ICS: A list of factors that contribute to its success

[Zogar]

If buildings were cheaper and more powerful, production and gold would effectively increase, which would lead to making too many units for the map.

What should be happening, is discussion on how to improve gameplay, to allow for increased strategies & options, and allow for a deeper more fulfilling gaming experience. ICS it has been argued is boring gameplay, The solution to that is not to eliminate or reduce ICS, its to find the root cause of why it is boring game play, and fix that. Additionally, Counters to ICS need to be placed into the, making it viable to actually compete with ICS in terms of small or mid sized empires. I would much rather see Civ 5 fixed by addition then subtraction as its current state is rather woeful.

Yes, the main reason large cities were made less productive than in previous civs is because of 1 upt. That's a funny analysis, 1 upt would actually be one of the reasons for ICS working so well (the second reason being too many game designs scaling with the number of cities, design scaling with pop already hurts because of a bad vertical growth, they had to add options to remove the penalities of mass expanding... I need an explanation here.)

If you push the analysis further, and prevent ICS as well, the end result is that you cannot grow vertically nor horizontally. This way you make the 1 upt work but the price to pay is that you completely destroy the city builder part.

The first suggestion is even worse than in the quote above. It might make founding the third city (when we are far away from anything like ICS yet) almost impossible since at that point of time you might not yet be able to cover the additional unhappiness.

b) Having "fixed penalties" for small cities doesn't help, as this can limit ANY growth of the empire, even when ICS was not intended.

As already said, to counter ICS, you need to make new cities less valuable, so you must nerf expanding at one point or another. Still, this is probably the best solution, and it would not be so destructive as you think for a 'normal' game play, after you first cities are developped you easily can expand. It would make for a very slow gameplay, true, see what I wrote just above.

The main problem is first and foremost the maritime CS.

ICS works even without maritime CS. It is just a little less effective.

To fight the income from roads I would propose certain thresholds, after which additional, fixed costs occur (let's say for the road department). That way, after 10 road hexes there could be costs of additional 2 gold . After 25 road hexes there would be additional 5 gold, and so on (once again, the numbers are just for display purposes, and might have to be adjusted per mapsize).
This principle is similar to "inflation", yet is easy enough to be understood by the player and doesn't harm the early build up of your empire.

That's bound to fail. One of the advantage of ICS is that you have very few roads, for a larger number of cities.

 

[PieceOfMind]

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.

 

[r_rolo1]

To be honest, IMHO the only real way of making curb ICS in this game is to mess with the global happiness variable in some way ... the simplest possible way is to make the happiness hit from having a city to not be constant but increase with the number of cities ( maybe even in a quadratic or, god forbid, in a exponential curve if we are that desperate ). The issue with that is that happiness is necessarily a integer, so with the relatively low numbers we have in game it would create major truncating errors that would create plateaus ( well, what firaxis did with unit maintenance when the game came out is a good indicator of how frustrating and gamey it would be ). That issue could be reduced by mutiplying all the happiness related stuff by 100 or 1000, but that would bring it's own issues ...

Other thing that contributes for ICS in this game ( besides the perenial nature of ICS in games where you need more pop for every increasing pop level ) is ... hexes Better said, the imperfect balance between tile output and max city size. IMHO the creators of the game were still thinking in civ IV terms when they thinked on the tile outputs ( worse, they seem to have been thinking in downgrading the tile outputs from civ IV standpoint ), so they were pointing to a 20 pop maximum, inconsciously or now. But civ V has hexes and the max area of work is either less that 20 ( 2 rings ) or more than 20 ( 3 rings ) ... as firaxis picked the 3 rings solution, it is obvious that the cities will surely have issues to become big enough . If you will take a lifetime to make a big city, you will surely be tempted to make lots of little cities to get the most juice possible of the land

 

[LegioCorvus]

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.

It's a decent idea, but I feel the option should be between developing a small number of larger cities, a large number of small cities, or something in between.

Simply making it easier to have big cities while barely hindering ICS doesn't mean people will choose between having a few big cities and many smaller cities. If this were done, it would be the most beneficial to create a core of a few big cities, while also making many smaller cities, then making those smaller cities large when you gain a lead on happiness. Instead of new cities being new sources of happiness for the older/bigger cites, you have older/bigger cities becoming the new source of happiness to found new cities.



I truly feel that there needs to be some sort of restricting element for expansion. Global Happiness is too flawed to be this metric. Social Policies are the only real current metric, but they're more of a lack of bonus then penalty. You can still easily win the game with just 2-4 SPs. Economics makes a kind of sense, but would be very hard to implement, especially with buildings like the Paper Maker throwing a wrench in the works. My best suggestion at this point, aside from redoing several game elements from scratch, would be something like corruption or adding pollution/health to the game.

The worst part is that this is a kind of Pandora's Box. People are already accustomed to ICS for Civ5. Taking that way in an expansion will upset just as many people as it will please. This is really something you need to start with out of the box, as expansions are meant to add cool new features, not remove them (no matter how much they break the game - sadly).

 

[Roxlimn]

r_rolo1:

I would like to note that Civ 4's solution was to have a cost that scaled with city number as well as distance. This effectively made it more cost-effective to have less cities so you paid less maintenance.

With having to pay maintenance for buildings as well, even if we think of happiness buildings as buildable maintenance, we have the competing concern of the efficiency of the lower tier buildings, and even if we didn't, "city maintenance" would still be only a small fraction of total city costs, whereas it was all-in in Civ 4.

The main "flaw" in Civ 5 is the same flaw that was built into the Civ design from the start, which was only just barely countered with brute force in Civ 4. It's not the hexes. It's not the global happiness mechanic. It's Civ itself - the whole shebang.

 

[Rowain deWolf]

@Lightzy: The problem with your resolution is wahat if you get f*** by the resource-allocation? I had already games where my chunk of land was completly void of Iron, Coal and Alu.

 

[PieceOfMind]

It's a decent idea, but I feel the option should be between developing a small number of larger cities, a large number of small cities, or something in between.

Simply making it easier to have big cities while barely hindering ICS doesn't mean people will choose between having a few big cities and many smaller cities. If this were done, it would be the most beneficial to create a core of a few big cities, while also making many smaller cities, then making those smaller cities large when you gain a lead on happiness. Instead of new cities being new sources of happiness for the older/bigger cites, you have older/bigger cities becoming the new source of happiness to found new cities.



I truly feel that there needs to be some sort of restricting element for expansion. Global Happiness is too flawed to be this metric. Social Policies are the only real current metric, but they're more of a lack of bonus then penalty. You can still easily win the game with just 2-4 SPs. Economics makes a kind of sense, but would be very hard to implement, especially with buildings like the Paper Maker throwing a wrench in the works. My best suggestion at this point, aside from redoing several game elements from scratch, would be something like corruption or adding pollution/health to the game.

The worst part is that this is a kind of Pandora's Box. People are already accustomed to ICS for Civ5. Taking that way in an expansion will upset just as many people as it will please. This is really something you need to start with out of the box, as expansions are meant to add cool new features, not remove them (no matter how much they break the game - sadly).

The way I'm approaching it at the moment, as I work on this mod, is to encourage people spamming those crap little 2 or 3 pop (or whatever) cities to actually build infrastructure beyond the colosseum. The aim isn't so much to stop ICS, but to stop the gamey ICS of tiny cities approach.

I will be looking at other little things that can be changed at this time that will have an impact on ICS.

By the way, I'm thinking about calling it the Icey No mod. Like it?

 

[r_rolo1]

r_rolo1:

I would like to note that Civ 4's solution was to have a cost that scaled with city number as well as distance. This effectively made it more cost-effective to have less cities so you paid less maintenance.

With having to pay maintenance for buildings as well, even if we think of happiness buildings as buildable maintenance, we have the competing concern of the efficiency of the lower tier buildings, and even if we didn't, "city maintenance" would still be only a small fraction of total city costs, whereas it was all-in in Civ 4.

The main "flaw" in Civ 5 is the same flaw that was built into the Civ design from the start, which was only just barely countered with brute force in Civ 4. It's not the hexes. It's not the global happiness mechanic. It's Civ itself - the whole shebang.

I agree with you, ICS is the result of core rules of civ games ( stuff like every pop level costing more food ( like I mentioned above ) and others ). But given that this thread is about things that help ICS , I also added the issue of global happiness, that was the thing that was meant to stop ICS in the first place

I do also agree that in civ IV the thing was stopped barely due to some heavy brute force mechanics ( and the major proof of that was that minor stuff like 2 extra gold per city ( GLH ) was enough to allow ICS again ) ...and that is why I was expecting some even more draconian measures in civ V (especially after all the hype about small empires and such ). And there a LOT of things that actually favour ICS in civ V instead of stopping it, even the tile outputs This makes the task of stopping ICS inside the current frame of civ V a daunting and possibly impossible task... something must give away. And if i could choose what to give away, it would definitely be in the realm of the global happiness variable... hence my proposal.

 

[Roxlimn]

r_rolo1:

I frequently encounter this strange opinion that stopping ICS would be impossible and difficult. I don't get how this can be. We can always institute a hard cap on cities. That would stop ICS pretty darned cold.

The issue isn't about how much we want to stop ICS mechanics or how. The issue is how much of it we want to actually stop. I don't think anyone would really be happy with a hard cap on cities, for instance, even though unlimited city settling is pretty important to an ICS concept.

 

[Paeanblack]

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.

 

[MkLh]

I truly feel that there needs to be some sort of restricting element for expansion. Global Happiness is too flawed to be this metric. Social Policies are the only real current metric, but they're more of a lack of bonus then penalty. You can still easily win the game with just 2-4 SPs. Economics makes a kind of sense, but would be very hard to implement, especially with buildings like the Paper Maker throwing a wrench in the works. My best suggestion at this point, aside from redoing several game elements from scratch, would be something like corruption or adding pollution/health to the game.

I don't think they ever will add completely new concepts like health or remove core concepts like global happiness. There is a simple and workable solution that doesn't need that much re-designing: increase tech costs by every new city.

 

[r_rolo1]

r_rolo1:

I frequently encounter this strange opinion that stopping ICS would be impossible and difficult. I don't get how this can be. We can always institute a hard cap on cities. That would stop ICS pretty darned cold.

The issue isn't about how much we want to stop ICS mechanics or how. The issue is how much of it we want to actually stop. I don't think anyone would really be happy with a hard cap on cities, for instance, even though unlimited city settling is pretty important to an ICS concept.

If you put a hard cap in cities you stop both ICS and non-ICS with the same number of cities Not mentioning that it would bork seriously games with lots of civs in terms of the dom VC unless the hard cap was atleast 19 cities

I never said it was impossible to stop ICS, but it is hard to do that inside the current rule frame ( global , fixed penalty per city, .... ) without messing somewhere else and that was always the context behind my posts. You can obviously make that with other rule frame, but that will be not civ V , but something else.

 

[Roxlimn]

r_rolo1:

We can't do anything about Civ V if we're not going to change anything. I'm quite sure I'm not getting what you're trying to say there.

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.

Civ V actually has a mechanic that encouraged large cities - it gets progressively easier to grow cities large as you uncover the latter techs. Hospital is "just" a granary, but Medical Labs is a Granary-granary. I think that those techs and buildings were supposed to counterbalance the natural tendency to small Cities in Civ. They don't appear to do so effectively enough.

 

[SammyKhalifa]

I never said it was impossible to stop ICS, but it is hard to do that inside the current rule frame ( global , fixed penalty per city, .... ) without messing somewhere else and that was always the context behind my posts. You can obviously make that with other rule frame, but that will be not civ V , but something else.

I don't do ICS, but what if you were to make Colloseums worse, while making the later happiness buildings better?

 

[lschnarch]

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 idea leads into the right direction, I think.
In addition a change of the library would be good as well, maybe just skipping the specialists slots and raising the costs by +1 gold.

Still only first steps, but it could be a start.

 

[MkLh]

This idea leads into the right direction, I think.
In addition a change of the library would be good as well, maybe just skipping the specialists slots and raising the costs by +1 gold.

Still only first steps, but it could be a start.

I'm not sure if nerfing library or some other early buildings is a right thing to do, but making them more expensive and maybe even more powerful might be. Simple logic:

-If the building is weak, you don't lost much if you just skip it --> you can happily do ICS
-If the building is cheap, you can spam it everywhere --> you can happily do ICS

Therefore, to prevent ICS, the building should be expensive and powerful.

 

[gaiko]

This runs into the same problem of nerfing early expansion of any sort, ICS or no ICS.

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.

 

[Bandobras Took]

I'm not sure if nerfing library or some other early buildings is a right thing to do, but making them more expensive and maybe even more powerful might be. Simple logic:

-If the building is weak, you don't lost much if you just skip it --> you can happily do ICS
-If the building is cheap, you can spam it everywhere --> you can happily do ICS

Therefore, to prevent ICS, the building should be expensive and powerful.

Close. To help prevent ICS, basic buildings shoud present the worst deal, with buildings that require them presenting better deals. This is because basic buildings are automatically available when you found a new city, so if they represent the best bang for the buck, preference will be given to new city development before old city development.

Or put another way, you would found cities with the goal of getting advanced buildings running for long-term gain -- you would not found cities for immediate short-term and ultimate long-term gain.

 

[lschnarch]

I'm not sure if nerfing library or some other early buildings is a right thing to do, but making them more expensive and maybe even more powerful might be. Simple logic:

-If the building is weak, you don't lost much if you just skip it --> you can happily do ICS
-If the building is cheap, you can spam it everywhere --> you can happily do ICS

Therefore, to prevent ICS, the building should be expensive and powerful.

The strong early buildings are just what makes ICS so strong:
You spread cities each and everywhere and make money due to the roads.
Then you build the initial buildings: Col, Lib and Mon and after that you foster your specialists.

There is almost no investment in this strategy (except for the setller and the road), but a lot of gain.

 

[Celevin]

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.

I'm skeptical on this idea. I will still hold that the problem is more fundamental. Right now and with this idea, if the only thing stopping you from another city is opportunity cost, the only thing stopping you from 10-20 new cities is opportunity cost. You're just inflating that number.

Secondly I compared my ICS empires to the empires when I purposely tried to have a smaller empire with larger cities. I noticed that in both cases, my main "core" of cities had all the happiness buildings up. With your change, the difference I think I will see is instead of having 2 colloseums in an ICS empire, I will have 1 colloseum and 1 theatre.

Finally a change like this might cause an explosion the moment theatres become unlocked. I think I'd have a number of settlers and gold saved up, then try and explode.


The problem I see is when a person gets over that initial 2 unhappiness hump for a new city, either through policies, wonders, or building a colloseum, then the only penalty for that new city is an increased social policy cost. Everything else is benefits. And whether you're going from 4 to 5 cities or 29 to 30 cities, or adding a city in the ancient age or adding a city in the modern gold-filled era, the same static -2 happiness penalty is the only thing that's there. If it's easy or moderate to overcome in the early game then it's laughable later on.