ICS: Love it or hate it?

[Dirk1302]

In answer of my feeling that ICS is not profitable in Civ4

Dirk1302:

I think it depends on what you're talking about. ICS can be profitable in Civ4, and early nearly unlimited expansion likewise. Just have to know how to do it.

I know that Iranon a very strong Civ4 player favored rather tight placing of cities in order to make maximum use of religion buildings and corps. But in Civ4 ICS is just another strategy that isn't necessarily better than conventional strategies. Seems in Civ5 it is.

I read some comments above that if you don't like ICS, just don't do it. Just as if you don't like building overpowered Horsemen armies don't build them. For me that's not good enough. Civ4 offered a real rather difficult challenge already in the vanilla stage and i had to play many Civ4 BTS games to become really comfy at deity.

Civ5 has none of this. I played my 4th game on immortal, used Horsemen only for defense and didn't even employ ICS. I probably don't know even a quarter of all Civ5 features but still stopped the game when i was technologically one era ahead(18 techs according to the overview that popped up).

I'll be patient and try again after some patching has been done but i have a bad feeling about Civ5 atm, where Civ4 was easily best sofar Civ5 seems to be struggling with loads of balancing issues that are not so easily resolved. Put fantastically bad AI on top and a rather bleak picture emerges.

 

[Snapp]

It sounds like there is some disagreement about what exactly the issue is with ICS.

There are some posts about "if you don't like ICS don't build so many bases"

I really don't think what we are trying to get away from is building a lot of bases. I have always been a player who tried to maximize the number of bases in Civ 4.

The issue here is that vertical growth has been disincentive in Civ 5, due to many factors, and that ICS removes the need to make any decisions about city placement.

If we look to remove ICS that does not mean that building a lot of bases should be removed. That should always be a good strategy, more cities, more land, more pop are all good things. What needs to be removed is that ability to ignore placement of cities, you should want each city to be in a solid spot or they won't be worth placing.

 

[ShuShu62]

It sounds like there is some disagreement about what exactly the issue is with ICS.

There are some posts about "if you don't like ICS don't build so many bases"

I really don't think what we are trying to get away from is building a lot of bases. I have always been a player who tried to maximize the number of bases in Civ 4.

The issue here is that vertical growth has been disincentive in Civ 5, due to many factors, and that ICS removes the need to make any decisions about city placement.

If we look to remove ICS that does not mean that building a lot of bases should be removed. That should always be a good strategy, more cities, more land, more pop are all good things. What needs to be removed is that ability to ignore placement of cities, you should want each city to be in a solid spot or they won't be worth placing.

I believe you are correct about the issue. Not sure that your use of the royal 'we' or describing your issue as ICS are accurate. If they were, I believe more folks would be talking about ways to enable/empower large cities/social policies.

I think that conversation would be more productive, but the conversation usually starts and ends with 4x4 is better than 1x16, which is ICS and number of cities based.

 

[boehj]

One way of really putting a dampener on your ICS empire is to have your sugar dadies (Maritime CSs) conquered by the AI all of a sudden.

Perhaps this needs to be looked at as a solution (i.e. the AI should more aggressively go after your Maritime CSs if it sees you employing this strat).

 

[ShuShu62]

One way of really putting a dampener on your ICS empire is to have your sugar dadies (Maritime CSs) conquered by the AI all of a sudden.

Perhaps this needs to be looked at as a solution (i.e. the AI should more aggressively go after your Maritime CSs if it sees you employing this strat).

I had launched a poll once asking if the best way to nerf maritime cities was to mke the AI better at nerfing the maritime cities. My opinion was nerfed by the folks at the time.

I still think you are right though. If the AI were more of a threat militarily, a lot of the ICS and Maritime city complaints go away.

 

[Shaihulud]

I don't love it, but I do love big empires with multiple cities, so Civ4 makes me sad . Civ5 may have made ICS too powerful and seductive however with citystates and slow growth of cities. Makes sense to make new cities when the preexisting one is stagnating, slowly comes the realisation to make continous growth part of the strategy. I would like to see there more incentives or more possibilities to make existing large cities grow faster with buildings beyond present rate, tone down the incredible powers of maritime citystates, penalize players with too many cities (corruption, inefficiency etc) so they need to build infrastructures to negate it. This I think will reduce the overpowering nature of ICS strategy, not entirely negating it but offeringf it as a relevant strategy.

 

[gilmore606]

Dirk1302:

I think it depends on what you're talking about. ICS can be profitable in Civ4, and early nearly unlimited expansion likewise. Just have to know how to do it.

Roxlimn could you please point us to a guide explaining how to do ICS in Civ4? I play a lot of 4 and would be very curious to try this strategy for myself. How do you do it?

My experience with Civ 4 is that the variety of strategies that can work, with no clear optimal path, is what makes it so interesting and replayable, but apparently Roxlimn knows the ideal strategies which make Civ4 boring. How exactly do they work?

 

[alpaca]

Roxlimn could you please point us to a guide explaining how to do ICS in Civ4? I play a lot of 4 and would be very curious to try this strategy for myself. How do you do it?

My experience with Civ 4 is that the variety of strategies that can work, with no clear optimal path, is what makes it so interesting and replayable, but apparently Roxlimn knows the ideal strategies which make Civ4 boring. How exactly do they work?

One way I've tried is to build the Great Lighthouse and spam coastal cities. The GL means your cities are mostly immediately profitable, which is the stuff that fuels ICS. This works especially well with Carthage iirc

As for the topic: ICS being possible is not the problem. In fact, you can win more quickly if you don't go for a real ICS game but stop at the required number of cities you need to win (for example 15). ICS is pretty strong compared to any non-city-spam strategies, though.

 

[fed1943]

In Civ4 ICS/overlaping was just made by weak or very strong players.
It's not easy to do it properly.
Perhaps the greatest tool is to change food tiles and the big goal to grow the cottages quickly.
But Roxlimn or Iranon can say better.