I don't agree. If you choose to remove that system then you would re-introduce the infinity city sprawl strategy that plagued the previous games. If there is no disincentive for building more cities, the optimal strategy will always be to build as many cities as possible. That is unless you introduce another game mechanic to help reduce city spam. Whether ICS is more realistic or not is of no concern to me; what does concern me is the quality of gameplay which basically revolves around how interesting the decisions are that one makes along the course of a game. If there was no cost to building new cities, the decision of whether or not to build a new city would become a simpler one, and less interesting.
I don't think infinite city sprawl is banned from Civ4. Just see what is doing the AI. I play in Emperor, and most games AIs have tons of cities, much more than myself. As to the player (me
), he can still infinite city sprawls, but that a tougher story.
And I don't think those city costs are visible enough; they are a surprise such as you have to save before creating a new city, or even a new settler, in order to reload if the city costs cripples too much your economy.
there should be at least an indicator of how much a new city would cost you, this would be of a great help. In order to prevent one to build a useless settler, new city cost should be always displayed in some corner of the screen. Plus, once the settler built, additionnal cost from distance of the capital that the new created settler is from.
In any case, reducing ICS helps to keep the game more interesting in the sense you get more out of smaller empires. Rather than just relying on brute force approach (huge empires and huge armies) like most strategy games tend to reduce to, Civ4 and BtS prevent that at the outset and a fine equilibrium must be achieved. Admittedly this obviously ups the learning curve for new players but it would only take only take a few comments in a tutorial (or a better game manual!) to let the player know he/she cannot simply spread cities everywhere with no cost.
For more beginners to be able to get into the game, it's not a simpler game we need - it's better documentation and tutorials. If to have a basic question answered about game rules means one has to come to civfanatics or another fansite, and not just look up in the manual or civilopedia, then something's wrong.
I agree. The manual should be more detailled about city costs. Nowadays, the only way to understand new cities costs is a kind of reverse engineering.
That said, I would not be worried if Civ5 to nullify those city costs
, and put in their place and in the place of goody huts and barbarians brand new civilizations, so that one expansion would be greatly disputed, as well as a rebellion/civil war system that would be to be considered before any new expansion.
. I hear that's far simpler than civ IV, and geared toward a different audience.
