questions about ICS

[saintly_saint]

Hi all,

While trying out some ICS playing I noticed a big problem: All my cities would be very small and basically town-level, now this gives a big problem, unit support. No matter how hard I tried with Republic the gold paid for military purposes was just crazy, and the only solution I finally came to is going over to Feudalism, which while successfully removing my military problems now raised my corruption to such a level that no matter how I adjusted the science I could barely keep up with my old science rates during the Republic. All my cities are roaded to the max and the major ones have markets and all the other good stuff. And yet I'm just barely beeting the AI in techs (on regent level!).

I have played a lot in regent level usually using very loose city setups and won very easily but this ICS stuff is just hell. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

 

[blackhalo14]

Use republic until you get democracy... Only defend the outer two layers of cities in your territory; that should cut down on unit costs. Another way to cut down on unit costs, is since you have everything roaded, you could join a lot of your workers to cities. You only need one to one and a half as many workers as you do cities. Do you have your forbidden palace yet? And build courthouses, they cut down corruption by at least 10%, and if you join a lot of workers to cities, then there will be a lot more citizens, and that makes for a bigger decrease in corruption with the courthouse.

 

[saintly_saint]

Been there, done that. In fact I cut down my defense to a very extreme minimum. My army is mainly a huge pack of attack units and the problem is that after 50 or so attack units add my workers on top of that and then the few defensive units and whatever, and I go over the limit bigtime, and still my army is insufficient (too slow) at waging effective war so I had to build more and more troops and seeing as how in republic my small cities amount to only 1 unit / city I was screwed. completely lost.

 

[CrackedCrystal]

seeing as how in republic my small cities amount to only 1 unit / city I was screwed. completely lost.

Sounds like you have a lot of pop 1 cities. You should let your cities grow to at least size 3 or higher. If every tile is roaded, the republic commerce bonus will kick in and assuming you don't have any specialists, you should be able to support units equal to the number of your population without losing any gpt (assuming no coruption) in your switch to replubic. For the very corrupt cities, turn them to taxmen.

In fact, that is the rule of thumb I use for my switch. Once I have more population than units, I switch.

 

[saintly_saint]

well not really. My cities are not size one but they are below size six which causes to provide support for only one unit. so seeing as how I have a few size 6+ cities and the rest are all towns, they hardly suuport my army, furthermore the maintanance is 2 gpt / unit extra instead of one so that kind of kills me too.

 

[BasketCase]

Saint, are you playing vanilla or C3C (I don't have C3C)? Could you post a save?

 

[saintly_saint]

So ya, I attach a save file of my game if anyone has the patience to look through it. It's a bit of a sloppy game but it presents what I mean clearly. I attached a early (pre conquest) version with my country under republic and then a later one under feudalism. Any comment would be greatly appreciated. Oh yeah, the game is C3C (sorry BasketCase).

 

[Chieftess]

What version is this? I have 1.22, but it's giving me DataIO errors.

 

[saintly_saint]

Well seeing as how I just reinstalled civ + conqeusts this would prolly be as old as it gets. I never figured it would be a problem, is there any quick way I could fix this?

 

[BasketCase]

Alternatively, you could post a few screenshots of your empire and some of your cities.

 

[saintly_saint]

Alrgiht so I put up two screens, one with an overview of pretty much all my land and one with a detail on the capital area. Hope you can undertand something from it.

 

[eldar]

I assume that you're capping non-aqueduct+corrupt cities at 12 food and converting to scientists/taxmen? Irrigating the totally corrupt portions of the map will help greatly.

Look at my first SG (link in my sig) - there's an example of ICS in Republic there, and we're running at +500gpt (no research, part of the variant - but we could be researching at 4 turns/tech quite easily).

Neil.

 

[Chieftess]

Just wondering, are you playing on Accellerated Production?

 

[saintly_saint]

Nope, completely standard settings (apart from map size). Anyways what made you think that? Oh yeah and could you tell me again why my save isn't working? eldar: I tried irrigating the faraway cities but the problem was that with all the corruption and my lack fo money I was unable to hurry aqueducts in any of them so I wa basically screwed. Thx everyone

 

[MOTH]

What do you have for buildings in most of these cities. If I understand it correctly, ICS will give you the free unit support and most cities (non-core) will provide 1 Gold due to corruption + whatever specialists you can put in place. You really need to limit what improvements these cities have or that will also eat into your gold. Consider having only a barracks (if going for conquest/domination) or only a Library if going for any other goal.

 

[Dianthus]

Alrgiht so I put up two screens, one with an overview of pretty much all my land and one with a detail on the capital area. Hope you can undertand something from it.

Well, those cities/towns are placed a bit far apart from each other for ICS. They should really be crammed in as close as possible. Here's an example of a recent game I played. I'm sure real diehard ICS players would fit in a few more! :

(Click for full size, 493Kb)

​

This was a quick 100K culture attempt, and I was using Communism, which is by far the best government if you've got significantly more cities than the OCN (only applies to C3C).

 

[Tomoyo]

That was quick?

 

[Dianthus]

It's quick compared to the quickest in the HOF, but maybe that's just because there aren't any good ones there yet. Come and show us how it's done!

 

[Tomoyo]

Oh... I thought "quick" meant in real time quick...

 

[Dianthus]

No, I meant finish date. Got 100K in 1200AD. The real time wasn't too bad, 30 hours in 5 sessions, that's quick compared to milking (at least, when I do it).