Is Infinite City Sprawling (ICS) strategy finally defeated???

[Yushal]

Settler factories are still a good way to go. If you notice, the rate at which you build settlers is dependant on how many food/shields you have coming in, IN TOTAL. And it totally ignores whether those food you have coming in are being eaten or not, so long as you have enough food to cover what you need for eatting.

So, a city founded on flood plains that lacks shields is a good spot to be building settlers (and I think also workers?), since that extra food has the same effect as shields when building settlers.

 

[Knightlancer]

It is clear that the new features and game engine very much attempts to defeat the ICS strategy as being the optimum and viable one in favor of more balanced and realistic expansion. So is ICS finally defeated once and for all???

Or is ICS simply ******** but it at its core ICS is still there as the optimum strategy?

It's gone and I'm loveing my Swiss like city. (Small land area, high culture, good military) I'm going for culture at the moment.

 

[spincrus]

People say ICS is gone because they want to believe it is. The truth is it's still the best way to go. Once you have two cities you can pump settlers out of one and units out of the other and get ten cities for every three the AI gets. It's that way on Noble anyway. I haven't played a higher dificulty yet. It's an even more essential stragety now with the emphesis on resources. Grab them all and choke the life out of your rivals.

Prince difficulty is the same essentially. By the time you get 2 cities going, you can eventually dominate the lands surrounding you quite easily, with your capital producing a settler and the other city producing your warriors.