kept small in population size (i.e. a positive difference between colloseum happiness and population unhappiness)?

If so, would it be possible to address the problem by preventing the option of disabling growth in small cities (excepting the capital) - or, going further, to prevent anything other than default citizen management, and not allowing specialists/unemployed? This would force some minimum population size that may make city spam unprofitable in terms of happiness.

This might not be enough for densely-packed cities at minimum distance from each other using non-farm land improvements, or spamming desert cities, so it may be necessary to have further penalties/restrictions for all cities below some critical population size. For example, disallowing worker and settler construction, imposing unit construction penalties, and penalties to "build wealth/science" yield in cities under the minimum population value. The rationale for this could be that small cities don't have a broad enough population base to run specialist economies or generate emigrants, nor to run efficient research/capital works.

These might not prevent the ICS strategy, but would certainly make it less profitable, without requiring a complete overhaul of game mechanics... Assuming they can be coded.

 

[Eskel]

Slightly increase in both number-of-cities unhapiness and hapiness costs should work against ICS, as you need then to build up your city to upkeep infrastucture.
To strengthen this effect, advanced hapiness buildings should be more efficient (should grant cheaper hapiness, or in other words more hapiness for 1gp). Small cities would then become money drain, as they couldnt pay for themsleves. In the same time, big sprawling empire should be still possible to build. There is possibility of strong snowball effect in late gameplay, but hopefully it wouldnt ruin it more then ICS, while being more rewarding for human player.

 

[Martin Alvito]

As Celevin points out, the basic problem is one of opportunity cost. Founding new cities is almost entirely upside, and provides the means with which to remedy the drawbacks. A size 2 city with a Colosseum more or less pays for itself in everything except Social Policy costs, and the prospective benefits from Social Policies aren't sufficiently large to outweigh the self-sustaining Hammer and Science stream of a new city.

It's probably still going to be worthwhile to spam size 1 cities everywhere if you nerf Colosseums from 4H to 3H, especially as China. The nerf would help, but I doubt that it will be sufficient to compel real behavioral change. I'm running 30-40 Happy surpluses in a fifteen city empire during the midgame (Renaissance) with Colosseums, the FP and Freedom as my only concessions to Happiness.

The only meaningful change from the Colosseum nerf would be a delay in receiving the second Happiness bucket Golden Age, because Freedom is so good. If you move city unhappiness from -2H to -3H, all that will do is make my empire smaller before it explodes and eliminate my second Happiness GA. Slowing me down a bit will not make alternative approaches competitive. The ICS mechanics are just too broken for that, and the proposed fix also nerfs alternative approaches (just not quite as hard).

ICS solution can't come from anything other than economy.

This is what worked for Civ 4. It doesn't necessarily follow that the solution is unique. If you make settling additional cities sufficiently unattractive, we won't do it. The problem is that a Happiness approach also makes warmongering more inefficient, and does so faster than it makes ICS inefficient due to buff city tiles.

Here are some outside-the-box ways to address the problem of many small cities:

- Make city tile production scale with city size.
- Modify Science production by average city size.
- Make the effects of Colosseums, Theaters and Stadiums scale with city size.
- Make Food boxes less punitive.
- Create a U-shaped Food box curve where growth from size 1 to size 3 is problematic, and then things ease up a bit for a while.

You don't need to implement all of these, and playtesting will best reveal what/how the rules should be changed, but the long and the short of it is that the payoffs for having large cities need to increase relative to the payoffs from small cities. It doesn't matter what mechanic you attack the problem with, as long as you implement enough of a cost to small cities that players can't just end-run the mechanic.

You also have to be careful exactly how you implement the changes, because we don't want to replicate Corruption from Civ 3.

 

[Thoughtful Thug]

It's great to see people making suggestion on how to make the game better by simple tweaks here and there, but howcan you persuade people that play a lot of multiplayer to all agree on one single modification?

It works for people wanting to play SP, but...

 

[Celevin]

Not with just an XML mod I'm afraid. Basically the only thing you can do with xml is change numbers upwards or downwards.

I've been thinking of what I can do with that constraint, and it's a hard one. The best idea I think is to modify social policies. My big beef (unhappiness per city being linear) won't be fixed by sticking to the XML, but the problem can be helped a fair bit by taking away +happiness-per-city policies, among altering other things...

 

[lschnarch]

This is what I currently have, though I'm still looking for more suggestions/criticisms:
(Note that at present I am sticking solely to changes that are possible with the current modding limitations. Please keep that in mind)

Spoiler :

Buildings
-Colosseum 3 from 4, 3 maint unchanged.
-Theatre 5 from 4, 4 maint from 5.
-Stadium 7 from 4, 5 maint from 6.
-Circus 3 unchanged, 2 maint from 3.

Trade Routes (We are currently limited to a formula of the form (a + b*citysize + c*capitalsize)
Changed from (1+1.25*citysize) to:
(-1.3 + 1.5*citysize + capitalsize*0.05)
This generally makes trade route values from small cities smaller than the vanilla game, but they get more attractive as the capital grows (e.g. as the game goes on). With 0.05 in each city per population point in the cap, we have a situation where growing the capital by 1 point increases the total trade route values by 1.25 when there are 25 connected cities, or 1.5 when there are 30 connected cities.

The citypop multiplier of 1.5 means there is now more incentive than before (1.25) to grow cities. The -1.3 initial base is perhaps newbie-unfriendly, because it means that small cities will find it difficult to turn a trade route profit if connected by road or harbor. Cities will need to grow to probably at least 2 or 3 pop more than before, before they turn a profit. Later in the game, when the capital is large (size 15+), things get a bit easier for new cities.

Happiness Balance
-Unhappiness per city increased to 3 from 2. This is probably the biggest change (compare it to captured cities which have 5 per city). I'm not completely sure how it interacts with other modifiers. It's possibly too high at 3, if it means that captured cities with a courthouse go down to 2.5? Perhaps I could just set it to 2.5 and call it a day? The disadvantage would be that thanks to rounding, settling new cities would be either 2 or 3 extra alternating (I think?).

At the moment I think all what this model will achieve is to limit your core cities until you will be able to build theatres.

Reasoning:
ICS has to take "free land". That means, the sooner you start, the better.
As the first ICS cities now can no longer "fund" the initial unhappiness in the new ICS cities, this funding will either come from luxuries or missing growth in the core cities, until they can (quickly, thanks to their assumed better production) build the theatres.

That means in the beginning: small core, small ICS cities.

Furthermore, the library is not included in your concept, yet plays a vital role, as it give *2 beakers and later on a lot of specialists to be burnt for Golden Ages or to rocket your science.

Result: unchanged speed of the ICS, yet weaker core. Is this really, what you are going for?