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

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.

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

[ProPain]

Originally Posted by 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.

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]

Originally Posted by 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.

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.