ICS: Love it or hate it?

[polypheus]

I view ICS the same as the 'God-mode'-cheatcode in Doom (or similar games). There are people who love to use a cheat and win so let them! This is a SP so if people want to win by using cheats what does it bother me?

I don't understand those people that use this cheat and then whine about 'the game being too easy'QFE

ICS is not some obscure gamey cheat (like say perpetual anarchy in Civ4) that is not obvious and is some kind of overlooked loophole. Rather it is the actual gameplay itself as designed! It is here because of the way the game mechanics work and the balance in terms of cost/benefit of growing large cities vs founding more small cities. It is actually what the game itself is telling you to do! It is even what AIs do!

You start playing a few games and realize that growing cities to make them bigger is very slow after fast initial growth. And then it also becomes obvious that even if you could make those cities bigger with more high level buildings, those buildings take too long to build and/or just don't offer enough benefits for the cost (in time and/or money) vs just founding new cities.

The game also makes it obvious that small cities grow fast and are fairly productive quickly. Yes there is the negative "happiness" hit but there you see that with a colosseum and later SP, they can at least be happiness neutral and self-supporting as long as they don't continue to grow beyond 4 or so. Thus you want to actually purposefully keep them small which is just completely bizarre.

Even if you choose not to go ICS full-scale, it becomes fairly obvious that it just doesn't make sense to try to expand vertically rather than horizontally. And whether you choose to do ICS or not, it is really the symptom of game mechanics and balance which IMO is flawed.

 

[Roxlimn]

polypheus:

Given that it took some weeks before ICS in Civ V became common knowledge, I would say that it wasn't exactly obvious.

Also, given how wonky the game plays when doing ICS, I would also suggest that the game wasn't actually designed to feature this technique.

Balance is not flawed. It is "off" or "not established" but "flawed" balance implies that the desired outcome was actually achieved and that that balance is fundamentally unworkable for some reason, at which point it's actually the design that's flawed.

I could agree with you that Civs that include features that promote ICS makes the games inherently flawed, but that would make every Civ game flawed.

 

[Roxlimn]

Zogar:

You can actually not use ICS and still win at Emperor. And yes, playing without using ICS is actually more fun for some of us. If you prefer using ICS, then more power - the game is currently tilted in your favor. Enjoy.

 

[Zogar]

Roxlimn : Yeah you can, I did it myself, but as I said it's mainly due to the AI being bad at winning any other way than conquest (and bad even at that ). Still, I get crazy when I see an AI with 30 cities and I have only 10 max because I don't "cheat". I agree that ICS is not fun, but neither is getting roflstomped by an AI who has 20 times your troops.

 

[Roxlimn]

Zogar:

The AI can do that even if you had similar Civ sizes. It's the deity handicaps that allow it to do so, not ICS. In fact, I have only very rarely seen the AI settle its cities exactly two hexes apart in an ICS grid. Generally, it settles on recommended spots - about 3 hexes from the nearest city.

 

[ohioastronomy]

You're getting into the realm of odd and arbitrary house rules. How many cities am I "allowed" to build before I'm abusing the system? How large are they allowed to grow? Do I let them get big as a handicap; pull some magic number out of the air and say "this many cities but no more"?

As long as I cap them at 4 a city on tundra with a library and coliseum helps me. I can Sorceror's Apprentice them by having little cities building settlers and workers for other little cities. It's adding beakers and gold and it's doing so faster than I possibly can in the big cities.

Once it is going, in fact, I add the little cities while I do whatever I want to with the bigger ones.

 

[Snapp]

IMO its not so much that ICS is the problem.

I find what is more of an issue is the lack of incentive to make your cities grow.

In Civ 4 there was 0 reason to not have your cities grow, if your local happiness could handle it there was almost no downside to growing a city.

Now in Civ 5 vertical growth limits your horizontal growth, so we are somewhat forced to choose between the two.

Due to many other factors, which have been gone over many times, lots of smaller cities works out to better than large cities for basically everything.

Change up the benefits for large cities, reduce the happiness hit for vertical growth, give people reasons to WANT to have larger cities and you will see this strategy start to lose steam.

Right now, this is literally no reason to not do ICS.

 

[lschnarch]

The more I am thinking about it, the more I come to the conclusion that Civ5 actually WAS designed for ICS.

Look at the values:
The earliest happiness building is tailor-made for small city ICS. It comes quite early, too
The Liberty branch of the SP is tailor-made for ICS, too. You get 50% off for building settlers when unlocking, you get 25% for workers with the first policy and with the second you get +1 happiness if cities are connected.
The connection you want to do anyway, since this gives you income, even more since the patch.

Adding a monument for a bit more of culture, a library for better science and two TP's for additional income: Voilá, you have all the ingredients for ICS.

 

[Snapp]

The more I am thinking about it, the more I come to the conclusion that Civ5 actually WAS designed for ICS.

Look at the values:
The earliest happiness building is tailor-made for small city ICS. It comes quite early, too
The Liberty branch of the SP is tailor-made for ICS, too. You get 50% off for building settlers when unlocking, you get 25% for workers with the first policy and with the second you get +1 happiness if cities are connected.
The connection you want to do anyway, since this gives you income, even more since the patch.

Adding a monument for a bit more of culture, a library for better science and two TP's for additional income: Voilá, you have all the ingredients for ICS.

That doesn't necessarily mean the game was intended for ICS.

Its clearly intended that expanding all over the place be a strategy, its intended that more bases = better for production and science. The issue I think most have with ICS is not the rapid expansion, its the ability for you to ignore city placement and get much greater benefits out of many low population cities, with literally no incentive to grow cities larger.

 

[Roxlimn]

Snapp:

There are reasons not to do ICS - it's just that the benefits outweighs the cons. I believe that it's beneficial to be objective and numbers-based on things like this. Alarmist exaggerations don't really serve a purpose here, IMO.

lschnarch:

Think you ought to stop thinking about it and start playing Civ games more. As I've mentioned before, the core mechanics of Civ games in general promote ICS, so if you want to find these in any Civ game, you will. Is this a revelation? Did you not know this?

 

[vranasm]

I like it more then playing the game in intended manner, since playing with less cities is boring for me and leads me to thinking about my empire as bunch of city states thrown around the map...

to make it better...
- improve production
- improve culture border pops to get feeling of empire
- improve growth after size 8

until then... ICS is more fun, sorry

 

[MkLh]

I like it more then playing the game in intended manner, since playing with less cities is boring for me and leads me to thinking about my empire as bunch of city states thrown around the map...

to make it better...
- improve production
- improve culture border pops to get feeling of empire
- improve growth after size 8

until then... ICS is more fun, sorry

The game was intended to play by spamming dozens of small cities in every spot you can find, no matter how crappy, and building same few basic building in each of them? They sure had strange intentions.

 

[Eberon]

I like it more then playing the game in intended manner, since playing with less cities is boring for me and leads me to thinking about my empire as bunch of city states thrown around the map...

to make it better...
- improve production
- improve culture border pops to get feeling of empire
- improve growth after size 8

until then... ICS is more fun, sorry

This.

 

[vranasm]

The game was intended to play by spamming dozens of small cities in every spot you can find, no matter how crappy, and building same few basic building in each of them? They sure had strange intentions.

i wrote such thing?
I think I wrote that the intended manner is playing with "bunch of cities" typically under 5 over continent and I find it boring compared to ICS and stated some reasons for my feeling.

 

[Rowain deWolf]

A cheat and a tactic that is allowed by broken game mechanics are totally different things. An equivalent for the Doom cheat would be going to world builder and giving yourself a Giant Death Robot in turn 1.

It is the same as it is in your power to use it or not. Noone is forcing you to ICS and noone is settling your cities for you.
This is a Single person game. If you decide to use ICS you are in the same boat as one who uses God-mode. Don't complain if it makes your game boring or simple you brought it on you yourself.

Then you look back over your empire, and realize you've just recreated ICS. There are just so many reasons to plop your cities down as close to each other as possible. Choosing not to starts to feel like holding one arm behind your back, or trying to play a sport with one eye closed.

I'm playing Civ since the time Civ1 was released and in none of those Games the AI had a real chance against the Human mind. Take a look at the successiongames for Civ4 played by the RB-people. They needed not only tied back arms but also cut off legs to even give the AI a little bit of chance.

 

[zuraffo]

I would like to see a population building requirement per city.

Lets say that where a collosseum gives you +3 happy citizens, you cant build it until you have 3 or more citizens in that city.

Logically for me the game should require you have at least 3 population to make 3 people happy.

I'll much rather the happiness building to scale according to population, like say, the library. So you'll get +2 happiness when you have 4 pop, +3 when you have 6 pop, etc. It fits the nature of the building (some but not all of your population get entertained) as well as preventing the happiness building to be of much use to ICS.

 

[Zogar]

The more I am thinking about it, the more I come to the conclusion that Civ5 actually WAS designed for ICS.

Look at the values:
The earliest happiness building is tailor-made for small city ICS. It comes quite early, too
The Liberty branch of the SP is tailor-made for ICS, too. You get 50% off for building settlers when unlocking, you get 25% for workers with the first policy and with the second you get +1 happiness if cities are connected.
The connection you want to do anyway, since this gives you income, even more since the patch.

Adding a monument for a bit more of culture, a library for better science and two TP's for additional income: Voilá, you have all the ingredients for ICS.

Yes, this is very disturbing. You forget a lot of other factors as well (maritime CS for example). Either they intended the game to work around ICS, either they made an incredibly awful job at balancing civ around 1upt (the reason why big cities were made not powerful in Civ 5)

@Roxlimn : Sure all previous civs (arguably except civ 4) favored expansion, but did they really favor a pure ICS style with packed, small cities with nearly nothing in them like we have now ?

 

[r_rolo1]

@Roxlimn : Sure all previous civs (arguably except civ 4) favored expansion, but did they really favor a pure ICS style with packed, small cities with nearly nothing in them like we have now ?

All civ games before civ IV ( barring some lapse of memory ) needed a building to pass 6 pop ... that alone make ICS a very atractive proposal compared with waiting for the tech that unlocks the building and spending hammers/shields/whatever to allow more pop. Add the costumary increase of food needed for each pop level and the " hammer ( or food or coin ) now is better than tomorrow" syndrom that plagues all civ-like TBS and you get a very strong tilt towards ICS. Not even the amazingly civ III mechanic of corruption could do much about that, because even a completely unproductive city could still be useful by harboring a spec ...

 

[jdubbins]

ICS is a valid strategy. However, in context of game theory, the ICS strategy is a strictly dominating strategy. In other words, the player always benefits more from choosing ICS over other strategies such as developing a few core cities or specializing cities.
The lack of a choice, unless the player purposely handicaps himself, contributes to the poor response gamers have given CiV.

To correct the choice issue, Firaxis either needs to weaken ICS (inflation is my favorite suggestion, since big undeveloped empires should not be cash, production machines) or strengthen the other choices (incentives to encourage development are my favs).

Well, that's my 2 cents and btw, first post.

 

[Zogar]

@ jdubbins : I don't know if it's more the lack of choice or more the lack of things to do / challenge that players don't like. You can decide to not ICS if you want, even if you know it's inferior. The AI will still be (very) bad in both cases .

@r_lolo : ok, I see. I was not aware of ICS back then. That's still not a good reason to favor ICS so much when the problem was (partly) solved in Civ4. They decided to change so many things in Civ5, but not ICS . I'm really not understanding the devs choices.