ICS in Civ V

[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]

Originally Posted by Socrates

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]

Originally Posted by akots

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.

Originally Posted by akots

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]

Originally Posted by 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.

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]

Originally Posted by akots

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 ?

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]

Originally Posted by Socrates

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

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]

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.