ICS: A list of factors that contribute to its success

[LegioCorvus]

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

The problem with that are buildings like the Paper Maker. You create an economic penalty like Civ 4, and you suddenly move China from 2nd best non-DLC civ to by far and away the best Civ in the game. The +4 from Paper Maker would offset a large number of cities, and any penalty that takes that +4 in mind would make other Civs unplayable. That's too say nothing of the Science boost.

I mean, yes, you can nerf Paper Maker, but then we get into all kinds of other balance changes that would need to be made...

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.

I like this. It would definitely help, and would also make the first purchase in the Liberty tree much more useful.

What would happen if Settlers were produced with only hammer and not food? Yes, cities would still grow, but their speed of production would also be reduced. The cost of a Settler would definitely need to increased from 89, though. The worker is just 70 right now, which is why you're getting those production discrepancies.

If you also tied in the building that give +% to settlers with the 'granary' buildings in Civ 5, that would be a subtle incentive to build larger cities. Of course, it would break the rule of Civ 5 buildings having one and only one use (outside of specialists potential)...

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.

Libraries are definitely a powerful part of the ICS strategy (see my mention of Paper Maker above). Their problem is not so much the mediocre +1 per 2 , but their solid +3, and +3 towards the best Great Person in the game, per specialist. It gets 2 slots! The +6 from using those two slots not only helps your cities not grow past the general 4 cap in ICS, but provides you with the of 6 extra citizens (plus potential Great Scientists).

If anything, that slot should be reduced to one, if only to nerf the ICS strategy a bit and to reduce abuses like the early game Civil Service rush bulb, the BC rifleman slingshot, or the lesser used Acoustics slingshot.

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

I'm sure the name will grow on me.

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?).

The more I read the comments here, and the more I think about your proposal, the more I like it. Though I think it could use a little extra from above like the Library nerf & change of Settler production rates.

Increasing the unhappiness per city is what I like the most. Right now, it's generally more beneficial to raze a city in a good location and build a settler. (Due to the build time of Courthouses among other things). Just a one point change might be enough to make a big difference here.

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but Courthouses completely remove the 5 from annexing a city, right? Or this a potential part of the mod your mulling over?

 

[Bandobras Took]

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.

Libraries are definitely a powerful part of the ICS strategy (see my mention of Paper Maker above). Their problem is not so much the mediocre +1 per 2 , but their solid +3, and +3 towards the best Great Person in the game, per specialist. It gets 2 slots! The +6 from using those two slots not only helps your cities not grow past the general 4 cap in ICS, but provides you with the of 6 extra citizens (plus potential Great Scientists).

If anything, that slot should be reduced to one, if only to nerf the ICS strategy a bit and to reduce abuses like the early game Civil Service rush bulb, the BC rifleman slingshot, or the lesser used Acoustics slingshot.

Switch the Library ability with that of Public Schools, including the specialist slots. If you need Universities to start reliably generating great scientists, a lot of their early-game advantage is gone, and ICS research may come down to an acceptable level.

For crying out loud, don't add maintenance costs to any buildings. The fact that a city with marginal infrastructure boosts your gold income while a city with well-developed infrastructure drains it is another argument in favor of ICS.

If you really want to go out on a limb, may I suggest eliminating rushbuy for all buildings in the game? If each city has to actually build its own colosseum, etc., then you can't just rely on a massive treasury to do it for you; the city you put down will have to generate its own production.

Increasing the unhappiness per city is what I like the most. Right now, it's generally more beneficial to raze a city in a good location and build a settler. (Due to the build time of Courthouses among other things). Just a one point change might be enough to make a big difference here.

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but Courthouses completely remove the 5 from annexing a city, right? Or this a potential part of the mod your mulling over?

I'd prefer increasing unhappiness based on the number of cities you settle:
Capital City - 0
2nd - 1
3rd - 3
4th - 6
5th -10

While cities you conquer retain the flat five. Punishes ICS, doesn't unduly punish the first few cities, and allows warmongers to still have their fun.

Of course, you'd have to scale that with map size.

 

[Roxlimn]

"Solution" for ICS: reverse the growth curve starting from population 30. Require cities thousands of food for the first few pop points, and progressively less food for more population.

 

[Lightzy]

I find myself repeating a lot in this thread, I dunno why.
I guess I care about my money. anyway, also you guys seem to have no clue. so here goes again:

happiness is not the way to restrict ICS, nor is building changes.

Why?

1) makes no sense (gamey)
2) restricts ALL large empires, rather than just ICS empires (if you don't have a mechanic that enables the player to reduce the added penalties by effort, it cannot work)


someone offered a food curve which is likewise ********, seeing as it slows the beginning game to a ridiculous crawl for everyone and makes planting new cities in late game a non-starter, in addition to further empowering maritimes.


listen to sense.

Economics.
Inflation.

solved

 

[Celevin]

I'd prefer increasing unhappiness based on the number of cities you settle:
Capital City - 0
2nd - 1
3rd - 3
4th - 6
5th -10

While cities you conquer retain the flat five. Punishes ICS, doesn't unduly punish the first few cities, and allows warmongers to still have their fun.

Of course, you'd have to scale that with map size.

That goes up way way too fast. Happiness isn't like gold in Civ4. While it's easy to pass current marginal unhappiness, it's also really easy for a city to "max out" on how much happiness it can give. This means to actually get more happiness you need to build more cities (unlike Civ4 where a city can get a very very high potential amount of gold to counter maintenance). So if your unhappiness-per-city is above what the cap is, the new city will always be a happiness detriment. This doesn't work.

I'm quoting myself from the Strategy and Tips forum on an idea I had for a happiness cap. Unfortunately it's not possible from just the XML files, but I think it's a worthwhile brain teaser.

I tried another function in order to make it asymptotic. To clarify from scratch the goal of this:
- Marginal unhappiness increases with number of cities
- Marginal unhappiness has a soft cap of X

We want the unhappiness soft cap to be big enough such that someone can't do ICS, but small enough that they never feel they can't profit from another city.

I chose the function with the following parameters. The values beside them are the parameters I used as an example for the graph. The base exponent "smoothes" the function by lowering each marginal unhappiness by a bit as it's lowered. -1/4 seemed like a good starting number.

Base Exponent: -1/4
Max - Min Unhappiness Spread: 4
Max Unhappiness: 6

The equation used was:
MARGINAL UNHAPPINESS = (Max Unhappiness) - (Max - Min Unhappiness Spread)*(# of cities)^(Base Exponent)

Here are the results:

Number of Cities Marginal Comulative
1 2.000 2.000
2 2.636 4.636
3 2.961 7.597
4 3.172 10.769
5 3.325 14.094
6 3.444 17.538
7 3.541 21.079
8 3.622 24.700
9 3.691 28.391
10 3.751 32.142
11 3.804 35.945
12 3.851 39.796
13 3.893 43.689
14 3.932 47.622
15 3.967 51.589
16 4.000 55.589
17 4.030 59.619
18 4.058 63.677
19 4.084 67.761
20 4.109 71.870
21 4.131 76.001
22 4.153 80.154
23 4.173 84.328
24 4.193 88.521
25 4.211 92.732

As said before, as the number of cities approaches infinity, the highest value the marginal unhappiness can be is 6 in this example.

 

[Bandobras Took]

I'm no mathematician.

But I think cities should get progressively more unhappy the more you yourself settle, rather than a flat rate -- once a flat rate is countered, it's countered for however many cities you want to plop down.

 

[PieceOfMind]

Just started a new thread for the Icey No mod. Please everyone feel free to repeat your suggestions from this thread in that thread. However, please keep in mind I'm doing my best to stick to working within the current modding limitations, which means that quite a number of the good suggestions in threads like this simply are not possible yet.

 

[Lone Wolf]

the general impossibility of early modern British, French or Spanish style empires.

That's been my beef with Civ, too. It had been that way with all versions of Civ - it was always more profitable to go bonk some heads on your neighbour, not some overseas civ.

 

[Celevin]

I'm no mathematician.

But I think cities should get progressively more unhappy the more you yourself settle, rather than a flat rate -- once a flat rate is countered, it's countered for however many cities you want to plop down.

Exactly, this is the exact problem. See? You're on the lonely road to becoming a mathematician with just that one statement! Unfortunately it's impossible to implement by mods right now, so we need to be more "creative".

 

[Roxlimn]

That goes up way way too fast. Happiness isn't like gold in Civ4. While it's easy to pass current marginal unhappiness, it's also really easy for a city to "max out" on how much happiness it can give. This means to actually get more happiness you need to build more cities (unlike Civ4 where a city can get a very very high potential amount of gold to counter maintenance). So if your unhappiness-per-city is above what the cap is, the new city will always be a happiness detriment. This doesn't work.

This is an interesting thought here. What if, to mirror Civ 4, we had increasing happiness costs, while also allowing core cities to build happiness without any cap? Seven Colosseums in one city.

 

[MkLh]

Libraries are definitely a powerful part of the ICS strategy (see my mention of Paper Maker above). Their problem is not so much the mediocre +1 per 2 , but their solid +3, and +3 towards the best Great Person in the game, per specialist. It gets 2 slots! The +6 from using those two slots not only helps your cities not grow past the general 4 cap in ICS, but provides you with the of 6 extra citizens (plus potential Great Scientists).

If anything, that slot should be reduced to one, if only to nerf the ICS strategy a bit and to reduce abuses like the early game Civil Service rush bulb, the BC rifleman slingshot, or the lesser used Acoustics slingshot.

I'm not sure at all that nerfing libraries would solve this problem. It would make non ICS weaker too. If the library is weak, you can just go ICS without building them. Advantages in science, gold and production are still there. In worst case scenario, it might actually make ICS more powerful relatively. A small empire probably has to build even weak libraries to stay competitive while an ICS empire can skip them and save a lot of hammers and maintenance.

The reason why specialists in multiple cities are now so powerful for GP-production is that they ridiculously reduced the bonus from NE from +100% to +25%. In Civ4, after an early game, running specialists in dozens of cities didn't actually affect your GP-production that much since a NE-city with 100% multiplier created vast majority of your GPs

 

[DiscomBob]

I find myself repeating a lot in this thread, I dunno why.
I guess I care about my money. anyway, also you guys seem to have no clue. so here goes again:

happiness is not the way to restrict ICS, nor is building changes.

Why?

1) makes no sense (gamey)
2) restricts ALL large empires, rather than just ICS empires (if you don't have a mechanic that enables the player to reduce the added penalties by effort, it cannot work)


someone offered a food curve which is likewise ********, seeing as it slows the beginning game to a ridiculous crawl for everyone and makes planting new cities in late game a non-starter, in addition to further empowering maritimes.


listen to sense.

Economics.
Inflation.

solved

Can you comment on my suggestion (#95): restricting the ability of cities below a critical population level from performing citizen management, stopping growth and assigning specialists, as well as applying a production penalty for settler, worker, science and wealth-building in small cities (except the capital).

I imagine it couldn't currently be modded, but with the right feedback to the game creators, maybe...

I think I present a reasonably valid rationale to fulfil (1), due to a small city not having a broad enough population base to support specialist economies, generate emigrants, or operate research/capitalisation efficiently.

It also definately satisfies (2) - any player who sets out to build large cities can quickly overcome these restrictions/penalties.

Will it be sufficient to completely prevent ICS? Maybe not, but it will make it less attractive by increasing the minimum population size in spammed cities (hence happiness increment per spam city will be smaller, maybe negative) with the player only able to impact this by building non-farm improvements - nothing else. Preventing small cities from assigning specialists would also greatly reduce the benefit of spam cities in terms of science/culture/gold/great person production.

This method would give all expansion decisions greater weight, since you must have enough happiness to support a new city to grow to this minimum population size - you can't simply stop growth when you want. So it would alter early game play for all empire builders, but I don't think this is a bad thing...

 

[Eberon]

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.

I appreciate your support. This idea would achieve the desired effect without drasticaly harming other gameplay elements. I feel that most of the other ideas given will cause ripple effects that are hard to forsee. I think the main reason why this idea isnt catching on is because it probably cant be modded into place. This would have to be something that fraxis does for us.

I must say that the ideas that give a happy penalty based on number of cities cause me the most pause. Those ideas have the possibility of killing the expansionist playstyle all together. The goal is to remove the incentive to not build and not grow, not remove incentive to expand. Please everyone keep that in mind.

We need to be careful about moving building bonuses around as well. They have been balanced vs the tech/unit costs pet era. Changing those could cause some eras production to slow down and others to accelerate. Likely a rebalancing of unit cost and tech cost would then be required. That complicates the fix significantly. Not saying that this isnt the way to go, I am just saying that when people go 'All you have to do is boost/reduce X!!!' that it is probably not going to be ALL you have to do.

 

[Thalassicus]

Very interesting points! I hadn't realized just how good ICS could be... going to consider some ways to deal with the various issues over the next week. Here's my thoughts to each point. (Forgive me for not reading the whole thread, just considering and writing this much took an hour. )

* Colosseums are the best value happiness building. If the happiness buildings got better rather than worse, then you'd be rewarded for in-depth development of less cities rather than lightweight development of more cities. More expensive later buildings is fine, but for all those extra hammers a Theatre gives the same 4 happiness and costs 5 instead of 3 upkeep.

* Unhappiness per city is supposed to be the big ICS killer, however it can be easily removed or in fact reversed by social policies and the Forbidden Place (which the AI also doesn't seem to build as quickly as many other wonders, although maybe that's just my experience). The upshot of all this is that a small city with a colosseum can actually be a happniess profit.

What if happiness of Colosseums 4→3, and Stadiums 4→5?

Colosseum: 3/3
Theater: 5/4
Stadium: 6/5

* Too many flat per-city bonuses. Maritime city states and a number of social policies give per-city bonuses, rewarding a player for building more cities, and making 1 population cities very productive. The "city centre" hex is by far the best hex available.

* With land tiles generally a lot weaker, specialists come out better value by comparison than in civ4, even before certain easily accessable social policies help them along. With maritime food, you don't need to develop a large number of farms and food resources and grow a huge city to be working a lot of specialists, you can have a small city quickly grow to 4-7 pop and work as many specialists as you have slots available. So ICS gets a lot of specialists (particularly scientists), and specialists are good (particularly scientists).

* Infrastructure is "underpowered". It's generally less useful than in previous civs, and production is so scarce that it's a lot harder to come by. In previous civs, it was practical for cities to build a full set of specialised infrastructure, and once they'd gone to the trouble of doing so you wanted those cities to work as many of the appropriate tiles as possible. With infrastructure so scarce it makes little difference which cities are working the tiles.

* City location is no longer all that important, so there's no real penalty to just sticking them down in a lattice. This is a culmination of a whole lot of factors:
- Resources are weaker in yield, so the benefits of claiming bonus resources are low.
- Tiles in general are weak, so settling in desert/tundra is no big deal. The hills in desert/tundra are as good as anywhere else too, and food tiles aren't necessary for ICS with maritime food.
- Location dependant buildings (observatory, circus, monastery, coastal buildings, some wonders like Machu Pichu etc.) do attempt to encourage planning of city placement. However, those buildings generally aren't any better than their alternatives (circus < colosseum, monastery ~= temple, observatory ~= university, mint ~= market etc.) and with production so limited it takes a long time to build both. ICS doesn't lose out on those buildings anyway, it just doesn't stack them up cleverly.
- Cities don't grow quickly past 10 food, and rarely make it as far as 20. Working most of the 36 theoretically available tiles is reserved for OCC, maybe the capital, and games that set out specifically to do it. This means there's no real need to avoid "wasted" tiles in core cities, as they'll always be able to find worthwhile tiles to work.

* Growth at high populations is painfully slow. Partly because the new "granary" is so far up the tech tree, but mostly because the food costs of growth rise so rapidly. This means that to get more population it costs much less to just settle a new city than to grow an existing one. It's also another reason that the dream of mega-cities, with well developed infrastructure and working many tiles to get the most out of their % bonuses is very hard to realise.

I partially tackled the Maritime food issue in the Diplomacy balance adjustments, though my long-term fix will be changing Maritime bonus from per-city to per-empire, like other City States. Some fixed amount of distributed among the empire's cities. This might be possible through removing the bonuses from XML and implementing some convoluted Lua programming, though it would likely take a day of effort or more, and will be just hours once we have c++ access.

I've been working on the terrain issues in the Terrain Improvements adjustments, improving the value of several tiles 25-33%. Bonus resources also got a boost in the City Development adjustments. With the improved production, it also makes it a little easier to build both location-dependent buildings and their alternatives.

I've been thinking about adding an Aqueduct at Construction that provides 25% food storage, and reducing cost/effect of Hospitals by half. This might help with early city growth frustrations.

* National wonders are underpowered (no need for "quotes" on this one). A specific case of the above, but national wonders seem to provide bonuses that mostly aren't even better at all compared to standard buildings, at significantly higher hammer price. In civ4, the planning of many national wonders was critical to optimal play, because they were so useful. In civ5 they're often not even worth building. This also means the "X in every city" requirements, which could otherwise hamper ICS, aren't such a big deal because missing out on the national wonder doesn't hurt so much.

Been considering a buff to these for a while now. Improving National Wonders would be helpful for general expansion vs small empire balance in general, not just ICS. One idea I've had is adding more specialist slots to these buildings, giving small empires extra specialist and GP potential.

Something like...

National Epic: 2 Artists
Hermitage: 2 Artists
Heroic Epic: 2 Engineers
Ironworks: 2 Engineers
National College: 2 Scientists
Oxford University: 2 Scientists
<something famous>: 4 Merchants, Walls in every city

* Cultural border expansion is slow. Buildings do not provide incidental culture the way they did in civ4, instead there's specific culture buildings which aren't good for anything else. ICS in a lattice avoids the need for any cultural border expansion entirely, which saves a lot of hammers for culture buildings or gold for buying tiles.

Not really sure what could be done about this off the top of my head.

* Trade routes provide a lot of gold, but are offset by the costs of road maintenance. ICS minimises the road maintenance for the amount of trade route gold generated.

* The trade route equation also favours more cities given the same population (thanks PieceOfMind for this point). The equation is (1 + 1.25*city size), making the '1' effectively another flat per-city bonus. The free '1' is presumably to partly offset the cost of more roads to more cities, but two small cities packed into the same space as the alternative one bigger city actually need less roads in general, as the city centre tiles get a road "for free".

This is something I could change. Perhaps 0+ 1.34*size?

pop : gold change
1 : 60%
5 : 90%
10 : 100%
20 : 105%

* Tightly packed cities are an ideal defensive set up.

One thing that helps counteract this is I increased the effectiveness of defensive buildings in the Units balance adjustments (plus bonuses to siege damage). A city with more advancement on that line is dramatically better at combat.

Still, though it helps, it doesn't really solve this last point too much. A big advantage of dense spacing is less distance required to move units around to defend the empire, and I'm not really sure what can be done about that.

 

[PieceOfMind]

Very interesting points! I hadn't realized just how good ICS could be... going to consider some ways to deal with the various issues over the next week. Here's my thoughts to each point. (Forgive me for not reading the whole thread, just considering and writing this much took an hour. )



What if happiness of Colosseums 4&#8594;3, and Stadiums 4&#8594;5?

Colosseum: 3/3
Theater: 5/4
Stadium: 6/5

Feel free to use Icey No for inspiration.

 

[Thalassicus]

(delete)

 

[Lightzy]

Can you comment on my suggestion (#95): restricting the ability of cities below a critical population level from performing citizen management, stopping growth and assigning specialists, as well as applying a production penalty for settler, worker, science and wealth-building in small cities (except the capital).

I imagine it couldn't currently be modded, but with the right feedback to the game creators, maybe...

I think I present a reasonably valid rationale to fulfil (1), due to a small city not having a broad enough population base to support specialist economies, generate emigrants, or operate research/capitalisation efficiently.

It also definately satisfies (2) - any player who sets out to build large cities can quickly overcome these restrictions/penalties.

Will it be sufficient to completely prevent ICS? Maybe not, but it will make it less attractive by increasing the minimum population size in spammed cities (hence happiness increment per spam city will be smaller, maybe negative) with the player only able to impact this by building non-farm improvements - nothing else. Preventing small cities from assigning specialists would also greatly reduce the benefit of spam cities in terms of science/culture/gold/great person production.

This method would give all expansion decisions greater weight, since you must have enough happiness to support a new city to grow to this minimum population size - you can't simply stop growth when you want. So it would alter early game play for all empire builders, but I don't think this is a bad thing...

It works in theory, but what exactly are 'big' cities? it's possible to ICS to cities as large as 6 or even 7pop currently.
Also, it doesn't exactly prevent ICS, it only delays your control over them until they 'mature'. But they still generate income and science until that point, which is what ICS is about.
Also, when they'll mature to what size you set as 'active', they'll prove that the mass ICS plant was worthwhile.

Also, I'm not sure it's fun to build cities you can't control.

Also, there shouldn't be any penalty to planting new cities when your economy is booming. actually, that's exactly what you SHOULD be doing when you can sustain it economically.

Also, what about your starting cities? you need a mechanic that allows a certain number of cities to be controlled from the start or it's really not fun. how do you select a number? It would feel very gamey in any case.

Also, there's no sense of player effort or a well defined goal. It's just a restriction.

Conversely, my suggestion of resource-dependent-inflation gives the player a very clear goal: want your economy to grow without crippling inflation? get a lot of resources.
Kinda like.. well, USA yes? Or any other large nation. Economy would inflate and explode if oil/coal/gas etc would become too expensive because no travel can be done across the expanse of the empire.


So if there's a mechanic that restricts ICS, it needs a counterbalance that is player-controlled to enable real large empires. Like the race for strategic resources.

Also the core problem is that tiles are irrelevant to the game. if tiles were completely rebalanced along with growth and sci rates and everything, it can still be saved.

You shouldn't be planting cities everywhere mostly because crap places with no resources and bad land should drain your economy completely and contribute very little production.

 

[biohazard72]

The best ideas so far (IMO):

Better happiness buildings beyond Colosseum.
Restrict Maritime food (I like a finite amount, increasing with era, spread over your cities at your discretion, but capped at a certain amount per city).
Balance trade routes to increase emphasis on city size.

+1 unhappiness/city also is a good balance.

 

[SammyKhalifa]

What if happiness of Colosseums 4&#8594;3, and Stadiums 4&#8594;5?

Colosseum: 3/3
Theater: 5/4
Stadium: 6/5

I haven't done ICS (just don't think it's very fun), but anyone who's played should notice this. Buildings shouldn't get worse as you move up the chain, but better (to encourage growth).

I can see and have heard how the Colosseums drive ICS (I know there are other issues as well). What if the building were a little more expensive and used a library-like mechanic, giving one happiness for every two or three citizens? I haven't run any numbers and don't plan to, but I think this would make decisions a little more interesting.

Of course, above everything else, something needs to be done with Maritimes.

 

[hp2225]

hi all, this is my first post. I'd played Civ since version I.

My suggestion: how about Colloseum only available in city of size 6(example) or above?