The tactic would have definitely worked for Civ1, but as with joncnunn, I don't recall encountering the tactic in any thread or discussion until after the advent of Civ2. It's possible that it existed and was known, but not popular or well-known.
kirbdog:
The term is almost always negative, even pejorative, and as such it's actually been imbued with several shades of meaning. Failing to distinguish them has led to a lot of talking at cross purposes. (It doesn't help that these features often show up together...)
Very much agreed and often my point. ICS as a tactic felt exploitative in the Civ1 and Civ2 eras because the cities were 1 tile apart - so close that it looked and felt extremely unnatural. A hard minimum limit of 2 or 3 tiles would have put paid to the tactic immediately, but designers forbore to implement it. Indeed, I often placed my cities in Civ4 2 tiles apart since that allowed faster use of all the tiles under my control.
Hail
ICS is about maximazing city count through maximazing city density. obviously that means that cities must placed at minimal distances.
ICS cities are usually stopped growing right before the natural happiness cap. no buildings are built in them.
Happiness was rarely the point or issue in ICS. Density was only a sub-category of concern. ICS was powerful because growth was exponentially powerful and easier at the lower population scores, so it was often much faster to harvest tile outputs by building new cities rather than waiting for older cities to grow new population. Moreover, city tile outputs are better than normal tile outputs, so cramming as many as the minimum would allow was (and still is) the best plan.
For both these reasons, increased city count was often better, but it is important to note the reasons. City count itself was not the point of ICS. It has underlying factors that made it powerful.
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Civ5's very large minimum city distance and Specialist Slots means that even when you settle cities at the minimum distance, you have to grow the cities significantly before you can see the maximum return from each one. This puts a severe dent into one of the core aspects of ICS, equivalent to a minimum 4 tile space between cities in the earlier Civs - essentially the "optimum" placement perfectionists could accept.
Ironically, the "perfect" placement many purists think necessary to evoke a more "natural" city feel is betrayed by a night-time satellite view of many places in the world today. A megacity like Manila is several cities built at very close proximity. The sprawl of such sites evokes ICS very much.
This is additionally undermined in CivBE because the game intentionally wants the player to be able to benefit from nearly any city founded nearly anywhere. That's the spirit of Terraforming.
