I'd appreciate if people could share examples of ICS.

[Buster's Uncle]

I'm with Yitzi on this one point - it's self-evident that satellites only supply half the nutrients - for example, the pop limit for Gaian bases working fungus with all the relevant SEs boosting,but no nutrient crawling, is 73, no matter how many more Sky Hydroponic satellites more than that you have.

[Kataphraktoi]

I have to apologize for that, i indeed got the satellite output mixed up. It is one per base population point, so i size 1 city only gets the 1 nutrient no matter how many satellites are up. Therefore a base must get 1 point of food per population from some other source. Aerospace complexes negate the 50% penalty which ordinarily limits a base to one nutrient per 2 population. This is a very bad technical oversight and i dont have any excuse but poor judgement in my earlier post.


Now im talking about two kinds of bases, first the ones in the save game i put up, which is not real world conditions. I have nearly all SPs and SE choices, so my new bases actually need only a hab complex then a dome and can popboom until they exhaust food resources. I get 3 food from fungus with 0 planet rating so all thats needed is to orbital drop colony pods into fungal areas. I could easily cover the map with these bases and achieve a high score if that was the goal.

A real ICSer will have much more formers and crawlers than i did in this game, i have seen 400+ formers on several occasions, my own games and others. Most or all of those forests between my bases would have been turned into condensors and they would generally rely on specialists for production and grow their bases normally without popbooming.(Cycon for example) Now what happens in the lategame? You either get Cloning Vats or gain another SE +2 growth. (Eudamoniac) Lets just talk singleplayer and say you got the Vats.

Now one problem with ICS is you cant really popboom, AFAIK. Ive seen hive, cycon, morgan ICS relying on just normal growth, working boreholes with bases and crawling condensers for nutrients to support the specialists. Meanwhile your high quality empire with very low empire can popboom because all your time and resources are focuses on a few cities, and you can direct all the resources towards them. This is your big advantage over ICSing as i see it, and when the ICSer can begin pop booming very easily suddenly what is his limitation? Your 25 bases can grow at 25 per turn...his 100 bases(and i have seen 100 bases in MP) can do 100 per turn. And dont think he cant because of nutrients, he has spent the game building that insane fleet of formers so he can cover the world in condensors.

The nutrient satellites would have a huge benefit here, building up his pop to the max the land can support. And so what if he has a lower ceiling per base and his pop per base wil always be less? Your cities will NEVER reach their max capacity before the game ends anyway, notice how in my game university HQ has so and so pop? I built a hab dome there the moment i got it, and it has popbooming constantly since then. What are you going to do, keep spamming end turn until it finishes growing? Why not cover the entire map in bases and use the fungal food? Im talking about going for high score here. Look at the situation in my game again...univ HQ could make a orbital drop pod every turn, and that new base with my SPs could grow every turn for a long time. The transcend specialist has a huge output so these bases will really add up before long.

Im not saying ICS is unbeatable, but you must know and understand your advantages over it, and use them to defeat your opponent before he really gets going. When you are using a strategy that avoids base overlap, you are basically trying to get more population per square than a guy who covers every square in cities. Imagine a map covered only in condensors and boreholes, and cities in max placement. Can you really exceed the population per tile with a minimalistic base placement style?

ICS tends to lag in tech development grinding minerals, while your popbooming cities produce lovely amounts of labs and energy. You need to convert this advantage into a decisive military win before he gets any of the crazy special projects or sufficiently advanced himself that a mere weapons edge wont let you win battles.

[Earthmichael]

I have made the point several times (most recently in the who's afraid of the big bad ICS thread) that large cities with lots of facility multipliers are far more productive than small cities with relatively fewer multipliers.  And if you put the same multipliers in all of the small cities, you come out worse because of all of the extra cost of the facilities and the maintenance on so many more instances of each facility.

It is also far faster to build the smaller number of instances of each facility required for large cities verses small ones.  I personally have never lost to ICS, but I have defeated players using an ICS approach many times.

I have offered to debunk the all-powerful ICS myth once and for all if someone wants to play a challenge game, where I am limited to certain minimal city spacing, and my opponent is limited to near ICS city spacing.  I am convinced from many games that the optimal approach for each map is based on exploiting the terrain on that map to the best of your ability for your earliest cities.  I proposed a symmetrical balanced map, such as the vets map, for this challenge, and we both play the same faction to take that out of the equation.

To see the approach I am suggesting, take a look at a couple of the AAR reports I have written.   They document the city planning and facilities that I am suggesting.

Ideally, the large city approach should use a faction that does not inhibit pop-booming, though any faction can pop boom either with a secret project or with the right facilities and golden age.

[Kataphraktoi]

Unfortunately by defending ICS here i will ofcourse be seen as an ICS advocate. That is not the case. I do not use ICS as my main weapon, and i cant effectively harness the human hive. I too place bases in the most optimal places and enjoy pop booming(i dont really see the game i uploaded as ICS. No ICS player would have as little as 50 formers and crawlers)

[Yitzi]

A real ICSer will have much more formers and crawlers than i did in this game, i have seen 400+ formers on several occasions, my own games and others. Most or all of those forests between my bases would have been turned into condensors

Yeah; I'm convinced a condensor nerf is essential for making late-game decisions more interesting.

and when the ICSer can begin pop booming very easily suddenly what is his limitation? Your 25 bases can grow at 25 per turn...his 100 bases(and i have seen 100 bases in MP) can do 100 per turn. And dont think he cant because of nutrients, he has spent the game building that insane fleet of formers so he can cover the world in condensors.

That'll work until it booms to size 21 or so (cover the world in condensors or not, it's still only 6 nutrients per square, plus 3 for the base...with tight packing, you're looking at a base every 4 squares, so the average base only works 3 condensors.)  25 bases on the same 400-square territory, on the other hand, can work 15 condensors per base, for a total maximum population of 93.  So it takes longer, but you get 2325 population on those 400 squares instead of only 2100.

Your cities will NEVER reach their max capacity before the game ends anyway

We're talking SP, so maybe I want to end the game in the latest possible year and tech up to an Alpha Centauri rating over 2000% via Transcendent Thought.

And in MP, the added cost of facilities for every base means you get a slower start at first.

Imagine a map covered only in condensors and boreholes, and cities in max placement. Can you really exceed the population per tile with a minimalistic base placement style?

Yes.

[Nexii]

There's this Ascent speedrun won on turn 76 (Transcend difficulty).  Not super ICS but most bases stay at size 9

http://www.dos486.com/alpha/

[Yitzi]

And if you want to go even faster, you can go for a hardcore conquest momentum game, where ICS is clearly the superior way to go (as you won't be teching that much anyway, and could use all the free support you can get).

But that's not so reliable in MP or a difficult SP game (e.g. playing against supercharged enemies, or if you're just not that great), and it's not the best way to score high in SP, so I don't think that really counts as ICS being so powerful.

[Nexii]

Yea I would think the ideal strategy varies a lot by map.  A lot of these blazing fast runs are on maps where you're under no military pressure.  Therefore you can put everything into economy and growth.  If you're on a smaller map or a land map, then tighter packed bases can be better.  You then have a smaller land area to defend.  I've found geographic placement really matters on non-asym maps (which is probably a good argument against random maps).

Personally I feel satellites and Transcend specialists are a little more game-breaking than Condensors.  Though +1 nutrient per Condensor rather than +50% wouldn't be a bad fix.  I feel a better fix would be to make it so Hybrid Forest didn't completely negate the advanced terraforming Eco Damage.  Then a base would have to have a mix of Forest, Farm/Solar, Boreholes, and Condensors.  No one improvement would really dominate.  A second exploit is that crawled tiles don't add Eco Damage...this should probably be nerfed too.  At least those are my thoughts.

[Yitzi]

Yea I would think the ideal strategy varies a lot by map.  A lot of these blazing fast runs are on maps where you're under no military pressure.  Therefore you can put everything into economy and growth.

Or into military in order to just conquer the world.

If you're on a smaller map or a land map, then tighter packed bases can be better.  You then have a smaller land area to defend.

Not really; the amount of land area you have to defend is determined by how much you can defend, as no matter what packing scheme you use more land means more resources.  The real question is, for a fixed amount of land, is it better to pack bases tightly or loosely.

I've found geographic placement really matters on non-asym maps (which is probably a good argument against random maps).

Personally, I feel that random maps give enough interestingness and unpredictability to be worth any lack of symmetry (and honestly, unless everyone is playing the same faction, symmetry is a lost cause anyway.)  Just make sure that your scoring method isn't determined by a single game, so that over the long run any imbalances cancel out.

Personally I feel satellites and Transcend specialists are a little more game-breaking than Condensors.

They all work together.  I think that satellites are more game-breaking (but easier to fix...I just need to fix the bug that shows up when sky hydroponics labs are not the first to be available), but even so I think they both need fixing.  Transcendi are not as much of a problem, since everyone can get them at around the same time (unless they beeline for something else which will be similarly powerful, such as singularity reactors), and they don't force any one particular strategy.

Though +1 nutrient per Condensor rather than +50% wouldn't be a bad fix.

Agreed; that's why I enabled it.

I feel a better fix would be to make it so Hybrid Forest didn't completely negate the advanced terraforming Eco Damage.  Then a base would have to have a mix of Forest, Farm/Solar, Boreholes, and Condensors.  No one improvement would really dominate.  A second exploit is that crawled tiles don't add Eco Damage...this should probably be nerfed too.  At least those are my thoughts.

Both are definitely valid approaches; I have not taken the time to enable those (as while I'd considered both, I decided against them being the best approaches by the time I worked on ecodamage, on the theory that former time is enough cost), but once I finish the "short list" they definitely are valid suggestions to be voted on by the community.[/quote]

[Earthmichael]

I think the correct endgame is where technology development and secret projects and facilities make it so that the optimal terraforming is to refungus the entire planet.

Toward that end, if we want to tweak some secret projects or anything else so that fungus is the ultimate final terraforming, I am all for a mod to do this.  So rather than nerf soil enhancers, let's improve fungus so that by the time you have all technology, there is nothing more effective to do than replant fungus.  If that means giving fungus techs or projects +X more food, then great, I think that is the right fix.  Because it leads to the right endgame.  Maybe what one could do is give certain facilities dual roles, like Tree Farms and Hybrid Forests, so that that they give extra resources to both Forest and fungus.  Or tweak the secret projects.

Anyway, does everyone agree that fungus ought to be the ultimate endgame, and agree with the goal to make fungus eventually better than any other terraforming?  If you agree with this goal, how do you think it best could be accomplished?

[Earthmichael]

One thought I had is what if Manifold Harmonics secret project is tweaked do more with a high planet rating.  What if Manifold Harmonics was changed to give:

0 Planet (0,+1, 0)
1 Planet (+1, +1, 0)
2 Planet (+3, +1, +1)
3 Planet (+4, +2, +1)
4+ Planet (+5, +2, +2)

This seems like it would have a minimal impact on most of the game, but would have the desirable effect of making Fungus the ultimate final terraforming goal (after building this project, of course).  This would also make the final ultimate society Green/Cybernetic + your choice of politics and values, so that you would end up with a +4 planet rating (plus/minus your faction bonus/penalty).

[Buster's Uncle]

Testing would be in order to make sure that wouldn't run a typical base over 127...

I think the correct endgame is where technology development and secret projects and facilities make it so that the optimal terraforming is to refungus the entire planet.

Toward that end, if we want to tweak some secret projects or anything else so that fungus is the ultimate final terraforming, I am all for a mod to do this.  So rather than nerf soil enhancers, let's improve fungus so that by the time you have all technology, there is nothing more effective to do than replant fungus.  If that means giving fungus techs or projects +X more food, then great, I think that is the right fix.  Because it leads to the right endgame.  Maybe what one could do is give certain facilities dual roles, like Tree Farms and Hybrid Forests, so that that they give extra resources to both Forest and fungus.  Or tweak the secret projects.

Anyway, does everyone agree that fungus ought to be the ultimate endgame, and agree with the goal to make fungus eventually better than any other terraforming?  If you agree with this goal, how do you think it best could be accomplished?

I'd say it was already the case with Deirdre and Cha - once I have the Assent built, I go WILD with the ecodamge, let Planet turn most of my improvements to fungus, and grow all my bases to 71-73, depending, (and my headquarters/superscience/supermoney base to 127 with some nutrient crawling) while I play out the clock and transcend at the last second.

[Yitzi]

I think the correct endgame is where technology development and secret projects and facilities make it so that the optimal terraforming is to refungus the entire planet.

I don't think that should be the only endgame (after all, transcendence is only one of the four victory conditions, and endgame conquest is a thing), but it should be viable for anyone with non-negative PLANET, good for for the Gaians, and clearly superior for anyone with the Manifold Harmonics.

In particular, I think the best way to do that is to give a fungus bonus at Centauri Empathy (fungus isn't going to be overpowered in the early game anyway, even for the Gaians), and shift the bonus types around as a result, with the final (ninth) bonus being a third nutrient bonus.  And on top of that, nerf condensers to be only +1, and make late-game crawlers able to crawl multiple resources (as otherwise a transcend plus a crawled condenser is worth more than working even farm/enricher/solar with raised land and mirrors).  Since fungus is better for minerals but worse for energy, increase the cost of rush buying by 50% so that it's harder to make up the difference by rush buying.  Finally, make it hard to keep satellites up unless everyone likes you (and if you've got a lot of satellites in the endgame, chances are you're a threat so not everyone likes you).  Then, there are the following options at the endgame:
1.Farm/Enricher/Condenser.  Worth 5 nutrients, 0-1 minerals, no energy.  Extremely high terraforming cost.
2.Farm/Enricher/Solar, with mirrors.  Mix in condensers as needed.  Worth 4 nutrients, 0-1 minerals, ~6 energy.  High terraforming cost, but less than #1 (and so probably superior, since you're trading 1 nutrients for 6 energy.)
3.Fungus.  Worth 3 nutrients, 3 minerals, 3 energy.  Low terraforming cost, extremely hard for enemies or worms to destroy, is not harmed by pops.  So you're trading (as compared to #2) 1 nutrient and 3 energy for 2-3 minerals and a lot more security, so usually worse if you're teching but better if you're production-oriented or worried about sabotage.

For the Gaians, fungus is +1 nutrient, so it compares evenly with #2 on nutrients, and you're just trading 3 energy for 2-3 minerals.

With the Manifold Harmonics and even +2 PLANET, you're trading 2 energy for 3-4 minerals, probably a good deal.  With +3, you only give up 1 energy.

And for the Gaians with the Manifold Harmonics...it's probably better than the CBA is in the un-modded game.  5/4/5 per square is extremely impressive.

Toward that end, if we want to tweak some secret projects or anything else so that fungus is the ultimate final terraforming, I am all for a mod to do this.  So rather than nerf soil enhancers

Soil enhancers are fine, it's condensers that are the issue...and they'd be an issue anyway, because they become better than farm/enricher/solar+mirrors before fungus would become the best anyway.

One thought I had is what if Manifold Harmonics secret project is tweaked do more with a high planet rating.  What if Manifold Harmonics was changed to give:

0 Planet (0,+1, 0)
1 Planet (+1, +1, 0)
2 Planet (+3, +1, +1)
3 Planet (+4, +2, +1)
4+ Planet (+5, +2, +2)

You know how you like to ban CBA and choppers because it's overpowered?  With your proposed Manifold Harmonics playing as the Gaians (even without other fungus boosts), I could get 8/5/5 per square, and with satellites (which are fairly easy to keep up if you're getting twice the production of your rivals) I could just make enough units to power through your elite choppers.  I'd just need to somewhat-ICS because of the 99 population cap.

I'm all for making late-game Gaians with Manifold Harmonics into a powerhouse...but not to that extent.

This seems like it would have a minimal impact on most of the game, but would have the desirable effect of making Fungus the ultimate final terraforming goal (after building this project, of course).

And the undesirable effect of making that project into an "I win" button because fungus with it is so vastly superior to anything else; it should be powerful, but not that overpowered.

So yes, the goal of making fungus-under-the-right-circumstances the best terraforming method is a good one...but it should not be vastly better than the best which is available to every faction regardless of secret projects.

You know what might be interesting, though?  If the Voice of Planet (which could be moved down some in the tech tree, now that the Ascent can be placed at the top and actually require its prerequisite tech) made centauri preserve/temple of planet work for fungus like tree farm/hybrid forest work for forest...it might be the same for everyone, or only for the VoP owner (as things stand now, there is no advantage to being the one who owns the VoP, or even to it existing rather than having been destroyed), or have one value for everyone and a higher one for the VoP owner.

[Yitzi]

Testing would be in order to make sure that wouldn't run a typical base over 127...

I think the correct endgame is where technology development and secret projects and facilities make it so that the optimal terraforming is to refungus the entire planet.

Toward that end, if we want to tweak some secret projects or anything else so that fungus is the ultimate final terraforming, I am all for a mod to do this.  So rather than nerf soil enhancers, let's improve fungus so that by the time you have all technology, there is nothing more effective to do than replant fungus.  If that means giving fungus techs or projects +X more food, then great, I think that is the right fix.  Because it leads to the right endgame.  Maybe what one could do is give certain facilities dual roles, like Tree Farms and Hybrid Forests, so that that they give extra resources to both Forest and fungus.  Or tweak the secret projects.

Anyway, does everyone agree that fungus ought to be the ultimate endgame, and agree with the goal to make fungus eventually better than any other terraforming?  If you agree with this goal, how do you think it best could be accomplished?

I'd say it was already the case with Deirdre and Cha - once I have the Assent built, I go WILD with the ecodamge, let Planet turn most of my improvements to fungus, and grow all my bases to 71-73, depending, (and my headquarters/superscience/supermoney base to 127 with some nutrient crawling) while I play out the clock and transcend at the last second.

I think Scient's patch placed a limit of 99 per base; I should be able to restore the limit to 127, and maybe even increase it to 255, in some future patch.

That said, what you describe is great fun...I once did it (as Deidre; Cha really isn't that amazing for it since he does not get any bonus resources in fungus) with Iron Man and ended up with a rating of over 1000%.  (I think it was a score over 10000 and a rating over 2000%, but it might have been a score over 20000 and a rating over 1000%.  That was only on Librarian and was not planned from the start; I'm sure someone like Earthmichael could do it on Transcend for a truly ridiculous rating.)

Even so, however, as things stand it's still more effective to crawl farm/enricher/condenser; Fungus is at best (unless playing a custom faction...) worth 4/4/5, and with satellites and transcendi the 6/0/4+2 from crawling farm/enricher/condenser and making a transcend is simply better, especially for teching.

[Buster's Uncle]

...Some of it is a matter of not having much choice once I've got all the min-boosting SPs.  And I just enjoy that red endgame.  You can learn to love the fungus...