Okay, that takes less time than I would have expected. Sounds like Firaxis can’t really disable ICS as a strategy, except by reintroducing much-hated concepts like waste/corruption from previous Civs.
hong
4082
Aren’t Great People points specific to each city? Or is it a civ-wide pool?
Maniac
4083
Sure they can. Most of it even requires simple XML changes. I’m talking about the combined effect of minor stuff like increasing settler cost to 120 hammers or so, make the growth rate of large cities equal as that of small cities, make higher level buildings more rather less effective than lower level ones (I mean eg Colossea and Theaters), rework maritime city states so they don’t give a per city effect. Stuff like that.
The Maritime City State bonus is part of it, but it’s a viable strategy without the extra food. You end up with slower construction and running fewer Scientists, but the basic effect still avoids the happiness cap.
As for corruption, who needs to jump straight to that as a solution? Civ IV demonstrated that you can ditch that idea entirely and still put limits on growth. The real issue is that Civ IV’s city upkeep model was a much better solution than the global happiness limit.
Maniac
4085
I’m talking about the combined effect of minor stuff.
You don’t need to make ICS impossible. You just need to make it less lucrative than building up your cities in most situations.
Tony_M
4086
I’ve always been happy to ignore the existence of ICS in previous Civ games. It makes gameplay tedious. Alpha Centauri was my favourite of the Civ series, but it too became unbearable if you followed an ICS strategy.
Still it would be nice if there were mechanics that steered you away from it for just that reason.
If you rely on ICS to beat a particular difficulty level in any Civ game, my advice is to drop the difficulty one level, make a house rule to not pursue ICS, and enjoy your game.
Tony
That’s true. In addition to what you mentioned, probably one of the larger contributors is how ineffective the non-Science multiplier buildings are. The Stock Exchange, Nuclear Plant, and Solar plant are the worst offenders to my mind, though the Arsenal also stands out. 600 hammers for a +25% bonus? Really? If your base hammers is in the 20 range (typical for a large, late game city) you need 120 turns to recoup your investment, and the game will be long over by then one way or another.
The bonuses on the Science buildings are better (+50% in each case, the library being the best since it’s +50% to base science rather than +50% to the multiplier), but their real strength lies in the fact that Scientist specialists are the only way to significantly increase your science output, whereas Merchant and Engineer slots produce stuff you can get more easily from working land.
Currently I’m finding it interesting exploring just what’s most effective in terms of an ICS opening. I was beginning to lose interest in the game because I’d demonstrated to myself that the Horseman rush was a viable opening with any civilization on Emperor, and games were feeling the same.
Tony_M
4089
Yeah I’ve always banned myself from early rushes too. They are too powerful in most of the civ games.
I know house rules (placing restrictions on available strategies, self nerfing) is not for everyone, but I’ve found it to be an effective way of extracting more gameplay from games I’ve mastered (particularly Alpha Centauri and MOO 1, which I have sunk countless hours into). In SMAC I play: No crawlers, no ICS, no population booming.
Tony
Maniac
4090
Yep indeed. The later a building appears in the tech tree, the better it should be. The hammer cost can be bigger, but then the building’s effects should be too. The reverse (later buildings being worse) is a common modder mistake though. I’m not sure what goes through the head of people who do this. Perhaps they’re unnecessarily afraid the economy might overheat during the endgame or something. I don’t know. :confused:
Crawlers? I assume that by “population booming” you mean you don’t ally with more than 1 Maritime City State, since getting several of them pushes your population up fairly quickly in the early game.
Come to think of it… Civ5 seems intentionally designed for ICS.
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The AI always pursues this strategy, and now fairly competently too.
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The slow growth & construction of each individual city don’t matter if most cities stay small.
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The only penalty for tons of cities is the happiness penalty which is easily overcome with one early-game building per city.
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The first option in the city focus menu is Avoid Growth.
So players are really supposed to have only a few big cities that build all the expensive stuff, and a ton of small cities that contribute money and specialist points. Did I understand that correctly?
Yeah, I play these games because I love building an empire and not as puzzles that need to be solved. Because of achievements I’ve been pointed towards trying new stuff… but ICS is too gamey for me to even care.
Tony_M
4094
I was refering to SMAC (Sid Miers Alpha Centauri) in that sentence rather than Civ 5. Sorry its a bit off topic, but I thought was relevant to the issue of self selecting strategies to increase challenge.
In SMAC, supply crawlers let you gather recources from outside the city radius, and when abused can result in extreme exponential growth. Population Booming is a state where all your cities grow +1 in size every turn (sort of like the old We Love the King day in old Civ). Alot of great strategies involved setting up a wide, shallow empire, then pop-booming to a massive lead.
Tony
Official info was posted about the next patch, with some interesting fixes/changes:
AI
Worker AI improvements .
Update to tactical AI pillaging code. Additionally, always check to make sure it’s not trying to pillage in an enemy dominance zone.
AI victory emphasis improvements (more efficient end-game when focusing on Science and Diplo victories).
AI should colonize other continents regularly.
AI will emphasize production of an Ocean going explorer unit when the time comes.
Adjust Napoleon to make him more likely to go for culture.
More aggressive second wave expansion (mostly off shore) after initial empire building and consolidation has occurred.
Optimization when finding routes (pathfinder improvement).
Multiple tweaks and bug fixes.
AI will now build ranged and mobile units more in line with the flavor settings.
Multiple defensive AI tweaks.
GAMEPLAY
Cities heal more quickly.
Only allow one upgrade per unit from a goody hut.
UI
Tweaked the single-player score list to hide the civs of unmet ai players.
DIPLO
AI's attitude towards you is now visible in the diplo screen and diplo drop-down.
Added info tooltip for an AI leader's mood. Lists things that are making an AI player happy/upset.
New diplo system: Declaration of Friendship (public declaration with diplomatic repercussions).
New diplo system: Denounce (public declaration with diplomatic repercussions).
New custom leader responses (Serious Expansion Warning, Aggressive Military, Luxury Exchange, Borders Exchange, Gift Request).
MODDING
Parent category counts now include counts of child categories.
Selecting/deselecting a category now automatically selects/deselects it's children and its parent.
Tweaked category name truncation to better fit names.
Hide categories w/ no children and a count of 0.
Added support for fallback languages (if mod is not translated, fall-back to English so text keys are not showing).
MISC
Fixed save format which causes saves to increase the memory footprint of the game drastically when loading frequently over the course of the game.
That’s fantastic news. AI naval expansion and diplomatic attitudes (or rather, visibility thereof) were two remaining weak points. But what’s an “enemy dominance zone” and why wouldn’t you want to pillage there?
Maniac
4097
A zone where there are many enemy military units, which would lead to immediate death if you tried to pillage there, I guess.
Quitch
4098
It’s going to be an AI threat evaluation.
I like what the patch proposes, generally. I’d like to see the effects of the AI colonizing other continents regularly and having an aggressive second wave expansion. I’m of the opinion that the AI spams cities enough as it is and I’m not going to like seeing them do more of it. Perhaps, though, the other tweaks to diplomacy and AI victory goals will offset it somewhat.
KevinC
4100
Multiplayer still remains in a dismal state it seems, too bad.
