So... What will stop ICS?

[qadams]

People need to understand terms here. ICS means just plopping cities at the minimum distance regardless of terrain. Vanilla civ 5 was full ICS. With specialists on libraries and endless maritime food you just built a city anywhere bought a library and ran specialists. This also gave massive numbers of the ultra overpowered Great scientists. That will NOT happen in civ 6 because of one thing, FRESH WATER. A city not on a river or coast has only 2 housing cap which means they have a 50% growth penalty immediately. There are no specialists without districts that need pop and space. Great People come from districts. You can only build an aqueduct if the city is within 2 tiles of a mountain so city placement is limited until late game. Add in massive adjacency bonuses for both improvements and districts and ICS is not a good strategy.

The question is open if Rapid Expansion is overpowered. I don't think so because there is way too much to do in civ 6 early game. Have you guys actually seen barbarians in this game. They are far more aggressive than in Civ 5 and the games are on prince. Without city bombardment you need military early to deal with barbarians because they will pillage everything. That ties up early hammers in military. Especially since the AI DOES move and shoot and seems to hunt units. Then if you want religion or science or culture you need to build the districts. And city states quests give far more valuable envoys so they are worth doing and can distract you. Then there is the question of eurekas and inspirations. They are so powerful you need to focus on them and they are not gained by expanding. Early war is also beneficial with minimal warmonger penalties.

Then there is the scaling of costs. Each settler, district and builder and district costs more hammers. If you just pile in more cities you will be pay more and more for less since you will be less likely to have the adjacency bonuses to make the districts powerful. And settlers cost 1 population to build which limits your ability to spam them like in Civ 5. Each Luxury only gives 4 cities a boost no matter how many copies you have so fewer taller cities is viable.

Cities are also at the strength they were in civ 5 vanilla and not BNW. Melee units eat cities unless you have walls and siege support negates those easily. Range units are very squishy and have no ZOC which makes mass range units less viable. Enemies can use your roads and send trade routes to make them pushing through rough terrain. The AI pillages more and your buildings are in unfortified districts not behind city defenses as powerful as the Golden walls.

At the same time there is no tradition factor going on here. Global happiness is not a thing so more medium size cities seems like a good strategy. City placement, wonder and district placement is going to make empire building more strategic than ever. You want cities spread out to have the space for adjacency bonuses and improvements to provide housing. But you want them close enough to make use of regional effects such as entertainment bonuses.

Nice analysis!

One thing I've seen in recent gamplays is that barbs don't seem to hunt builders or traders. They just ignore them. That may need some tweaking.

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

The game have some reasons for ICS:
*Allow more copies of the same district
*More housing
*Cheap to grow pop if pop is low

The game discourage ICS by:
*Settlers being expensive and get more expensive
*District and buildings are expensive
*Cities need development before they are useful which cost resources in the short term

 

[stealth_nsk]

In Civ6 minimal distance between cities is 3 tiles. With district adjacency bonuses and some buildings/wonders covering area, building cities at the minimal distance may be a viable strategy in Civ6. And that's generally ICS.

 

[Captain Fargle]

ICS is absolutely not viable in Civ 6. The escalating cost of Settlers, Builders and Districts completely guts it. Add in to that the fact that it costs -1 Pop to build a Settler and that cities are unable to defend themselves without proper investment?

If you try to ICS you will never be able to build anything else. You'll never build up good adjacency bonuses which is where the late game yields to make your cities actually effective are found.

You'll find yourself pleasing Trajan's agenda and NOTHING else.

 

[snarzberry]

Well it should be noted that this is something that has traditionally been very difficult for the developers to get right on the first go. Alpha, beta, whatever, it turns out that when you release the game to hundreds of thousands of players that are all trying to find the best way to win then they will discover things that you didn't think of. So it may be that ICS is overpowered when the game is released, but there is no way that they haven't been thinking of this and they think they have the balance close to right. Time will tell.

A civ game should have a specific mechanic that causes a trade-off for expansion, like in civ 4 it was maintenance and in civ 5 it was global happiness, so it seems almost certain that they tried to build something like that into this game and it's probably the increased cost for settlers - which seems kind of weird unless you're familiar with the history of ICS in civ games. So it's just a matter of wait and see because all of the little differences and major differences in this game will add up to whether or not a straight ICS strategy is overpowered.

 

[Biz_]

whenever you try to assess whether something is overpowered, you have to look at whether you would still win the game without resorting to that tactic

in every good strategy game, extreme economy optimization (whatever form that takes) is supposed to be the most efficient, but you generally have to already be winning to take advantage of it without losing control of your empire, so it's not necessarily overpowered

ICS is fine if it's a shortcut to complete an already won game in 200 turns instead of 300 turns

 

[Midori]

I get the sense that having a lot of poorly-planned cities packed together early in the game is just not going to get you very far. The way amenities are distributed is going to keep their growth severely inhibited, and if you can't grow, then you can't build as many districts. That's bad when districts are the soul of Civ 6 strategy.

Maybe there will be a bit more incentive to fill up the map (especially later in the game), but outright city spamming seems more crippling than not.

 

[treadwin]

I like the idea that ICS is a strategy thatis available yet comes with a risk. Do you put down that city and claim territory, next to a mountain, without water, knowing that it will be great once you can build an aqueduct, or do you wait and risk another Civ plunking down a city there?

I think this fear of ICS being game-breaking is only because we had a Civ game where this happened (a long time ago). The over-correction in Civ5 was worse than the original problem. This needed to be put back. Dangerously rapid expansion is a valid strategy.

 

[need my speed]

I like the idea that ICS is a strategy thatis available yet comes with a risk. Do you put down that city and claim territory, next to a mountain, without water, knowing that it will be great once you can build an aqueduct, or do you wait and risk another Civ plunking down a city there?

That is not ICS. ICS is, literally, building a city everywhere you can, because a city is far better than a tile, and because, aside from a Settler, there is no cost to it. This is very visible in Civilization III.

Why would you not build a city? You can build a mine or a farm, sure, or you can build a city, with a market and a bank and a temple and a forge and ever so on. This only works with flat yield bonuses, though, as in Civilization V; a forge giving +2 production, a market giving +2 gold, a temple giving +2 faith... That makes the city tile - with all those buildings in it - far better than it could have been with a farm or a mine. With percentual yields - +25% production, +25% gold... - the city depends on the surrounding terrain; it needs to work tiles with production and gold to make the most of these buildings. This (partly) counters ICS.

The other way to counter ICS is to make cities cost something - to make a city a short-term loss (bút also a long-term gain, which Civilization V, in the end, didn't have, thereby ruining the entire concept of an empire management game). Not a nonsensical global happiness system, but what Civilization IV did, by paying maintenance for a city. There were civics that could decrease the maintenance paid for both the amount of cities and for the distance these cities had to your capital - and speaking of civics, more cities also increased their upkeep. I was surprised by Civilization V not having this, dare I say, perfect system.

Civilization VI probably won't have ICS as a valid tactic... Although, the minimum distance to settle a city is three tiles away, I believe, and that gives more than enough land to build districts and improvements... So, yeah, in that case, technically, ICS will probably be a thing, but I wouldn't count it as ICS. 'ICS' is city-tile-city-tile-city-tile, and three tiles is a large enough amount to be fine in my opinion.

Anyway, Civilization VI's cities will need districts, and can benefit from very powerful improvements (or, farms), which negate ICS - but then, again, that can probably easily fit within a three tile radius.

 

[Lord Shadow]

As others have sensibly said, ICS is probably not viable in Civ6 given cities are vulnerable, unstacked and progressively more costly to set up. They are precisely not (and should never be) necessarily better than a city-less tile, which doesn't cost you anything to work if in range.

It looks like plopping cities willy-nilly regardless of terrain will just not be worth it, compared to putting some actual thought and planning into it and seizing only the good locations.

Viable ICS as it is is a sign of bad design, given mindlessly "brute-forcing" the game's systems (terrain, costs, etc.) like that should never be advantageous.

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

ICS may be a thing in civilization VI because of the following:
*Industrial zone give area of effect production
*Cities can not build more district after a certain pop cap (so growing cities past that point is not really that interesting compared to more but smaller cities)
*No % buildings
*Entertainment district also give area of effect

ICS may be a thing you want to do in the mid/late game then you can build factories and such because the early game you have nothing to gain from ICS.

I don't think it is a problem that late game ICS is viable.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

Pro ICS (why to build another city regardless of terrain/impact on existing cities)
"flat" yields
Regional yields (production.. and amenities)
Local "happiness"/housing pop limit with a minimum

Anti ICS (why not to build a city, and instead keep tiles for another city)
Escalating cost of settlers
Number of cities/settlers may increase district cost
Most "flat" yields aren't really flat per city, they are flat per District, and each district needs 3 population
Adjacency for Farms and districts may interfere with city placement

 

[Gyromancer]

ICS was always about the snowball. The "free" production from the city center, coupled with the low cost to grow from pop 1 to pop 2 was the real mechanism for enhanced exponential growth. The underlying idea was that you wanted to get as many tiles productive as quickly as possible. Then you wanted to optimize and selectively add buildings in each city according to the low population (or higher population for the few cities you built to support that)

Cities not being able to defend themselves didn't stop it (See Civ 1-4) Settlers costing a pop point (or two) didn't stop it (See Civ 1-3) Settlers built using food production didn't stop it (See civ 4-5) Min city distances only modified how you used it (see Civ 2-5) Corruption, city maintenance, global unhappiness, increased science and culture costs all modified it, but you still were constantly looking for that equilibrium - the point where the building the next city hurt more than it helped.

Increased production cost of settlers is an interesting attempt at solution, but I worry that it will just mean conquest becomes the new late stage ICS. More cities is still better, they are just expensive to build. When settlers get too expensive, why not build a big army and take cities instead.

The fact that the min city distance went down in Civ 6 (I assume, since it was mentioned above that it is 3 now) coupled with (apparently) no maintenance or corruption cost seems to imply they've eliminated the "number of cities" equilibrium in favor of a "build" equilibrium. (1) Build settlers and grab what land you can, packing cities tightly if needed (2) Once settlers are too expensive, build a big military and go bonk some heads 'till you run away with the game. Hopefully this won't be a single dominant strategy.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

ICS was always about the snowball. The "free" production from the city center, coupled with the low cost to grow from pop 1 to pop 2 was the real mechanism for enhanced exponential growth. The underlying idea was that you wanted to get as many tiles productive as quickly as possible. Then you wanted to optimize and selectively add buildings in each city according to the low population (or higher population for the few cities you built to support that)

Cities not being able to defend themselves didn't stop it (See Civ 1-4) Settlers costing a pop point (or two) didn't stop it (See Civ 1-3) Settlers built using food production didn't stop it (See civ 4-5) Min city distances only modified how you used it (see Civ 2-5) Corruption, city maintenance, global unhappiness, increased science and culture costs all modified it, but you still were constantly looking for that equilibrium - the point where the building the next city hurt more than it helped.

Increased production cost of settlers is an interesting attempt at solution, but I worry that it will just mean conquest becomes the new late stage ICS. More cities is still better, they are just expensive to build. When settlers get too expensive, why not build a big army and take cities instead.

The fact that the min city distance went down in Civ 6 (I assume, since it was mentioned above that it is 3 now) coupled with (apparently) no maintenance or corruption cost seems to imply they've eliminated the "number of cities" equilibrium in favor of a "build" equilibrium. (1) Build settlers and grab what land you can, packing cities tightly if needed (2) Once settlers are too expensive, build a big military and go bonk some heads 'till you run away with the game. Hopefully this won't be a single dominant strategy.

Fortunately conquest expansion has some limiters too.

Conquered cities will always get a % higher war weariness (so more unhappiness whenever you are at war)
[conquering requires you to be at war]
Luxury amenities will get spread out...

The biggest issue is if there are multiple levels of Unhappiness.

 

[indradiva]

also, districts and buildings cost maintenace, albeit not comparable to units, these are even more expensive to maintain and upgrade. That means if you want big armies, be sure to develop your economy. But there's actually no need to go for conquest, since there's a card that actually reduces the cost of settlers (expropriation). It comes a little bit late, but still makes late-game expansion viable. And before that, you can produce settlers faster with colonization.

 

[treadwin]

That is not ICS. ICS is, literally, building a city everywhere you can, because a city is far better than a tile, and because, aside from a Settler, there is no cost to it. This is very visible in Civilization III.

Why would you not build a city? You can build a mine or a farm, sure, or you can build a city, with a market and a bank and a temple and a forge and ever so on. This only works with flat yield bonuses, though, as in Civilization V; a forge giving +2 production, a market giving +2 gold, a temple giving +2 faith... That makes the city tile - with all those buildings in it - far better than it could have been with a farm or a mine. With percentual yields - +25% production, +25% gold... - the city depends on the surrounding terrain; it needs to work tiles with production and gold to make the most of these buildings. This (partly) counters ICS.

The other way to counter ICS is to make cities cost something - to make a city a short-term loss (bút also a long-term gain, which Civilization V, in the end, didn't have, thereby ruining the entire concept of an empire management game). Not a nonsensical global happiness system, but what Civilization IV did, by paying maintenance for a city. There were civics that could decrease the maintenance paid for both the amount of cities and for the distance these cities had to your capital - and speaking of civics, more cities also increased their upkeep. I was surprised by Civilization V not having this, dare I say, perfect system.

Civilization VI probably won't have ICS as a valid tactic... Although, the minimum distance to settle a city is three tiles away, I believe, and that gives more than enough land to build districts and improvements... So, yeah, in that case, technically, ICS will probably be a thing, but I wouldn't count it as ICS. 'ICS' is city-tile-city-tile-city-tile, and three tiles is a large enough amount to be fine in my opinion.

Anyway, Civilization VI's cities will need districts, and can benefit from very powerful improvements (or, farms), which negate ICS - but then, again, that can probably easily fit within a three tile radius.

If this is how we are defining ICS then this thread is a waste of time! Clearly with the cities unstacked, you need to build more than city centers to make cities viable, and there is a potential shortage of tiles for even well-spaced cities. If we take the slightly looser definition of ICS which is just trying to grab as much land at the start and using that as a "crowbar" to victory, then this is a valid strategy and as long as they balance the risk of doing that.

 

[need my speed]

but you still were constantly looking for that equilibrium - the point where the building the next city hurt more than it helped.

Which is exactly the point, is it not? What you are describing here isn't ICS, that is any 4X-game.

If this is how we are defining ICS then this thread is a waste of time! Clearly with the cities unstacked, you need to build more than city centers to make cities viable, and there is a potential shortage of tiles for even well-spaced cities. If we take the slightly looser definition of ICS which is just trying to grab as much land at the start and using that as a "crowbar" to victory, then this is a valid strategy and as long as they balance the risk of doing that.

That would either be REX or the way every single 4X game is supposed to be played, depending on how you mean that.

 

[joncnunn]

Traditionally ICS simply meant founding cities as tight as the city placement rules allowed; and there were other city settlement patterns. It was Civ V where the Civ V main designer misapplied it to mean found on the map if I could while keeping to whatever pattern I was using.

As such I see pure ICS mode as sub-optimal; there won't be enough tiles left for farms, mines, and districts even if you skip world wonders entirely.

I see what used to be known as close-city-placement (one tile beyond what it allowed) as more likely to be optimal for most cities; this should allow most cities enough tiles for farms, mines, districts, and perhaps a world wonder.
I'd still want slightly longer distance (loose-city-placement) between my capital and it's neighbors so my capital (which I would intend to have the largest population) could get a few more tiles.

It also may very well be viable to mix and match; have some cities not intended to grow much at minimum allowed distance from one or more of its neighbors while giving cities intended to grow more a bit more space.

 

[Biz_]

ics and rex go hand in hand

if you can take advantage of more city centers per area, it's usually faster to expand to closer cities first and then to farther spots. especially if you can just flip tiles from one to another based on need

people grabbing farther land first and then filling in the parts in between with 'infinite' cities is more about grabbing territory before others get to it than it is about performing the fastest economic development stratgy

 

[need my speed]

ics and rex go hand in hand

Not per se. Very roughly put:

ICS = city tile is by far the best tile possible, attainable with little investment (buildings have flat modifiers, for example, so that you don't need to work a lot of land)
REX = rapid expansion at the cost of everything else is the best possible strategy (cities cost 'nothing' to produce - give a city a maintenance cost so that it is a short-term loss)