Icey No mod
ICS? Icey No!
NO LONGER IN DEVELOPMENT
This is a mod that tries to curtail the effectiveness of the hard ICS strategy, where many small and mostly infrastructureless cities packed in tightly can be more powerful than an empire of similar population size but with more developed core cities.
The aim is not necessarily to just throw nerfs at ICSing, but to also add incentives to alternative paths. Importantly, it tries where possible to avoid nerfing early expansion because this is a normal part of most strategies. Unfortunately it's unlikely that this will remain completely untouched. To hurt big-scale ICS, REXing or smallscale ICSing may suffer a bit too.
Note that this mod may have a short lifespan because it will be built with the current modding limitations in mind. This makes things difficult because many good proposals for how to combat ICS are just not possible yet. If the balance is changed with a patch, or when the c++ sdk is released, this mod may no longer be needed.
In the meantime, the aim is to keep this thread as a place to discuss ways to counter ICS.
The mod is now available on modhub.
You can also download the zip here.
For your convenience, this is the readme for v1.
Spoiler :
Icey No Mod
Homepage: http://tinyurl.com/IceyNoMod (or http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=396258)
For more info, please visit the above website. At the moment I welcome any and all suggestions or criticisms. If you have any questions about the mod, that's also the place to ask them.
This mod makes a few balance changes in an attempt to encourage the alternatives to spamming small and mostly infrastructureless cities.
List of changes:
v1. Experimental - not very well tested yet!
Buildings
---------
-Colosseum 3 from 4, 3 maint unchanged.
-Theatre 5 from 4, 4 maint from 5.
-Stadium 7 from 4, 5 maint from 6.
-Circus 2 from 3, 2 main from 3, 120 cost from 150.
-Forbidden Palace now -25% unhappiness from population, from -50%.
-A science specialist slot moved from the library to the university.
Trade Routes
------------
-Old formula was (1 + 1.25*citysize)
-New formula is (-1.3 + 1.5*citysize + 0.05*capitalsize)
(Ideally I'd like to put a quadratic term in there, but it's not possible yet)
Social Policies
---------------
-Landed Elite (Tradition) SP now gives +20% growth to all cities, rather than +33% to the capital.
Miscellaneous
-------------
-Unhappiness per city increased from 2 to 3.
-To help reduce the effect of the previous change on the early game, default at all difficulties is increased by 1. At Prince and above, this means from 9 to 10.
To do / Proposed changes:
-------------------------
+Reduce unhappy per pop? Not even sure if this can be made non-integer
Ideas:
------
+Halve the bonus from maritime states (I'm not sure this is possible with current mod limitations)
+Granary gets 2 and +20% growth, but for a new maintenance of 2
+Hospital reduced from 50% to 35% (maint 2 unchaged), and Medical Lab reduced from 25% to 20% (maint 3 unchanged).
Homepage: http://tinyurl.com/IceyNoMod (or http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=396258)
For more info, please visit the above website. At the moment I welcome any and all suggestions or criticisms. If you have any questions about the mod, that's also the place to ask them.
This mod makes a few balance changes in an attempt to encourage the alternatives to spamming small and mostly infrastructureless cities.
List of changes:
v1. Experimental - not very well tested yet!
Buildings
---------
-Colosseum 3 from 4, 3 maint unchanged.
-Theatre 5 from 4, 4 maint from 5.
-Stadium 7 from 4, 5 maint from 6.
-Circus 2 from 3, 2 main from 3, 120 cost from 150.
-Forbidden Palace now -25% unhappiness from population, from -50%.
-A science specialist slot moved from the library to the university.
Trade Routes
------------
-Old formula was (1 + 1.25*citysize)
-New formula is (-1.3 + 1.5*citysize + 0.05*capitalsize)
(Ideally I'd like to put a quadratic term in there, but it's not possible yet)
Social Policies
---------------
-Landed Elite (Tradition) SP now gives +20% growth to all cities, rather than +33% to the capital.
Miscellaneous
-------------
-Unhappiness per city increased from 2 to 3.
-To help reduce the effect of the previous change on the early game, default at all difficulties is increased by 1. At Prince and above, this means from 9 to 10.
To do / Proposed changes:
-------------------------
+Reduce unhappy per pop? Not even sure if this can be made non-integer
Ideas:
------
+Halve the bonus from maritime states (I'm not sure this is possible with current mod limitations)
+Granary gets 2 and +20% growth, but for a new maintenance of 2
+Hospital reduced from 50% to 35% (maint 2 unchaged), and Medical Lab reduced from 25% to 20% (maint 3 unchanged).