ICS - back with a vengeance?

[King Jason]

If you want to build as close to compact cities as you can and don't really care about maximizing tile space then Japan probably does this the best. It's a fun civ to play because you can simply crawl your way to victory ( in addition, 3 of its district cost are cut in half). Japan's districts get really nice adjacency bonuses which make terrain requirement less of a hassle.

Every civ should be building compact cities, japan's main bonus is that their cities aren't terrain dependent. As it stands, however, there's little reason anyone should spread cities much further than 4 tiles out. In the course of a game, no city will come even close to it's cap on usable terrain unless players are purposefully attempting to do so. 80% of my victories occur before any of my cities are above pop 15, and most hover around pop 10. This holds true whether I'm playing prince or deity. There's really very little need to grow any city beyond it's ability to host 3-5 districts.

Since you don't need the space, more cities are always better, so packing them in tighter is the optimal decision. But again, this has nothing to do with ICS or even implies ICS is an optimal path or back with "a vengeance". In terms of victory; you REX to an empire that is reasonably sized on your map type, and then focus your time and your production on those cities; Expanding further inevitably becomes pointless because in the time it takes for those cities to have made a meaningful contribution to your empire, you will have won the game.

Also, you're better off utilizing the surrounding chops and existing traderoutes on your current infrastructure, not establishing new cities. Since chopping isn't penalized by distance; you should be sending your builders out to chop/harvest everything in the lands that aren't within your borders - not expanding to those sites.