ICS best of the best!

[LordTC]

Is it possible to make it so your first population always works your city tile, rather than your first population works the city tile and another tile? If so improve the bonus from the city so that the city tile generates positive food (3 or 4 total food), and get rid of the bonus tiles worked.

All the free tiles (1 extra tile for every city you have) is what negates all the penalties associated with expansion.. even if you're paying a happiness cost for the extra cities, you're paying off that happiness because you get an extra tile.

The other issue is some tiles are clearly better than others, and as long as smaller cities get to work better tiles its hard for big cities to keep up. Higher resource density might be a good option, I've noticed on legendary starts ICS does slightly worse (although still clearly the best strategy), compared to larger cities with better access to resources, and I think this is because you can get more value out of the other population points.

I agree the changes to the buildings are massive improvements, but I'm not sure they go far enough.

 

[Martin Alvito]

You're replicating some of DaveV's logic underlying his Civ 2 ICS strategy. The problems go deeper than you indicate:

- A city tile automatically improves to a minimum of 2F/2H/1G. That directly improves the value of the tile by a wide margin. That's quite the boon to an otherwise useless Desert tile.
- A new city adds up to seven tiles to your empire without the associated Gold cost.
- Closely packed cities require fewer roads to connect them, resulting in more AND potentially larger trade route gains.
- Many Social Policies become more effective as you add cities to your empire.
- Maritime bonuses are empire-wide and scale as you add cities.

It's worth noting that you don't fully pay off the Happiness cost of the extra city. The city costs you 3 Happiness and the Food/Hammer investment. Growing the population by 2 could cost less in resources, and even return more in benefits under the right ruleset. But with city tiles improving dramatically, providing free tiles for your empire, and getting fed by Maritime allies, horizontal growth is unquestionably the way to go.

Even with the upcoming changes, ICS is very likely to be the optimal approach on most difficulties. If anything, it is being strengthened. To make ICS merely competitive rather than overpowered, the devs need to rebalance Social Policies and probably Golden Ages to disproportionately reward small empires comprised of large cities.

 

[pi-r8]

I still feel like national wonders are the best way to go for nerfing ICS. In civ 4, on most difficulty levels it doesn't really take long for a new city to pay for itself with cottages, especially being financial or organized. That's a good thing- players shouldn't be punished for having a lot of cities. However, there is also a strong incentive to set up big cities early on to take advantage of things like the heroic epic, the national epic, and the beuracracy capital/oxford university. Those national wonders are so powerful that they're worth way more than a lot of small cottage cities.

In civ V though, the national wonders are extremely weak, so there's no point halting your expansion long enough to build them. All a city really needs is a coloseum, library, and university, to generate massive science and zero unhappiness. The national college, national epic, and other national wonders should all be a lot stronger, since those directly reward small empires with big cities.

Also I don't really think ICS is the biggest problem in this game. Yes you can do it, spamming 50+ cities in less than 200 turns, but you can also win faster with less than 20 cities, thanks to the library university scientist combo. The whole economic system of this game is just broken and not very fun. The happiness system doesn't really give you any interesting choices, it's just a hard limit on expansion. It's always: do you have enough happiness to expand? If yes, do so immediately. If no, find a way to get more happiness. Period, full stop.

 

[bobbyboy29]

Good point pi-r8, National wonders have to be more powerful, it's such an interesting part of civ 4 which has been completely lost unfortunately. That having been said though, part of the problem is not only are they lacklustre, but the requirement to have every city having the required building is too harsh. Even a smallish empire will struggle to get libraries up in every city early enough, due to low production, and then if you settle or annex just 1 more city, you have to start all over again. And due to building maintenance, some national wonders, like heroic epic just won't ever get built.

The only way to balance these 2 problems (need to be more meaningful/ accessible for small empires, yet still possible for any empire to build) would be to make the requirement 75% of cities need the pre-req building (should be MUCH lower for something like HE). This way you can still afford to settle at least 1 new city without abandoning the National Wonder, yet smaller empires will still find them easier to build.

 

[vranasm]

I think nationals should be done the way they were in CIV. Just limited number of cities for each one and boost them somewhat.
Maybe the devs when they playtested didnt saw it as problem, because we were said that they are used to play with 3 cities... but who on their right mind would like to play civ with such low number of cities? Even in CIV I felt undersized with 8 cities

 

[Slowpoke]

I still feel like national wonders are the best way to go for nerfing ICS. In civ 4, on most difficulty levels it doesn't really take long for a new city to pay for itself with cottages, especially being financial or organized. That's a good thing- players shouldn't be punished for having a lot of cities. However, there is also a strong incentive to set up big cities early on to take advantage of things like the heroic epic, the national epic, and the beuracracy capital/oxford university. Those national wonders are so powerful that they're worth way more than a lot of small cottage cities.

In civ V though, the national wonders are extremely weak, so there's no point halting your expansion long enough to build them. All a city really needs is a coloseum, library, and university, to generate massive science and zero unhappiness. The national college, national epic, and other national wonders should all be a lot stronger, since those directly reward small empires with big cities.

Also I don't really think ICS is the biggest problem in this game. Yes you can do it, spamming 50+ cities in less than 200 turns, but you can also win faster with less than 20 cities, thanks to the library university scientist combo. The whole economic system of this game is just broken and not very fun. The happiness system doesn't really give you any interesting choices, it's just a hard limit on expansion. It's always: do you have enough happiness to expand? If yes, do so immediately. If no, find a way to get more happiness. Period, full stop.

Yeah I'm not sure how they thought a scientist being quadruple science from a normal citizen was even remotely balanced, but they considered a merchant being worse than a trade post to be fine. I've tried lowering scientists to 2 science 2 GPP but I think that is not even strong enough.

 

[Deep_Blue]

The real power for big cities in IV was GP farms, but now there is no way to assign unlimited specialists in a city to setup GP farms like GA farms for example, and you are limited to small number of specialists of same type.

If unlimited specialists are reintroduced in the game then big cities will be an advantage, combine this with what pi-r8 said about NW and combine it with maritime city states and you will get a powerful combo that is alternative to ICS.

 

[pi-r8]

Yeah I'm not sure how they thought a scientist being quadruple science from a normal citizen was even remotely balanced, but they considered a merchant being worse than a trade post to be fine. I've tried lowering scientists to 2 science 2 GPP but I think that is not even strong enough.

It's "balanced" that way so that the game will end fast enough. They need science to be fast so that you don't have time to build many units, or else the map get's completely clogged. But yeah, the other specialists are pretty weak in comparison. Although if you get freedom/seculraism, even a citizen is actually pretty strong- better than most tiles.

 

[alpaca]

It's "balanced" that way so that the game will end fast enough. They need science to be fast so that you don't have time to build many units, or else the map get's completely clogged. But yeah, the other specialists are pretty weak in comparison. Although if you get freedom/seculraism, even a citizen is actually pretty strong- better than most tiles.

I'm not sure this is as big an issue as you make it, tbh. The AI already does this and it's not a big problem. The player won't do it due to upkeep. So having slower science probably won't generate much trouble.

I agree about high specialist yields. On the other hand, in Civ4 I thought they were too low unless you were running representation. The difference is, of course, that pretty much every tile in Civ4 produced 5-6 gold after a while so the specialists needed to be as strong. In Civ5, most tiles only produce something like 2 or 3 gold so the specialists can be weaker.

Actually it's just the scientists that are too strong. 3 science per scientist plus great person points is too much. I agree with Slowpoke that they should be lowered, but I also think we need to buff science from population to be competitive. This means adding more library-like buildings, preferably without science slots. I pitched an idea in the mod forums a couple of days ago about that. The basic idea was to have two science options: Large cities with science based on population and appropriate library-like buildings, and smaller cities that hinge on scientist specialists. The latter would be less effective and efficient in output but produce great scientists to compensate, therefore allowing more depth research.

To fix ICS, I agree we need to make cities less immediately profitable (aka add a higher cost to expanding). Paeanblack proposed nerfing the base tile and increasing settler cost. I proposed a city maintenance. Both are basically the same thing, maybe a combination of them makes sense. To boost large cities, an India-like building like Dale is proposing is, however, a good idea in my opinion, although I wouldn't go further than +0.5 happiness per citizen.

 

[V. Soma]

I haven't done the math and thought much about how to balance the game, but
maybe TPs are too power ful with the 2gp/tile bonus.

Could (should?) we change it?

Like TP gold tied to city size in a way?

Say: base TP bonus is 0,5 gold, and every 2 citizen adds some value to it...

 

[Slowpoke]

Well it's not too bad if you nerf what makes gold too powerful: RAs and bribes. Then TPs are pretty weak.

 

[Dale]

I think nationals should be done the way they were in CIV. Just limited number of cities for each one and boost them somewhat.
Maybe the devs when they playtested didnt saw it as problem, because we were said that they are used to play with 3 cities... but who on their right mind would like to play civ with such low number of cities? Even in CIV I felt undersized with 8 cities

Not all the people involved with the dev were playing with three cities. There were two notables (I was one) who game after game demonstrated the power of ICS for months. I think my best was culture victory around turn 178 (from memory) as France with 78 cities. And note, at that point in development luxuries only gave +4 happy, and you needed 6 SP categories filled.

I tended towards the builder ICS methods, the other guy demonstrated the numerous conquest path ICS methods.

 

[lschnarch]

Say: base TP bonus is 0,5 gold, and every 2 citizen adds some value to it...

And how do you display decimals in the city screen?

 

[Julian Delphiki]

Not all the people involved with the dev were playing with three cities. There were two notables (I was one) who game after game demonstrated the power of ICS for months. I think my best was culture victory around turn 178 (from memory) as France with 78 cities. And note, at that point in development luxuries only gave +4 happy, and you needed 6 SP categories filled.

I tended towards the builder ICS methods, the other guy demonstrated the numerous conquest path ICS methods.

Good to hear that testing team results were noted when doing the final build.

 

[alpaca]

I haven't done the math and thought much about how to balance the game, but
maybe TPs are too power ful with the 2gp/tile bonus.

Could (should?) we change it?

Like TP gold tied to city size in a way?

Say: base TP bonus is 0,5 gold, and every 2 citizen adds some value to it...

Trading posts are probably not the problem, really. They aren't too strong, even with research agreements and bribes in the equation. I don't like the bribe mechanics but a sensible replacement would probably be complex and take a lot of work. Research Agreements are maybe a bit too cheap but they are a high-risk, high-rewards thing on Immortal and Deity if you play Pangaea (I have a DoW with maybe 50% of my research agreements lately).

 

[mamuz]

my 2 cents.

To underpowered ICS (*) and make viable other strategy easily, i really think that the mathematical function used to link science and population should be a powerfunction (^Y).
The value for each technology in the tech tree should be scaled in consequence (the hard part of the thing -i think this scale should be somewhere link to the number of turns...-).

For exemple :
5 pop city gives 25 sciences.
10 pop city gives 100 sciences.
25 pop city gives 625 sciences.

I mean if ICS use only maritime states to boost the population, strategies which use farms and maritimes states will have more population... then more science. It will create a balanced choice between go for total money/production or go for total science/culture. I guess ICS is overpowered because it's the best way the have money/production... AND science. It's too much. Only culture is crushed in ICS. Science should, too.

In my example, two 25 pop's cities will produce a bit more sciences than twelve 10 pop's cities. (**). But, the factor ^Y can be chosen correctly if it seems to be too much... or not enough.
The power function here can be a good way to powered the verticality.

(*) : I just want to underpowered ICS (or make it less automatic).
(**) : We can notice than this behaviour happens in reality : if scientist A produces a total of research equals to W1 and a scientists B a total equals to W2, then these two scientists, by working in team, will produce a total of research greater than W1+W2 (in reality it's true not only for sciences, but for workers and marchands, too)

Note : In this design super-scientist should give a X% boost and not an absolute value.

 

[pi-r8]

I'm not sure this is as big an issue as you make it, tbh. The AI already does this and it's not a big problem. The player won't do it due to upkeep. So having slower science probably won't generate much trouble.

I disagree, I feel like it's already a big problem with the AI on immortal/deity. One time, I fought a war where it took me more than 100 turns to grind through Monty's gigantic army, so that I could finally start taking his cities. Anyway I think everyone agrees that scientists are by far the most powerful specialist- not only from their high base yield, but also because the great scientists are so powerful.

 

[LordTC]

Instead of +3 Science each scientist gives a boost of 25% of the base science produced in the city, so science specialists are negligible in tiny cities that don't adequately support them, but massively effective in big cities. With some tweaking to tech costs as needed.

 

[V. Soma]

And how do you display decimals in the city screen?

Hmmm

OK, perhaps just forget it

 

[Knut_Are_M]

ics is great because of 3 things.
1.a settler is cheap. 90 hammers for what is early game +2 happiness and 2 worked tiles. when you settle on lux which, you usually do.
2. later on you have social policies and maritimes which give huge flat bonuses.
3. growth slows down really fast. New cities grow way faster then big cities.

fix any of those 3 and you will limit ics. pick and mix to your hearts desire.

PS in real life growth with just enough food and resourses is exponential. It grows much faster the more people you got barely getting by.