Reducing ICS

[gja102]

I was thinking of getting back into this game, but I remember the ICS and micromanagement requirements being pretty brutal, especially if you are used to playing Civ 4. Does anyone have any thoughts on how you could mod the game to reduce the colony pod / crawler spam elements of the gameplay?

Presumably you could lessen / remove the population limit and drone penalties (whilst increasing the too many bases penalties), meaning that a few larger bases would be a better economic bet again.

Another approach might be to reduce tile yields across the board, meaning there would be larger ’desolate’ areas of Planet that stay uncolonised (like the sand dunes in vanilla).

You could also try and limit access to colony pods somehow, but I can’t see an effective way of making that work.

Obviously a few of these approaches would throw game balance out of the window (Morgan with no early hab limit…), and I also wonder how far the AI would be able to cope (as it seems to actively pursue ICS under the current setup).

Any thoughts?

 

[History_Buff]

Another approach might be to reduce tile yields across the board, meaning there would be larger ’desolate’ areas of Planet that stay uncolonised (like the sand dunes in vanilla).

This would probably only make ICS an even better idea, since the awesome yields from base squares would be even more impressive. This is a mistake Civ V made, where ICS is still a fantastic idea.

 

[mintcandy]

Any thoughts?

Remove the orbital satellites that provide benefits to every base. Yeah, I suppose those are much less of an ICS problem than supply crawler spam, but still, the orbital satellites definitely encourage it.

Oh yeah, remove supply crawlers.

Civilization V's method of controlling ICS was interesting, but flawed because it didn't prevent effective science growth.

It would be interesting if there was an Alpha Centauri analogue of the Social Policy cost for the amount of cities in your civilization...but for science instead of social policies.