ICS? Icey No!

[pi-r8]

Well all we're modifying is how long till out city grows, not its maximum size or anything else. Let's set it obscenely high. Let's say 0 food required: our city is as big as (food output) - 2*(city population) the moment it's built. What will happen? What will break completely?

That would be pretty funny. It would break the happiness system I think. Founding such a large city would almost certainly send you below -10 unhappiness, so you'd need to save up enough gold to immediately rush buy happiness buildings to counter that. Otherwise you're stuck building coloseums at -50% production.

The early game would be hurt the most. You wouldn't want to found any extra cities, so you'd just have to sit there banking up gold for many turns before you can finally get a second city.

 

[Slowpoke]

Actually, you could starve your cities by making them unemployed, (+ hammers) and hit avoid growth when you hit -9 happiness. Production would hit the roof.

 

[killmeplease]

what about to cap happiness produced by buildings to unhappines generated by a city they are built in

 

[Slowpoke]

So sorta like a semi-local happiness? Not sure it'd help, as cities already at size 2 would gain full benefit of a colosseum.

 

[killmeplease]

and what about bringing city maintenance back?

 

[Celevin]

No good, gold plays a completely different role. Gold isn't science anymore, gold is "more flexible but weaker production". If we start putting gold maintenance, I think people will build cities until their marginal revenue once again hit marginal cost. We'd still have ICS, but people would have no gold to spend (either that, or we'd still have ICS, but people would still have gold to spend as it's not binding).

As long as ICSing gives you more science, it will always be the best strategy if it means giving up another commodity like gold. The only way to stop it is to stop the benefits from the expansion by plunging happiness into negatives or something so there's no incentive to build new cities.

 

[Louis XXIV]

What's wrong with linear? For the record, that is essentially how civ4 did it. Actually my aim with changing the formula was to make it much more linear, but not too different from the current one for cities less than about size 5.

The one problem with linear is it used to be balanced out by more citizens requiring food, with less tiles to feed them. With maritime citiy-states and granaries and the like, there's a bit less balance. Then again, I think they're supposed to be to encourage specialists.

I'd say make it far more linear, but perhaps not exactly linear. I know that's vague, but that's what I'm good at

 

[Gedrin]

I just posted a thought about this in:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=9910094&highlight=ICS#post9910094

I dont see this mod as addressing ICS in the same manner.

I admit I am still play testing... seems to work well so far though

 

[Celevin]

Yeah, I just looked at that post of yours, and it's very interesting. The side-effects of having "happiness per city" set as technically only 1 are nasty, but could probably be tweaked and eliminated.

What if you lose a city then build another? What is each city's unhappiness then? What if I build cities 2, 3, 4, then 5, then lose city #2? What if I lost city #5? These little problems worry me. Can we sell the buildings, or can we tag them as unsellable?

This is definitely the way I'd want to go to curb ICS.

 

[Gedrin]

Hmm... you mean "unhappiness per city" right?
And yes... it does affect:
1. BUILDING_FORBIDDEN_PALACE is 1/2 as effective... giving only -.5 unhapiness per city
2. POLICY_PLANNED_ECONOMY is 1/2 as effective... giving only -.5 unhapiness per city
3. TRAIT_POPULATION_GROWTH [ie Ghandi's trait] is 1/2 as bad... giving only +.5 unhapiness per city

But those could be tweaked to be the same absolute effects they give now.

It "should" be based only on how many cities you control... I have not yet puppeted a city in my test game so I will see... however IIRC puppet cities do not impact your unhappiness due to city count in the vanilla game so I expect they will continue not to.

The building is not only unsellable but does not even appear in the city [which is not what I intended]. As it is now you get a free invisible city hall in every city that just serves to annoy your citizens.... just like real municipal govs.

 

[killmeplease]

As long as ICSing gives you more science, it will always be the best strategy if it means giving up another commodity like gold. The only way to stop it is to stop the benefits from the expansion by plunging happiness into negatives or something so there's no incentive to build new cities.

Ah I see..
I have an idea on how sciense from different cities has to be collected. Say if we have 2 similar cities, their citizens do pretty the same things in their life and thus inventing the same things at the same time. So, sciense from those 2 cities should not be equal to S1+S2, but of some falue V(S1, S2) < S(S1,S2)=S1+S2. The exact formula for V is under development. Also, certain techs like printing press, radio, computers could increase some coefficients in V, so with development of those techs V will become closer to S.

another idea is to make science coming from specialists for most, and make science/specialist-boosting civics be unavailable for large empires: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=396109

 

[Tomice]

Sorry if this has been posted before somewhere:

IMO, science buildings should produce raw beakers, instead of boosting the population-related value. Especially universities and science labs (only buildable in advanced cities) should have quite a few beakers of their own.

The rationale is that science should be more dependent on a good education system and infrastructure than population. The science boost from ICSing is very unrealistic. Lots of small cities with basic schools are not exactly known to be the best way for scientific progress...

 

[Louis XXIV]

If science produced raw values, it would actually reward ICS. Small cities with free beakers would do better than large cities that need population to benefit.

 

[PieceOfMind]

So what comments do people have about changes in the upcoming patch, how it will affect ICS and how it will affect the direction of this mod?

With such massive changes to gameplay still being effected (e.g. the change to social policy accrual) it's giving me cause to hesitate on getting too invested in the mod.

 

[MouseyPounds]

AFAIC, the proposed patch notes don't provide enough detail to do anything but guess at what will happen. Personally, I would wait until the patch comes and we get to see the exact changes and test them out before putting too much more work into something like this.

 

[Dale]

So what comments do people have about changes in the upcoming patch, how it will affect ICS and how it will affect the direction of this mod?

With such massive changes to gameplay still being effected (e.g. the change to social policy accrual) it's giving me cause to hesitate on getting too invested in the mod.

In my view, the patch notes indicate that ICS is still the efficient path.

IMO, the root cause of ICS is that Col allows a size 2 city ALL BY ITSELF! With two trade posts, you can afford a Col and Library. With either Meritocracy or Military Caste that gives you a 3rd pop in the city to assign to the library. Cover the food cost with Maritimes and for each Maritime you add another pop.

The problem is Col.

My proposal:
Col: 50% city pop happy
Theatre: +25% city pop happy
Stadium: +25% city pop happy

To eliminate the entire city's unhappiness you require all three buildings. The Col only affects half the cities pop, meaning the previous size 2 city still generates -1 unhappiness (assuming you can account for the 2 city number unhappiness by other methods). Size 4 generates -2 unhappiness. Size 6 generates -3 unhappiness. Build a Theatre and suddenly your size 6 city only generates -2 unhappy (50% + 25%).

To counter the requirement to build more happiness buildings, half the maintenance cost of them.

This kills ICS in one change.

EDIT: fix up maths

 

[Slowpoke]

That would make it impossible to make a large empire until you made it all the way to stadiums, though. I like the idea that someone recently posted in general forum, of combining that with a flat bonus. So like Colosseums = +1 happy +40% city pop happy.

 

[Dale]

Not necessarily. It's pretty easy to get your hands on 4-5 luxuries giving you another 25 happy. Assuming Meritocracy and Military Caste that means in 5 cities you cover 5 pop. If those cities only have Col's then you can grow them all to size 10. 50 pop before requiring theaters.

Building theaters then allows those same cities to grow to size 20 (10 for Col, 5 for Theater, 5 for luxuries). Who says you need stadiums to run 100% happiness?

Tell me, wouldn't you love to have 5 size 20 cities by the renaissance?

Or, just get Forbidden Palace and Cols and run at 100% happy.

 

[Slowpoke]

Yeah I guess you got a point, didn't take into account SPs and wonders.

 

[Celevin]

So what comments do people have about changes in the upcoming patch, how it will affect ICS and how it will affect the direction of this mod?

With such massive changes to gameplay still being effected (e.g. the change to social policy accrual) it's giving me cause to hesitate on getting too invested in the mod.

The social policy change really affects the most extreme styles of play, but I'm not seeing many standard strategies being affected (other than the annoyance of timing era changes with policy gains). Many ICS strategies still go down Liberty as early as possible. It'll stop cheesy culture wins and Order beelines, but that's about it. I think this change has more bad in it than good, as it'll cause more micromanagement.

The other change is obviously the Maritimes, but since it's still giving food per city, it will always benefit ICS empires much more. Either the nerf won't be enough, or big and small empires alike will suffer. It's not a problem with the integer values that the developers set, but it's a fundamental problem with how it distributes the food.