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.
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.