ICS in Civ V

[ProPain]

I was browsing CFC and reading Sulla's site and ran into some ICS discussions. Dunno how many of you still visit CFC but I'll try to boil down the discussion for you.

Although the designers claim they aimed Civ V to cater to small empires it turns out ICS works like no crazy in Civ V. How come?

Happiness
Happiness is the determing factor in pacing expansion. The way it works is that you have buildings and policies that fight happiness on a city level and a fixed amount of happiness from difficulty level and luxes.

Although technically buildings and policy happiness effect don't apply to cities but are put in the global happiness pool, for convenience we can apply them to the city they lend there effect from. Example

Colloseum provides 4 happiness and any city can build one, consequently you can have a city (2 unhappy) with 2 pop (2 unhappy) and you're happiness neutral so to say.

If you maintain all you're cities in a happiness neutral state you can expand infinitely, or rather as long as you have map space.

The fixed happiness you get from dif level, natural wonders and luxes allow you have some cities to exceed their neutral happiness level. Estimates say a map contains about 50 extra happy. This simply translates to 50 pop above city neutral happiness.

city tile
The centre city tile is one the best, if not the best, city tiles available in the game. So the more cities you build, the more return you get from your land. Added bonus effect is that citis can bombard. building a lot of cities close together are excellent for defense. Last but not least, city tiles contain free (rail)roads, saves building and maintenance.

buildings
The way Civ V is set up, early buildings are more cost effective then more advanced ones. A colloseum provides more cost effective happiness than a theatre, a library provides more cost effective science than a university.

Now I read that a 10 pop city with uni apparently provides more science than 2 * 5 pop cities. Problem however is that it takes ages to grow a city to very large pop. In other words you can have 2 * 5 pop cities much faster than one 10 pop because of the exponential growth in food requirements for every next pop increase.

Summarised building a lot of small cities with just basic buildings is very cost effective.

City States
The martime CS are excellent in this strategy to provide all the food small cities need. Get 2 maritime CS's and you have +4 food in your cities and you can have your citizens work as specialists or on tiles with just hammers/gold.

ICS strategy
Build a few (2 or 3) big cities that you use as your building cities, ICS the rest letting them grow to 4 and only build lib, colloseum, market in them. Once they reach 4 avoid growth. Try to get 2 maritime CS on your side for food, put your citizens in your libs and having them working on hills with the commerce improvement as much as possible.

When you conquer an enemy, raze all cities and replace them. Puppets are no good as they build stuff you don't want and grow too much. Annexing is bad because you'll need a courthouse build which takes ages. Most likely they're placed on bad spots for you close build grid anyway. Raze, bring in settler and rebuild.

Drawbacks
Apart from being boring as hell the major drawback is that you'll hardly be able to get social policies. SP's get more expensive with every city you build, and you'll be building a lot of them. On the bright side, you hardly need any SP's, you'll be fine without em. You need a few key ones (meritocracy is good and the unlock that provides half unhappiness for specialists (freedom I believe))

My experience
After reading I tried it out on a large prince level map. Took prince because that was the last low level I needed the achievement for and didnt feel like putting in a lot of micro. Took large because that gave a decent chance of early expansion space (which it did).

I played the whole game extremely loose, had a few cities grow too much for example, but it worked like a charm. See the attached pics. This was in a GA but when out of GA I was still in great shape.

All in all I think this shows a design flaw. Apart from again showing CS are imba, others gave shown this to work in games without CS as well. Basically keeping your cities small and happy neutral is all you have to do.

Sulla wrote he didn't understand how they could have done this as it was Civ III all over again. I have to disagree cause ICS in Civ III did actually require some skill and tricks like RCP weren't that obvious. I'd say it's more like Civ II where I played deity level by just building settler/spear and expand.

Curious to all your thoughts

[Rik Meleet]

Add the Forbidden Palace as soon as possible (Unhappiness from number of cities reduced by 50%) combined with Meritocracy (+1 Happiness for each city connected to the Capital) and you've negated any happyness penalty completely. Keep your cities at size 4 and you're running a net positive.

Maritime citystates are sort of the enemy of ICS; you'll easily get too much food and the cities grow too big, negating many of the positives. Especially when you reach a next age and get additional food boni your cities can grow too big. Be very careful with allying maritime citystates (although 1 or 2 is doable). I prefer cultural citystates or even militaristic citystates; you will need military since it seems the chances of AI dogpiling you are higher when the number of cities to number of units gets higher.

[Socrates]

Hehe (http://www.civduelzone.com/forum/showthread.php?p=129713#post129713) :p

But from what I've read, you're right on, PP.

[ProPain]

Lol, missed that post and Sulla's SG as well. didn't have time to read the 20 page thread yet but I will do that for sure.

The game by Sulla I read was on his personal site, here's a link (http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/artofwu.html).

Conclusions pretty much the same in both games I guess, judging post 313 by Sulla in the thread you linked.

[ProPain]

Add the Forbidden Palace as soon as possible (Unhappiness from number of cities reduced by 50%) combined with Meritocracy (+1 Happiness for each city connected to the Capital) and you've negated any happyness penalty completely. Keep your cities at size 4 and you're running a net positive.

Maritime citystates are sort of the enemy of ICS; you'll easily get too much food and the cities grow too big, negating many of the positives. Especially when you reach a next age and get additional food boni your cities can grow too big. Be very careful with allying maritime citystates (although 1 or 2 is doable). I prefer cultural citystates or even militaristic citystates; you will need military since it seems the chances of AI dogpiling you are higher when the number of cities to number of units gets higher.

Built the FP already, obviously a superb wonder for ICS. As far as the maritime CS are concerned. Just allied 2 for the most of the game to avoid excess food. Due to liberating a CS i got 'stuck' with a 3rd mar CS, go figure. As it turns out that isn't as bad as avoid growth is actually avoiding growth I think. Havent looked at the city screens in to check yet, but will. Also I;m building heaps of settlers to fill conquered lands and they put a stop to growth as well.

No real danger of dogpiling for me. It's prince level and the AI have really sorry armies.

@socra.
Read the 1st 8 pages of that SG, really good read. A lot to improve on what I did. Really sad deity is beat so quickly and easily, hurts the replayability for the veteran players. After 5 years of Civ IV I never even managed to beat immortal (granted, I hardly played civ, but still) The way things are looking now I;m quite confident I can get a deity win in Civ V before 2011. I think it took me a year to manage that in Civ III.

Ah well, still have Civ IV immortal and diety to bridge me over to Civ VI :)

[akots]

Civ4 Immortal is not that bad, it is almost always winnable, if not by military means then by culture. Civ4 Deity is very hard to win on Standard Map and larger even if only by diplomacy and that would be the most reasonable win. Essentially impossible to win by Space and military win will be extremely hard to pull off unless really lucky with map setup. I'd say it is harder than Sid level in C3C by a wide margin. But Sid was also hard unless played on Archipelago map. Here, in Civ5, Deity on Archipelago is quite playable on normal speed and people who play marathon say it is not very challenging. IMO, epic speed will be about right to play for Deity and map type Archipelago. I even started one such game to win by culture and it went well up until ... the patch came out and I cannot open the save any longer since then.

Oh, ye, almost forgot, please accept the friendly challenge.

[ProPain]

For me Civ IV emperor is a challenge. Like I said before I haven't played a lot of civ IV certainly not when compared to the time I invested in Civ III. What triggers me when reading your post however is the remark about the military win. Might be my problem, I hardly aim for anything else in my single player games. :)

Deity on civ V will be my next game. Gonna put the large ICS game on hold for a while cause I'm bored out of my mind with it. Feels more as work than as a game. Planning to finish it one day though. Want to do a space ship vic with it so I get 3 achievements at once.

Thanks for the heads up about hattrick, totally forgot.Tried to accept but Hat is down till 11 for maintenance. Will log in immediately and accept when up again.

[Shabbaman]

Civ4 Immortal is not that bad, it is almost always winnable, if not by military means then by culture. Civ4 Deity is very hard to win on Standard Map and larger even if only by diplomacy and that would be the most reasonable win. Essentially impossible to win by Space and military win will be extremely hard to pull off unless really lucky with map setup. I'd say it is harder than Sid level in C3C by a wide margin. But Sid was also hard unless played on Archipelago map. Here, in Civ5, Deity on Archipelago is quite playable on normal speed and people who play marathon say it is not very challenging. IMO, epic speed will be about right to play for Deity and map type Archipelago. I even started one such game to win by culture and it went well up until ... the patch came out and I cannot open the save any longer since then.

Oh, ye, almost forgot, please accept the friendly challenge.

What does map speed matter in this? I thought this only changes the amount of turns you get, nothing else basically.

[akots]

It does that but further unbalances a few things which are not scaled right for the speed. Also, you can have insane number of experience and promotions for the units by declaring against a city state and subjecting your units to bombardment by the city. It is similar to what marathon did in Civ4, basically decreasing a half of a level of difficulty. In Civ5 it brings it down a whole level compared to normal speed.

[Shabbaman]

Pfff, I don't have time for that ;) I've actually played some games on fast.

[Socrates]

Speaking of ICS : LOLZ (http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/showpost.php?p=95743&postcount=1306)

A few posts further in that thread, Sullla nails the coffin a little more : nail (http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/showpost.php?p=95894&postcount=1314) [xx(]

I'm really starting to wonder WTF is going on. It seems the devs and the testing squad completely failed for Civ5.
On a sidenote, remember that, if I'm not mistaken, Jon Shafer, lead designer on Civ5, was a thinking head in one of the teams in the mythical Civ3 inter-site MP game (known as Trip). ;)

[ProPain]

On a sidenote, remember that, if I'm not mistaken, Jon Shafer, lead designer on Civ5, was a thinking head in one of the teams in the mythical Civ3 inter-site MP game (known as Trip). ;)

You're not mistaken :D

Good players are not automatically good designers

[akots]

I don't see anything wrong with ICS personally. Except that it is boring to play if you need a good result, like for example, a GOTM competition.

Overall, IMO, Civ5 is a nice game but the replay value is mediocre. But I said same thing about Civ3 prior to decent patches came out and about Civ4 up until Warlords came out and patches were introduced to make it playable.

However, Sulla is right about low activity of the forums and in multiplayer which is essentially unplayable at this stage.

THe worst thing which might happen is that Firaxis goes bankrupt and there would be no patches or addons to correct all the bugs and glitches.

[akots]

Trip was, is and will remain a thick dolt.

[socralynnek]

I also didn't own Civ4 when it came out (I think, it was 3 months in until I got it)

But I remember much more positive feedback, especially by top players. It was quite ok, already after the first patch.

OK, maybe if they didn't have steam, then they wouldn't have sent more than one patch out, but it seems like they need a lot more patches than in Civ3 to have a nice game.

I don't mind the occasional falw in game design. E.g. RCP in original Civ3 up to PTW still offered enough challenging decisions on where to place cities and how set up rings. But removing it made the game like one level harder (or let's say, the AI was a level stronger w.r.t. the game mechanics)

Sure, it might be worth waiting for the first expansion or some more patches, as probably there is a lot that can be tweaked (and e.g. if they do have proper code, they might replace happiness caps with Civ4 like maintenance or something like that)

Bottom line: Two months after Civ4 came out, I couldn't wait getting it in my hands and getting a new machine to handle it properly. Just from reading the feedbac and strategic articels in the forums. Now I feel, like I have a ot of time switching to the new version (hey, and if they don't make significant improvements, then I'll just wait for Civ6 when Sid, Soren, Sulla and PP will design the game, with Mistfit doing the graphics)

[Darkness]

Trip was, is and will remain a thick dolt.

In that MP game, to me he came across as a very good player, though his people skills sucked. Look up the dictionary for "pedantic" and "arrogant" and you'll find a picture of him. ;)

I agree with akots' other post though. Civ V is a nice enough game, but I also feel there's a distinct lack of replay value. And right now, any competitive game (whether that be MP or a GOTM-like competition) is ridiculously flawed due to major unbalances in game design.


But from what I've read from Sullla so far, I can't escape the notion that he has some kind of bone to pick with either the game or the designers. The tone and trend of his posts just don't feel like he's really got an entirely open mind about Civ V... I may be wrong though...

[ProPain]

I don't see anything wrong with ICS personally. Except that it is boring to play if you need a good result, like for example, a GOTM competition.
...
However, Sulla is right about low activity of the forums and in multiplayer which is essentially unplayable at this stage.
[\QUOTE]

I totally agree nothing is wrong with ICS, it's been a core Civ strat ever since Civ I (where you could just build cities right next to each other iirc). I do think Civ V game mechanics power ICS too much as there really is no decent countering effect to spamming cities at all like maintenance/corruption did. Well apart from boredom that is. :)

The fact that the forum & competitive community isn't really warming up to the game should worry Fir/2k. In the end they are the ones carrying the game and providing replayability and feedback. I think losing them will seriously hurt a civ VI.

[QUOTE=socralynnek;129941] (hey, and if they don't make significant improvements, then I'll just wait for Civ6 when Sid, Soren, Sulla and PP will design the game, with Mistfit doing the graphics)

Lol, think it would be much better if I won't be involved to mess things up. There's no civ game designer in me.

But from what I've read from Sullla so far, I can't escape the notion that he has some kind of bone to pick with either the game or the designers. The tone and trend of his posts just don't feel like he's really got an entirely open mind about Civ V... I may be wrong though...


Garee with that, he seems to do a fair bit of civ developer bashing. No need for that. But apart from that I do think he has some valid points about the game design.

[Beam]

I also didn't own Civ4 when it came out (I think, it was 3 months in until I got it)

But I remember much more positive feedback, especially by top players. It was quite ok, already after the first patch.

OK, maybe if they didn't have steam, then they wouldn't have sent more than one patch out, but it seems like they need a lot more patches than in Civ3 to have a nice game.

I don't mind the occasional falw in game design. E.g. RCP in original Civ3 up to PTW still offered enough challenging decisions on where to place cities and how set up rings. But removing it made the game like one level harder (or let's say, the AI was a level stronger w.r.t. the game mechanics)

Sure, it might be worth waiting for the first expansion or some more patches, as probably there is a lot that can be tweaked (and e.g. if they do have proper code, they might replace happiness caps with Civ4 like maintenance or something like that)

Bottom line: Two months after Civ4 came out, I couldn't wait getting it in my hands and getting a new machine to handle it properly. Just from reading the feedbac and strategic articels in the forums. Now I feel, like I have a ot of time switching to the new version (hey, and if they don't make significant improvements, then I'll just wait for Civ6 when Sid, Soren, Sulla and PP will design the game, with Mistfit doing the graphics)

Imo the graphics in Civ5 are pretty good. If only the rest of the game was at least that good. :(

[Shabbaman]

However, Sulla is right about low activity of the forums

Well, for CDZ standards the game seems to be generating a lot of traffic. At least there are more posts on civ5 strategy than on civ4 over the past few years. And don't forget that civ4 was a slow starter as well (proof (http://www.civduelzone.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3269)). Personally I think the game is enjoyable, and if you play without city states (and without city bombardment) I think 1 UPT will make for very interesting multiplayer games. As for single player, AI behaviour is easily patched. If the AI has maritime CS as it's highest priority, the current basic strategy is unusable (well, I mean buying maritime CS, not conquering your neighbours with just 3 units, that seems rather unfixable).

There's a point to be made that the game is too easy (with me playing on Deity as proof...), but only 4% of the (paying) players have beaten king and under 1% has beaten immortal or deity. It might be a very vocal part of the community that claims that the game is so easy, yet with all this information available from the likes of Sulla there are very little (paying) players able to reproduce it.

Now, I'm explicitly mentioning "paying" players, because in the end I doubt Firaxis will give a rat's ass about pirates claiming the game is too easy. If the percentages for king were higher, I'd be worried. But it's not. People are dumber than we think. But, unfortunately, there's no depth in the game. OK, I'm not a complete retard and I have some serious civ baggage, but if I'm beating this game without much effort then there's something seriously wrong.

Or.

Seriously good? Because apparently the core mechanics are very understandable for a long time civ player, yet the game has changed a lot. But still, calculating everything in gold (instead of, dunno, hammers that carry over from previous turns) doesn't make a complex game. But civ4 isn't the shining example of complexity. At least civ3 had some serious broken stuff that could be exploited (like RCP), but I guess that wasn't added intentionally but was rather sloppy programming. Civ4 got complex because of the added layers like espionage and religion, but in itself the game was easy compared to previous versions.

But civ5 is intrinsically flawed. For example, the AI's inability to fight. Perhaps this is also fixable by AI preferences (for instance: more weight on flanking bonuses?), but it doesn't seem like that to me. Even ICS seems fixable by lowering city tile production and lowering trade network income. Where it goes wrong is that cities aren't a drain on your treasury. There's no corruption. Instead, you just get a boatload of puppets (or ICS, apparently), and the only drain is on happiness. And the worst part: the AI values happiness, so puppets will build happiness buildings automatically. This also prevents the AI to go ICS on your ass. But who cares about happiness, as long as you don't get too deep into unhapiness (<10 iirc) there's not a real penalty. Civ5 is too light on penalties (for instance: no more oil? Oh, keep your bombers, you'll just run at -1 oil for the rest of the game), but this also seems tweakable. The core mechanic, calculating everything in gold, that's what makes the game easy.

[Darkness]

The AI just can't deal with combat in Civ V. IMO that's the main reason why people claim it is too easy. In older versions (III and IV specifically) at higher levels the AI could "compensate" for it's lack of a real strategy thought by making huge stacks (>100 on deity was not an exception for me). With the 1-unit-per-tile (1upt) rule in Civ V the AI's main coping mechanism for lack of strategy has been taken away, and that makes them significantly weaker than in previous versions.

That said, I do like the 1upt rule. It makes positioning your units much more important. Running huge stacks into enemy lands is not really a challenge, whereas 1upt strategy and movement is. But the AI needs some serious improvement to get it to work. One of the main flaws is that once an Ai decides to attack, it keeps no forces in reserve and attacks with everything its got. So if you defeat that, basically they have zero defense remaining... :(

[Rik Meleet]

Wow, Ultimate ICS !!
Spaceship victory before 230 turns.

http://i53.tinypic.com/20h37fr.jpg

[Beam]

This isn't ICS. This DPHCP (Densely Packed Hexagon City Placement).

This kills MP and GOTM imho. Firaxis did not even bother to set a minimum city distance! [:(!]

[Shabbaman]

Firaxis did not even bother to set a minimum city distance! [:(!]

They did, the picture is from a mod without minimum city distance.

[grahamiam]

My god, it's full of cities...

[ProPain]

Good fun don't you think. Wonder what level that was done on btw, couldn't exactly see that in the RBCiv thread.

Spaceship before 230 is pretty fast imo even on lower levels.

Sulla posted that someone on CFC managed to research the entire tech tree in 200 turns on deity level. Curious to read that. :)

[Socrates]

I don't see anything wrong with ICS personally.
I do. It doesn't value the geography at all, and I think it's a nice and important part of such a game. Here you just invade the tundra and that's fine. Plus it becomes a no-brainer, where is the strategy there ? Might as well play Tic-Tac-Toe. Feels weird to me, I never thought about ICS before reading about it online.

then I'll just wait for Civ6 when Sid, Soren, Sulla and PP will design the game, with Mistfit doing the graphics
The triple S. :cool: And PP. And Mistfit. :)

But from what I've read from Sullla so far, I can't escape the notion that he has some kind of bone to pick with either the game or the designers. The tone and trend of his posts just don't feel like he's really got an entirely open mind about Civ V... I may be wrong though...
I feel that a little as well. But he has valid points (at least from what I read). And he took the time to play those games and write reports to make his points, so it's not just ranting.

@ Rik : Beat you to that pic. ;)

[Shabbaman]

Invading the tundra just doesn't work. Early on the city tile gives 2 food, 2 hammers and 1 gold. You can't get a city to size 4 without food bonuses, and on tundra this will get difficult. So you need multiple maritime CS, but if you can pull that off you are already winning. ICS could be a way to win, but it's not guaranteed you get there.

[Socrates]

Yes, basically you need maritime city states to provide you with food, but that's often the case, and quite early on in the game. Otherwise, change "tundra" to "whatever is a bit better but still not great". ;)

BTW, someone has to create a huge (and pink) "SPAM CITIES" smiley ; that could be handy. :rolleyes:

[Shabbaman]

You make it sound too easy. You need 500 gold to pull it off.

[Socrates]

That is from what I've read. Gold seems aplenty in Civ5 btw. Sell your resources. And don't forget the arcade-style missions triggered by the city states.

[ProPain]

500g is extremely easy to get.

AI will pay 300g for resources and 50 for one sided open borders with your civ.
At the start you don't really need your happy resource-> sell
Once an AI (or you) get writing -> sell open borders
If you're lucky with ruins and CS missions things can be even easier

Also more often than not a CS has a happy resource of it's own that you will get after allying them. So if you sell a resource, ally a CS with a connected resource: happy neutral transaction but food bonus gained.

And that's all apart from the fact that you always seem to run a gold surplus between 5-10G a turn from the start.

[akots]

I do. It doesn't value the geography at all, and I think it's a nice and important part of such a game. Here you just invade the tundra and that's fine. Plus it becomes a no-brainer, where is the strategy there ? Might as well play Tic-Tac-Toe. Feels weird to me, I never thought about ICS before reading about it online. ...

I think Sulla oversimplifies the things here and in either case, how would you yourself know? I don't think I'm qualified enough to argue with him on this. In any case, this is the strategy for single player game obviously. I've never been a huge fan of single player apart from a few games in Civ3 GOTM. For multiplayer, this would surely spell a disaster for me just because it should be quite hard to run away pursuing this strategy against another human. But it is good to know that on certain types of map, one can win single player games quite easily.

The assumption on a low significance of map is IMO primarily based on improved map generator for Civ5 which is doing quite reasonable job here with random maps whereas, in Civ4 and partly in Civ3, the thing just did not work well. So, map is not that important because it is balanced. I would bet any sum of money that if you had to expand to tundra and I would have had hills and grassland, you'd be in trouble whether ICS or not.

But he's making a good point about deer, sheep, and cow. These are all useless indeed to a larger extent and normally is not worth improving. Another good point is exponential growth of cities. Both of these are quite obvious though.

If one takes so highly praised Civ4, that cottage spam would make ICS viable there and it indeed is quite viable. The bigger guy usually wins either way and while single player games of Civ4 are hard because of huge SODs that AI fields on Immortal/Deity, these high difficulty levels are substantially less challenging in Civ5 due to one unit per tile rule and awful AI tactics. AI in Civ5 is also deeply strategically flawed and hopefully, diplomacy will be patched in the forthcoming patch to make it playable.

Unfortunately, he is absolutely right about poor sales and passive community. I blame this on essentially unplayable multiplayer and failure to release the code for the modding community. What also contributes is another fundamental flaw. The game is not designed to be able to run smoothly and on huge maps which many people like. It is a 32-bit software and running it on huge maps smoothly will require more than 3Gb of available RAM due to very lousy and suboptimal programming.

I blame Trip. The fucker he were, he is, and will obviously remain. Of which I already wrote somewhere.

[ProPain]

For multiplayer, this would surely spell a disaster for me just because it should be quite hard to run away pursuing this strategy against another human.


I;m starting to think that a non CS, mirrored map MP game might actually be quite ok for Civ V. Very interested to see how 1 UPT would work out in MP. Still on the fence how ICS would work out in MP. I'm inclined to think it's quite powerfull there as well for the following reasons:

Pro
- City tile is a very productive tile, even without maritime CS. On top of that it contains roads (less worker actions involved and saving 1 gpt)
- City bombard. Closely placed cities are amazing for defense in the early game.
- Controlling happiness makes it easier to expand and land grab
- Hardly any need to buy or culture expand tiles.


Con
- Hardly any Social Policies. Someone going early military with Honor tree might counter ICS. Wonder if this will overcome city bombard.


I would bet any sum of money that if you had to expand to tundra and I would have had hills and grassland, you'd be in trouble whether ICS or not.



Starting on tundra will be hard, dunno if expanding on it will be that bad. After all you're relying on city tile benefits, mar CS for food and employing specialists as much as you can. That can be done on Tundra as well, as long as you start with a decent capital and maybe 2nd city for production.

For MP I think the mirrored map script will be great. That would allow for a good comparison between strategies as well.

[Shabbaman]

500g is extremely easy to get.

AI will pay 300g for resources and 50 for one sided open borders with your civ.
At the start you don't really need your happy resource-> sell
Once an AI (or you) get writing -> sell open borders
If you're lucky with ruins and CS missions things can be even easier

Also more often than not a CS has a happy resource of it's own that you will get after allying them. So if you sell a resource, ally a CS with a connected resource: happy neutral transaction but food bonus gained.

And that's all apart from the fact that you always seem to run a gold surplus between 5-10G a turn from the start.

Yes, that works, but not if you're only producing settlers. It's still hard to pull off before 200bc any way you look at it. Unless you're lucky, but luck has no place in a strategy debate. You need 500g or you're screwed, but basically you need another 300g to rush a worker. You can't build anything else besides settlers in your capital (after the initial monument to grab that first civic), because if you stop grabbing land the AI will grab that land for you. You need to grab land for the resources you want to sell, you need the worker to harvest the resources, and you need the tech to be able to do that. This means either mining, trapping or calendar. Any way you look at it: it's not quick.

[ProPain]

I don't agree you can only build settlers. The course I took was
- build scout, worker, settler, monument (not necessarily in this order)
- get tech to grab lux. (if trapping/mining won't do you;re in a bit of a fix imho)
- rush to HBR tech.
- build a few horsemen
- rush neighbour with horsemen

Horsemen rush is very powerfull and if you properly defeat a civ they will gift your all their wordly possesions, family and pets just for peace.

Now if you have bad luck and an AI spawns on your doorstep, you'd prolly be forced to do a warrior rush. Don't have experience with that myself, but read a thread on CFC where someone was pulling that of quite easily on deity as well.

[Shabbaman]

I seriously doubt that works "easily" on deity. You can rush your neighbour, but you need some work and some luck to pull that off. It's more likely that they're on your doorstep before you have horsemen. And besides that: this has nothing to do with ICS. If you can rush your neighbour, you will win. After that ICS is a way to carry you to victory, but ICS does not help you rushing your neighbour.

[Socrates]

For multiplayer, this would surely spell a disaster for me just because it should be quite hard to run away pursuing this strategy against another human.
Maybe. But Civ5 is not a multiplayer game, right ? :rolleyes:

I would bet any sum of money that if you had to expand to tundra and I would have had hills and grassland, you'd be in trouble whether ICS or not.
Of course, because you'd have better land right from the start, and rich land is still better than poor land, although just slightly if you go ICS in both cases.
But the point is to state that, in a solo game, ICS is viable whatever the land, provided you meet a few requirements, which aren't rare at all. And it's not luck : start your game, do your best, and at some point in time you should be in position to judge whether ICS is the optimal strat or not. It seems this is the case more than often.

[akots]

Maybe. But Civ5 is not a multiplayer game, right ? :rolleyes:


For now, it is not, at least not really since it does not even have a hotseat. But they promised PB and PBEM. Not sure if they'll be able to deliver though. However, some people play MP. Feedback is mixed, it is certainly a heavily military game, building happiness and barracks, and units all the way. In MP, most of the ppl have no luxury to bribe CS due to high military maintenance costs. Actually, CS are mostly conquered to give some short cash boost for upgrades.

The main problem with MP is a very poor connectivity due to some intrinsic limitations because of Steam server. Also, there is no direct IP games for similar reasons. Looks like they cannot check the assets as well if connection is made not through the Steam lobby.

[ProPain]

http://www.civduelzone.com/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=420&stc=1&d=1290183400

tiny map however just me as Siam and Persia AI. Start was ok, only one maritime CS however so no superabuse possible.

Will post a bit more about the game later but in a nutshell
- connected resources
- expanded 'loose ICS style', kept my cities small and placed them in packed grid. Didn't avoid growth though, only on a few occasions when happy was getting to low.
- teched to horses, whacked Persia a bit and made peace
- expanded a bit more, fought, made peace, fought, won
- getting 500 gold is substantially harder on a small map with less civs, not so much customers for your luxes expecially not when you're at war with your only one.
- AI didn't make a lot of cities 4/5 ish. Still made craploads of units though
- Again abysmall AI fighting: parking cannons next to elephants and such.
- a part from the the first 3 pop of my cap I never, ever bothered to micro my citizens just let the governor do the work.

[Shabbaman]

I'm trying ICS on deity/normal map with a more than decent start, but I keep getting rushed by Babylon. It seems as if my ICS is pissing him off to no end. I'm not sure what it is, even if I just build the second city next to horses he's already on my doorstep. And he's not even close, Germany is even closer: germany's second city is in what would be my third ring, plus a tile, while Babylon is, well, somewhere on the other side of a lot of mountains. I'm sad.

[ProPain]

Weird, played a few diety maps never got AI rushed. AI does get pissed off once your borders touch and you'll know you're in trouble then.

I do a fair bit of trading with the ai though, basically I trade away everything I have in terms of open borders/luxes. Not sure but I think that keeps em happy as well.

Did you trade with them? if not, you might wanna gve that a try.

[Shabbaman]

No, the first thing I see of Babylon is that he's at my borders with his army. I could try what happens if I settle south instead of north, or if I explore his way and sell him some luxuries.

Getting 500g hasn't been the problem by the way, but being able to spend it is: if I ally the single maritime CS, Germany just pays more than I do.

[Furiey]

Babylon always seems to do that to me even if I have been trading. Just shows up at my borders with a huge army. Still fighting him off in my current game at the moment.

[Furiey]

Beat Bablyon off in Immortal, now for Deity. I think this may take a few tries.