"ICS" layouts - here's mine!

[PieceOfMind]

Can a city bombard another city? That would be cool to see.

 

[Louis XXIV]

You should probably still build some sort of regular military at the beginning. I used horsemen to defend for the first half of the game. That's a good point about The Wheel, though. I guess in the same way, city tiles don't give free railroads until you research Railroad.

I made a few other dumb mistakes that hurt me (I figured since I'd be settling there anyway, there was no point to build tile improvements, which was quite a dumb idea). I just didn't play well overall.

BTW, no, a city cannot bombard another city. Also, if you lose your city, there's a decent chance that another one of your cities will no longer be within your cultural borders (which leads to starvation pretty quickly). There was also some weird unit movement bugs having to do with cities. Quite apparent that the game was not built with this in mind, but it was still a fun experiment.

 

[pi-r8]

huh? How can a city not be within your cultural borders?

 

[atteSmythe]

huh? How can a city not be within your cultural borders?

The game sometimes has some strange ideas over who owns what tiles. I've had cities lose access to the first ring of hexes after a nearby city was razed. In this case, I'm guessing that when the city is captured, its inner ring is being given to the conqueror as territory, leading to your cities not being in your own land.

 

[beestar]

The game sometimes has some strange ideas over who owns what tiles. I've had cities lose access to the first ring of hexes after a nearby city was razed. In this case, I'm guessing that when the city is captured, its inner ring is being given to the conqueror as territory, leading to your cities not being in your own land.

Yep, I had this happen just yesterday. Cumae owned a tile with a gold resource that was close to an Arabian city. I conquered the Arab city, and razed it ... and then that gold tile became no-man's land again. I had to buy the tile all over again. Annoying.

 

[atteSmythe]

To the OP - I use the city spacing that you propose, though the road situation is somewhat more complicated than you present it. If you tile that triangle road structure, you'll find that each city is connected to the trade network twice (Edit: best case, 2/3). There's another pattern that requires only 2 out of every 4 cities to be connected twice, with occasional interconnects, as convenient for troop movement.

I started with your triangle, but noticed that there was another way to connect 3 cities with only 3 roads (blue for cities, brown for roads):

You can add a fourth with only one more road, which the triangle cannot do. This is the building block:

You'll notice that it can be connected either straight, or turned:

You can also connect via the edges, instead of the ends, while maintaining efficiency:

There are some highly efficient (1.25-1.33 rd/city) arrangements that are also highly impractical, and unlikely to be implemented due to terrain considerations:

One thing I like about it, though, is that you can also improvise pretty easily, without trashing your efficiency too much. A lot of that is due to the 3-city arc that is the basis of the 4-city slant. Moving the 3rd road of the triangle from an 'inside' edge to an 'outside' edge of the last city hex means that you only have to add one more road to connect it to either another city (making the slant) or in place of one of the cities in another slant:

A city off the lattice requires only one more road in many cases. Switching lattice directions from right- to left-handed (or vice versa) may not even require any extra roads, unless you want another interconnect somewhere. A typical continent might end up looking something like this (disregarding any lattice imperfections, which will be there, but are harder for me to draw up quickly):

If I counted correctly, that comes out at 53 roads to connect up 39 cities, ~1.36 roads/city. Surprises me that it's almost as efficient as the spiral, even though it clearly has two extra connecting roads and a few oddball cities added on.

 

[m4gill4]

This thread is great! And shows that civ 5 is such a great game, it's almost on the level of TETRIS!

 

[LordTC]

So four versions later and we're back to the Civ I strategy being the best.. however It's also banned. Out of curiosity can you build a ship in a city connected to the coast by cities.. if so that would be OLD SCHOOL!!!!

 

[WickedSick37]

I did a cluster with 107 cities, it gets really boring after a while

Spoiler :

 

[Deep_Blue]

Seriously guys do you enjoy playing ICS? I mean it is ugly..

I dont play this way.. I like big cities with every tile worked out, so my playstyle is similar to Civ4.

 

[Jester Fool]

Seriously guys do you enjoy playing ICS? I mean it is ugly..

Can't argue with the results though. Pretty much Augustus Caesar on Immortal level...which is quite enjoyable BTW. Just finished a game, where just for giggles, I maxed out my influence with all 13 city states. Then I declared war on Elizabeth and laughed as they all attacked her. Too bad Germany had declared war on her the turn before (and he was future tech while she was "only" in the modern age). Priceless.

 

[atteSmythe]

Seriously guys do you enjoy playing ICS? I mean it is ugly..

I dont play this way.. I like big cities with every tile worked out, so my playstyle is similar to Civ4.

I do. I was a builder, too, but ICS doesn't exclude that. I'm settling on a city pattern that looks something like this:

Black cities are 'fillers,' with each colored section being the territory owned/worked by a 'real' city. And 'filler' is a misnomer - by the end of a long game, with enough social policies, they can become substantial.

The big cities can work 18 tiles each, taking the best away from the fillers, and using all the big builder-city multipliers on them. Realistically, each will never use all 18 tiles, since some specialists will prove superior, allowing fillers to still have 2-3 tiles worked, if needed/desired.

For me, the change of heart was two-fold: realizing that even in civ iv, each of my cities wouldn't live up to its full potential, and coming to think of fillers as big terrain improvements that can only be built by settlers. There are only a few times per game that you really need to consider them as cities at all, but when you do, they lend tremendous flexibility.

Edit: Notice that the spacing of the megacities is probably what you'd use if you weren't ICSing anyway, especially if you aren't as stringent with the lattice as I've gotten. The filler cities are just a better use of space for tiles that probably would never have been worked by the main cities anyway.

 

[Slowpoke]

Heh, since we're back on the original topic, honestly I gotta agree with martin. ICS theory just never really works in an actual game. In a real game you have to first get luxury resources, often building on them for best effect (further limiting choice), you're bounded by sometimes oddly shaped mountains and water, and you need to make sure you get hills or forests for every city. So going pure ICS doesn't quite work. In the end it just gets to the point where your aim is build as many cities as you can with what you've got at turn 80.

 

[Deep_Blue]

I do. I was a builder, too, but ICS doesn't exclude that. I'm settling on a city pattern that looks something like this:

Black cities are 'fillers,' with each colored section being the territory owned/worked by a 'real' city. And 'filler' is a misnomer - by the end of a long game, with enough social policies, they can become substantial.

Nice !
This looks much better.. I will try this

 

[atteSmythe]

Heh, since we're back on the original topic, honestly I gotta agree with martin. ICS theory just never really works in an actual game.

Well, in theory there's no difference between theory and reality. In reality, there is!

Honestly, though, I consider that intersection - theoretical ideal versus pragmatism - to be one of the things that adds constant, meaningful decisions to the game, and it helps keep me interested. I'm also not doing 200-turn spaceship runs on diety . My goal was to find something that works quite a bit like how I ran my empire in Civ IV, but without bankrupting me and having my empire in shambles from constant overwhelming happiness problems. For me, this fits the bill.

 

[ShadowoftheDark]

yeah, I tried pure ICS, got trashed with early dow lol (immortal). though I'd like to try that other layout. still that 107 cities is pure lol.

 

[GenericPlayer]

This ICS layout isn't my invention, but I live there!

70 million people tightly packed into the Nile Valley - I wonder what the huge-earth-map equivalent would be! The next Civ game should take away the Wonder build bonus and put in an ICS bonus!

 

[Louis XXIV]

To be fair, they're not cities (at least not historically). Egypt had a distinctly non-urban character that was very different from Mesopotamia. It's something the game doesn't model efficiently, though.