My friend ICS got shot in the head

[Abbadonlefleau]

I have just played 2 immortal games with BNW and I started with my usual strategy, which is some kind of ICS (or rather "very wide").
Whooo, maybe I missed something, but it could seriously nerfed:
- you cannot trade immediately for the 240g (I hear someone say "you just need to be friends"; well it takes time to get friend, and "agressively founding cities does not
help"; you really need those 240 early to buy your settlers)

- +3% technology cost per city ! So clearly, at some point (12 ? 14 cities ? it really does not make sense to create additional cities. Notably as you have some fixed figures with the trade routes)

- pantheon: maybe I was unlucky, but it seems that founding a pantheon is much tougher in immortal than it used to be. Probably several IA go with piety opening and found way before me. Given that religion is important in ICS, that does not help^...

- religion: so the cool +1 happiness per converted city (which was my main source of happiness in ICS) became 0.5. This does not help either....

- and on the other hand, you have trade routes, which clearly incentivize you to make nice large tall cities, which will get +20 gold from trade routes.

So, ok, maybe ICS was a bit OP (at least that's how I won my only game on deity without using any "abuse" / tricks), but now...
I feel that Liberty is completly useless. I will never plant more than 5 cities, and therefore I will never go Liberty.

Did I miss something ? I feel that all the new stuff nerfed the strategy of going wide. Are there anything that helped it ?

(the only fun stuff was that I took the reform religion giving +2tourism by religious building; and suddenly my 14 cities with pagoda produced 28 tourism ;-)

 

[VainoValkea]

You even forgot the fact that happiness buildings only give +2 local happiness each.

And true, ICS has been nerfed. You'll actually need to pay close attention not only to your amount of cities but their efficiency. I personally like this change, although warmongering took too much of a hit in my opinion.

 

[killmeplease]

i've never traded useless things to AI it feels like cheating to me

+3% technology cost per city

i thought its 5%...

 

[anandus]

i thought its 5%...

Maybe he plays on a different speed than standard?

Personally I'm happy the "lump sum"-'exploit' has been nerfed, I always found it a bit cheaty, although opinions differ of course.
But you can still get gpt, even without friendship, and the AI seems to value it better than before

 

[The QC]

i thought its 5%...

It scales with map size. It's 3% on large maps and 5% on standard maps. Presumably, the bigger the map the smaller the penalty for each city.

 

[anandus]

Ah, that makes sense

 

[Dysus]

I haven't been able to find many ICS / liberty LPs recently. Would love to see some liberty love on immortal or diety.

 

[killmeplease]

is the modifier a compound interest or those percents are just combined?
e.g. after i have planted 10 cities after the capital, will the tech cost increase 1.05^10=2.6 times or 1+0.5*10=1.5 times?

 

[The QC]

is the modifier a compound interest or those percents are just combined?
e.g. after i have planted 10 cities after the capital, will the tech cost increase 1.05^10=2.6 times or 1+0.5*10=1.5 times?

The latter.

 

[Ryoga]

The tradition way has been nerfed too, Before you could easily find enough money fast to buy settlers, now you don't. Even if you make friends they don't have enough money to spare.

Generally early development has been nerfed for everyone, AI included.

 

[Horizons]

It just feels that warfare has been uber-nerfed to the point where it is not possible as a viable strategy any more. Instead of beating up on other civs excessively, you have to butter them up excessively via diplomacy ... instead of conquering them mindlessly you just send out trade ships to them mindlessly ... one evil replaced by another

 

[Abbadonlefleau]

ICS has been nerfed, but still works. I played with Moroco (on immortal). Clearly not a civ for ICS. But I was able to found a pantheon, and obviously, with deserts... the faith quickly came rushing. So I decided to go ICS (against my will) and it is working "ok". In G&K it would have been an easy win, now it's tougher...
I do not feel that warmongering has been nerfed. What did I miss ? (ok, loosing your trade route does not help...)

 

[Hpuk]

Losing the happiness policy from Rationalism and the +1 happiness for defensive buildings from Honor hurts a lot too. Order being moved to modern/3 factories, and GE buying moved to Tradition are some other nerfs to wide style. Adding so many new things to build and new specialist buildings means you'll need more pop in your cities to do everything.
I've still been able to win with Liberty on Immortal, but it seems Tradition is clearly the better choice most of the time, especially if you're not going for early conquest.

 

[Horizons]

ICS has been nerfed, but still works. I played with Moroco (on immortal). Clearly not a civ for ICS. But I was able to found a pantheon, and obviously, with deserts... the faith quickly came rushing. So I decided to go ICS (against my will) and it is working "ok". In G&K it would have been an easy win, now it's tougher...
I do not feel that warmongering has been nerfed. What did I miss ? (ok, loosing your trade route does not help...)

It doesn't pay in the long run to be a warmonger ... no trade with other civs, being crippled by World Congress resolutions (until you are able to take out the city states), any trade routes you do have get pillaged and then finally culture-bombing on a DEVASTATING scale in the late game.

 

[Castar]

Warmongers can still trade with their own cities to pump their growth and production to ridonculous levels.

 

[Dtekkar]

I have just played 2 immortal games with BNW and I started with my usual strategy, which is some kind of ICS (or rather "very wide").
Whooo, maybe I missed something, but it could seriously nerfed:
- you cannot trade immediately for the 240g (I hear someone say "you just need to be friends"; well it takes time to get friend, and "agressively founding cities does not
help"; you really need those 240 early to buy your settlers)

- +3% technology cost per city ! So clearly, at some point (12 ? 14 cities ? it really does not make sense to create additional cities. Notably as you have some fixed figures with the trade routes)

- pantheon: maybe I was unlucky, but it seems that founding a pantheon is much tougher in immortal than it used to be. Probably several IA go with piety opening and found way before me. Given that religion is important in ICS, that does not help^...

- religion: so the cool +1 happiness per converted city (which was my main source of happiness in ICS) became 0.5. This does not help either....

- and on the other hand, you have trade routes, which clearly incentivize you to make nice large tall cities, which will get +20 gold from trade routes.

So, ok, maybe ICS was a bit OP (at least that's how I won my only game on deity without using any "abuse" / tricks), but now...
I feel that Liberty is completly useless. I will never plant more than 5 cities, and therefore I will never go Liberty.

Did I miss something ? I feel that all the new stuff nerfed the strategy of going wide. Are there anything that helped it ?

(the only fun stuff was that I took the reform religion giving +2tourism by religious building; and suddenly my 14 cities with pagoda produced 28 tourism ;-)

I just played a Germany game where I went wide (well, conquered wide heheh) in the early game and got exclusive access to 1/3 of the Pangaea. When I founded a ceremonial burial pagoda religion I thought the game was mine after some deep economic development. But I didn't have enough happiness to keep growing despite spamming happiness buildings and my desert faith / Mosque of Djenne spam taking over the world, post Unity of the Prophets. Massively behind on tech and unhappy, I was unable to settle the remaining plots, and without a large coastal city for trades meant I was at a questionable GPT all game long, too. I ended up just barely getting a domination win alongside my autocracy partner, Mr. Khan, when we teamed up and killed Ethiopia with them 1 influential culture from victory, then Babylon, who had a couple spaceship parts done. Babylon nuked my air force, which made the final showdown with Khan the toughest battle, but with 8 faith bought great generals we had a great line of citadels that wiped out countless troops. It was eventually nuked, but it was too late. I had air superiority and the ground war had stalemated. Victory, if only just.

It seems liberty is a lot weaker than before. Beyond the penalties, the design change of gold from terrain to trade routes strips ICS of one of its key advantages: huge GPT. Now, regardless of # of cities, you need to develop a large trade hub city or two, preferably coastal, with a large # of land plots and resources, and grow it like crazy. With that in mind, for a perma-grow happy ICS, a mix of liberty and tradition is probably the ticket. Open tradition for the early culture, get to monarchy (+1happy per 2 in capital), then Liberty just to meritocracy (+1happy per city connection & -5% population unhappiness), snag naval tradition from Exploration (+1happy per coastal building), then come back for Aristocracy (+1happy for every 10 pop in a city) once a few cities hit 10 pop and then try to clear out commerce gunning for Protectionism (+2happy per luxury) before/until you can adopt an ideology. If you can get a happiness religion alongside this, you will have a HUGE empire... like, John William's Imperial march theme will replace the in game music in your head, but you are going to have to lean on stone circles/desert faith/gempearl faith and some shrines to get you there, and that's the most rickety bridge in this strat.

 

[RealHuhn]

ICS/wide:

Negatives:
Agreed with the original post. It's definately harder and you have to pay close attention to every city in order to succeed.

Positives:
1) You can boost new cities with internal food trades and focus on production (this can be huge but is difficult to pull off indeed)
2) Religion is easy to get, for example take Piety opener as 4th policy after free settler, then Organized Religion for more faith per turn, Pagoda spam is awesome as always
3) Reformation beliefs generally much more useful for wide empires
4) Policy penalty per city was reduced
5) Early iron gives a nice production boost and a good alternative in case you have to defend against early DOWs
6) Early DOWs happen much less frequently (if they do happen, they are much harder to fend off though)
7) Early exploration can give huge happiness and production boosts when you have a lot of coastal cities
8) Order/Autocracy both give massive happiness boosts to wide empires, for example +2 happiness per monument (crazy^^)

I think I missed some stuff. So yeah, it's harder but many buffs compensate for negatives quite nicely.

 

[chazzycat]

agreed ICS is pretty dead. Between the science penalty, ceremonial burial nerf, and change to happiness buildings it got beaten up pretty bad.

I've still had good success with liberty though, expanding to 6-8 cities or so. You just can't take it to the extreme anymore.

 

[RealHuhn]

agreed ICS is pretty dead. Between the science penalty, ceremonial burial nerf, and change to happiness buildings it got beaten up pretty bad.

I've still had good success with liberty though, expanding to 6-8 cities or so. You just can't take it to the extreme anymore.

Cap cities at size 3, then grow again after Pagodas start to kick in. Pagoda spam actually got buffed. 160 faith per pagoda is nothing.
Buy as many workers as you can and do nothing but improving luxuries and mining hills.

Use Pantheon that are meant to help ICS. +1 hammer per city at size 3 is very good. Use internal food trades to boost new cities to 3. For example as Russia, you get +1 hammer on early horses and iron, +1 hammer at size 3 and potentially +3 hammers at early exploration policy.

Wide requires a lot of micromanaging but has high snowball potential.

 

[chazzycat]

I just don't see how that comes out ahead, with the per-city science penalty. I was a big fan of the faith snowball in G&K, but my experience was that if you hit unhappiness and stopped growing, death would not be far behind. Ceremonial burial played a key role in keeping my cities growing...Pagodas are great but there is a hard cap of 2 happy per city...with ceremonial burial you could get crazy happiness from the AI cities and that's been cut in half.

Labeling ICS "dead" is probably premature, someone will come up with some cool strategies. But it does seem to me, that it's a LOT more difficult path now.