Getting Rid of ICS - No free centre square

[Austin]

I'm starting a new thread for a topic that sprung up


------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I think that you can always beat just about any turn based strategy game with a rush strategy.

The one thing that I really wish CivIII had done that I can't think of how to do myself with the editor is getting rid of that square worked for free in all new cities.

If they did away with this then I think that would really kill ICS once and for all, as it would be more worthwile to expand an existing city than it would to found new ones.

Right now you are often far better off with 3 size 3 cities than with one size 9 city.

Austin

Originally posted by PerpetualNewbie
Get rid of the central tile? Wow. Unless you start with some bonus food resource, that city is dead. If the best tile you had was grassland, you sit at pop 1 until you change from Despotism, which would be sometime in the 1900s, I'm guessing. If you start on plains or desert, you are dead in a turn. Or were you planning on boosting the production of your other tiles in response?

I was thinking of making some of the bonus things like wheat and cows a little more common. Early urbanization was a LOT more difficult historically than it ever is in this game. The effect that I'm going for is that in the very beggining you have a lot fewer sites that make for good cities, so in the early game you cannot simply spew settler diarheea all over the place and ICS your way to victory.

This puts the emphasis more on having fewer cities in the early game and developing them better. It also actually makes colonies a hell of a lot more usefull and relevant to the game.

And yes restricting despotism in that fashion was deliberate. The big land grab part of the game should be at the end of the middle ages, not in 1800 B.C.

And if your civilization doesn't advance itself technologically, it SHOULD remain stuck at a low level (see historical American Indians among others).

There should be large swaths of land that are'nt useable right away, but that start opening up for colonization mid game once your society is advanced enough.

Austin

[Inverse Icarus]

bleh. civ without ICS (or REX as it is in civ3) really isn't civ at all...

why wouldnt you just make it so you couldnt build more than 20 cities before a certain year? it would have the same effect.

but civ isn't a historical simulator... civ is a "what could have been" simulator.

[ALPHA WOLF 64]

I increased settler to require 3 population. its greatly slowed ICS during the early game.

[Aeson]

I don't think it's a bad idea, but with the current state of the game it wouldn't work well. Several changes would have to be made.

- Starting positions would all have to have some sort of bonus food source nearby. On a pure grassland start you'd never grow until you can get out of despotism. Some maps would be close to unplayable.

- The AI would have to be retaught where to settle, and how to prepare new city sites. A player can easily pre-irrigate those flood plains, but the AI? They already have trouble enough making good terrain improvements as it is.

- The whole speed of the game would be slowed down considerably. This could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on what difficulty level you play. Tech requirements, unit and building costs, would all have to be changed.

[Arrian]

It has promise.

I would go so far as to say grassland would need to produce 3 food...or have some way to allow 3 food once irrigated, even under despotism. That, or more bonus squares for sure.

It would certainly have a drastic effect on settlement of jungles, desert and tundra, that's for sure.

I think this would boost the already strong industrial trait, as terrain improvement becomes even more important. Religious too, because 8 turns of anarchy could result in widespread starvation later in the game.

You may have to allow hills to be irrigated.

If the city square isn't gonna produce anything, why not allow settlement on mountains?

What happens, in the case of a siege, when the city is pop1 and is still losing food? Does it get auto-razed when the food box empties? Hell, I would surround the city with troops & just starve 'em out.

Just some thoughts...

-Arrian

[Wittlich]

Originally posted by Arrian
What happens, in the case of a siege, when the city is pop1 and is still losing food? Does it get auto-razed when the food box empties? Hell, I would surround the city with troops & just starve 'em out.
-Arrian

Actually starving out a pop 1 city IS realistic at least...

[monkeyman]

Originally posted by Arrian
It has promise.

I would go so far as to say grassland would need to produce 3 food...or have some way to allow 3 food once irrigated, even under despotism. That, or more bonus squares for sure.



What happens, in the case of a siege, when the city is pop1 and is still losing food? Does it get auto-razed when the food box empties? Hell, I would surround the city with troops & just starve 'em out.

Just some thoughts...

-Arrian

Two points: 1st is that the low integer numbers that are used for food, shields and money don't lend themselves well to balancing. If a citizen used 4 food, then you could adjust numbers accordingly a little easier. Doubling the number of hp seems to work well to eliminate spearman/tank problem, so perhaps increasing the number of gradations in production will help as well...

2nd: Seige. Now there's a new strategy. The original idea has merit by that marker alone...

-mm

[Akka]

Suggestion : the "free" use of the center square is removed. To compensate, the "city" improvement add value to the square (what I mean is that the city is treated as an improvement, just like irrigation or mining).
At first, the city add 2 to food, 1 to ressource and 1 to commerce (and+1 food due to irrigation). It means that a city on grassland under despotism produce 4 food, and 3 food on a plain. You could reduce the bonus to +1 food for the city, and +1 for the irrigation.
Then, when the city grow up and reach the size of a town (7 I think), the bonus is +1 food, +1 ressource, +2 commerce (as the farmlands are slowly recovered by houses).
At last, when the city become a metropolis, the bonus is +0 to food, +0 to ressource and +3 to commerce.

Additionnally, EVERY unit that is formed by a large number of people (ie : all the land units except explorer, and perhaps some ships) should require 1 pop point to be built. Ideally, if the engine allow it, a unit should require 1 food as support in addition to the 1 gold (and that gold support should change according to the unit).

These changes could slow down the wild ICS, and make bigger cities important, as they would allow to support larger armies due to their larger food output.

[Ribannah]

Ages ago, I suggested to battle ICS by requiring a city (village) to build a Town Hall before allowing it to grow beyond size 1.

[Austin]

Originally posted by ALPHA WOLF 64
I increased settler to require 3 population. its greatly slowed ICS during the early game.

I did this too. It slowed things a bit, but still by 1 AD the whole map is carpeted except for jungles and mountains (I also made settlers wheeled units).

Austin

[Austin]

Originally posted by Aeson
I don't think it's a bad idea, but with the current state of the game it wouldn't work well. Several changes would have to be made.

- Starting positions would all have to have some sort of bonus food source nearby. On a pure grassland start you'd never grow until you can get out of despotism. Some maps would be close to unplayable.

- The AI would have to be retaught where to settle, and how to prepare new city sites. A player can easily pre-irrigate those flood plains, but the AI? They already have trouble enough making good terrain improvements as it is.

- The whole speed of the game would be slowed down considerably. This could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on what difficulty level you play. Tech requirements, unit and building costs, would all have to be changed.

[Nostromo]

It's a good idea Austin. I have another one, but it's less elegant than yours (it would be harder to implement). As you well know, a city needs an aqueduct in order to grow beyond size 6. How about extending this idea at the national level? For example, a civ would have to build a certain improvement (most likely a small wonder like the forbidden palace) in order to grow beyond a size 12 empire ("size 12 empire" means "an empire with 12 cities"). And in order to grow beyond a size 30 empire you would have to build another improvement. Of course, the empire size limits on a huge map would be different from the empire size limits on a tiny map. Moreover, the corruption could, I think, be toned down at a Civ 2 level. What do you think?

[PerpetualNewbie]

[RANT]Aargh. Is there some way we could get a "back" to get to the reply if the stupid "login again" screen comes up? I can't save cookies in this configuration, and I log in when I click on reply, then apparently if I don't finish my post soon enough, I have to log in again, and it conveniently forgets whatever it was I wrote. If I don't remember to copy the text to the clipboard, I am just out of luck. [ /RANT]

Getting rid of the central square, unless you are going to do hordes of balance changes, is going to do more than slow down the game -- it is going to make starting position nearly victor-determing. Right now, for instance everyone gets the same central tile (I'm assuming) so the penalty for drawing a poor starting location is reduced.

Lets take two hypothetical civs, and leave balance paramters alone for the moment. One draws a plains tile on a river with wheat, the other draws a grasslands tile with shield, and let's figure they road and irrigate/mine appropriately. Their Pop 1 procuction is:

Civ      Base    Improved   Proposed     Improved
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
 1        5/2/2     6/2/3          3/1/1           4/1/2
 2        4/2/1     4/3/2          2/1/0           2/2/1

Comparing the two starts, after a the prudent improvements, in the current system Civ 1 has a 50% advantage across the board. Pretty beefy, true. But under the proposed system, there is a full 100% bonus for city growth, and a full 100% bonus for tech research. Civ 1 gets another worker going in 10 turns, bringing him up to even in terms of shields gathered, but is now researching 4 times as fast as Civ 2. Note his population is still growing, and in another 10 turns, he will have more shields being produced, and will complete his research in 1/6th the time.

Now you could balance this out by adding one food to all tiles, I suppose, but that makes pop 2 equivalent to the status quo in terms of food, and from pop 3 and on, you have actually sped up REX.

You could give more bonus food tiles instead, but then the question is how long it takes the civ to find one. Pop your city down in the "wrong" place and its game over.

Personally, I would prefer a little less randomness in the initial draw. The fixed offset of a central tile gives everyone a certain base from which to start. It reduces the penalty of not being able to find bonus resources on a river. And why is it a good idea to further penalize a civ who has to look around and eventually settles for an OK site, while another lucky civ happened to start in a sweet spot?

IMO, a decent "compromise" might be to allow the central tile to be free only for the capitol... It is less of a penalty to the civ that gets a bad start location, and decreases the value of additional cities. OTOH, unless you increase the value of tiles, it's going to be pretty boring to watch a zero or one shield "core town" sit at 1 pop until you get the chance to change governments...

[Tuberski]

Why get rid of the Center tile? wouldn't it be simpler to state that instead of the current 2 food, 1 production, 2 trade, we raise the food by one and eliminate the EXTRA TILE that size one cities use. so a size 1 city ONLY works the center tile, instead of the center tile and one other.

[monkeyman]

Originally posted by PerpetualNewbie


IMO, a decent "compromise" might be to allow the central tile to be free only for the capitol... It is less of a penalty to the civ that gets a bad start location, and decreases the value of additional cities. OTOH, unless you increase the value of tiles, it's going to be pretty boring to watch a zero or one shield "core town" sit at 1 pop until you get the chance to change governments...

Now there's an idea... get rid of the center square and then make the palace a +2 food improvement. Can this even be done in the editor????


-mm

[Capt Dizle]

Korn made a great post about ICS and why it was fixed sufficiently. I think I agree with him. True infinite city sprawl is building cities in a checkerboard pattern only one tile apart and is not nearly as overpowering a strategy in Civ3 as in previous games.

[Capt Dizle]

ICS and REX are too different things.

[Capt Dizle]

Korn post pasted without his knowledge or permission:

agree with many of your takes on the game and have tried to fix those things in the blitz mod, but you got one completely wrong

quote:

30 - ICS has become even more a horrible necessity than it was in civ2. REX compounds the problem. Players used to work like hell to secure that perfect setting for a city; a river running through it, a nice patch of grassland, rich resources within hinterland radius… now it just doesn’t matter. Filling up the map is an immediate necessity, and it doesn’t matter where you choose to settle. Huge mistake.



civ3 fixed ICS and you should take it off of your list, here's why:

ICS worked because it exploited the rules in civ2, REX is completely different, and it doesn't present the same game breaking problems as ICS in civ2 did, ICS was a problem that ruined civ2, REX is easy to fix

but if you want a more comprehensive breakdown of ics, here you go
_____________________________
1) It exploited the growth rules. Ten size one cities grew much faster than one size ten city.
2) It exploited the unit support rules. Ten size one cities supported far more units than one size ten city.
3) It exploited the production rules. Ten pop points worth of settlers would give the player an equivilent of twenty pop points worth of production.
4) It exploited the happiness rules. Ten size one cities were far happier than one size ten city.
5) It reinforced the bigger is always better philosophy. No matter how many cities you had, a few more always made your stronger. The only limit to expansion was the player's patience
6) Once you started ICS it was self sustaining. Using ICS principles to continously churn out settlers meant that each settler came faster and faster since settler production was limited only by shields.

Civ3 has implemented various solutions to most of the exploits so that it really takes away the power of exploits.

1) Each city level has a fixed size food box which completely eliminates the smaller cities grow faster exploit. A size ten city in Civ3 with a granary takes the exact same amount of food to grow as a single size one city without a granary does.
2) With the different support levels for each city size means that larger cities aren't as poor support wise as what they were in Civ2.
3) In Civ3 it takes twenty pop points worth of settlers to give you the equivilent of twenty pop points worth of production.
4) No changes here
5) Corruption kicks in after you go beyond the optimal number of cities. This means that infinite expansion can slow your overall rate of production down.
6) Population limits means that in Civ3 continuosly churning out settlers isn't an advantage.

[Ribannah]

[1] Ten small cities still grow significantly faster, because you don't have to improve so much land. Once you have the Pyramids, the difference gets greater.
[2] Irrelevant, since you won't need to build so many units, or at least it's not the bottleneck.
[3] However, the city square is always good. This makes it easy enough to continuously build Settlers, or before the Pyramids with a temple/military unit in between.
[4] Ten small cities are still much easier to keep happy. Also note that marketplaces and banks now cost more shields to build and if you don't have many luxuries, they don't help much to keep large cities happy.
[5] But it's now relatively cheap to rushbuild settlers.
[6] Why?

So it boils down to this: does the increasing corruption outweigh the easy victory condition (culture) and the fact that happiness doesn't deteriorate with the number of cities? Note that culture is unaffected by corruption.

[Capt Dizle]

Well, I depise culture in Civ3 and I also think happiness from luxuries sux.

But, ICS is not a problem IMHO.

[Geoff the Medio]

Why get rid of the Center tile? wouldn't it be simpler to state that instead of the current 2 food, 1 production, 2 trade, we raise the food by one and eliminate the EXTRA TILE that size one cities use. so a size 1 city ONLY works the center tile, instead of the center tile and one other.

Or just let the player pick any *ONE* spot in the city radius to work. This could be the city square if no better squares are available... but wouldn't have to be.

The city square could be made to always produce 1/1/1 more than a given terrain type would if it were irrigated/roaded/mined. This way, cities on grassland/plains would always have a square capable of supporting and growing the city. Cities on hills would be unable to grow without assitance (tile improvements in neighbouring tiles). Cities on mountains could be founded, but without a better tile available for growth, they would starve -> tradeoff for better defence, would allow cities to be surrounded and starved off -> seige warfare.

[notyoueither]

Originally posted by Ribannah
So it boils down to this: does the increasing corruption outweigh the easy victory condition (culture) and the fact that happiness doesn't deteriorate with the number of cities? Note that culture is unaffected by corruption.

Culture is effected by Corruption in a round-about way. Corruption is a break on run-away Culture due to the inability of far-off cities to build all the Culture producing buildings.

Admittedly, not a big effect, and certainly not what you probably meant. If excessive Corruption led to negative Culture, that would be a large effect.

[Geoff the Medio]

The city square could be made to always produce 1/1/1 more than a given terrain type would if it were irrigated/roaded/mined.

... of course having no extra tile worked would cause a problem if the city went into unrest... what with it then starving...

maybe the city square should produce 2 more food than a normal tile would... and no size 1 city should go into unrest.

maybe reduce the 2 extra food to 1 for a size 7+ and no extra food for 13 + city size... (and increase commerce according, as someone suggested)

the extra food kinda makes sense too... you can do more work if you don't have to trek hundreds of km/miles to get to your field

re: point 3 from points 1-6 above

Could now change back to settler = 1 pop point. makes more sense than a pop point disappearing to found the new city

[star mouse]

Here's how I would do away with the free tile:

Citizens eat 3 food
Cows, wheat and game are more common
Despotism penalty is different
Cows +2 food, +1 trade
Wheat +2 food
Game +1 food

Grasslands: produce 4 food, irrigation 6, rails 8
Plains: produce 2 food, irrigation 4, rails 6
Flood Plains: produce 5 food, irrigation 7, rails 9

Boost the production of the food-producing tiles, and you can counter ICS.

Edit: increased irrigation effect from 1 to 2.

[Az]

what is REX?

[Ecthy]

Stop spamming this place, Dal

[Az]

are you stalking me , Andreas , dear?

[notyoueither]

Ming is REX.

MarkG is REX, absolutely.

[Aeson]

Just a little screenshot for anyone who thinks ICS isn't a bit overpowered. Deity, 315 cities in 500AD.

[notyoueither]

Yes Aeson, but you're twisted.

BTW. How many Settlers out of Huts in the first 2000 years?