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That was a very interesting article. There is a quote here that I think is important to why the author (and I) believe that ICS is not optimal.QuoteLet me also talk a little bit about build density. SMAC is well-known for encouraging ICS strategy, but I'm not going maximum full-blown here. I actually think it's more efficient to give the bases a little room to breathe, about 8 tiles each. The reason for this is buildings, primarily the Children's Creche but also any multiplier facilities. Each building costs the same amount but is worth twice as much in a city twice as big. This network of bases is already working every available land tile at size 7. If I had more bases, they would both need more Creches and not all be able to boom to size 7, for the same total population and output.This is exactly the logic I use for why ICS is not so great. I think he missed the point himself a bit. His logic is give the cities twice as much room to expand (8 squares each, verses 4 for ICS), so each facility is effectively twice as valuable. If you extend that, why not double again, give each city 16 squares. His logic was not wanting to building housing structures. I think this is faulty. If you are going to build other structures anyway, what are a couple of housing structures? So I would go further to state that cities ideally are spaced to give each city as much room as possible, so that all ground is covered with a minimum number of city, instead of ICS which uses the maximum number of cities possible in a given area. This minimal cities means the fewest of each structure so that each square worked still gets maximum bonuses.
Let me also talk a little bit about build density. SMAC is well-known for encouraging ICS strategy, but I'm not going maximum full-blown here. I actually think it's more efficient to give the bases a little room to breathe, about 8 tiles each. The reason for this is buildings, primarily the Children's Creche but also any multiplier facilities. Each building costs the same amount but is worth twice as much in a city twice as big. This network of bases is already working every available land tile at size 7. If I had more bases, they would both need more Creches and not all be able to boom to size 7, for the same total population and output.
-The second file option would have the advantage that I could alter some other things to reflect a new status quo, like flecks of green in the fungus. No room to add anything but alt. forest in the original...
Actually, I think there are enough balances to pop-booming already.Early game, the most you can boom to is 7, until you get Hab Complexes. You probably can't get drone control for size 7 bases all that easily.
Mid game, you can boom up to 14 with the Hab Complexes, but you still have a problem of getting enough nutrients and drone control for this.
Changing crawlers to harvest multiple resources changes all of this. With multi-resource crawlers, you would not have any incentive for actually working a single square of land with a worker. You would just crawl every square on the board. So it would not matter so much how large a city is, since it can still have the same effect as a large city if a lot of crawlers are homed to it.I don't like the idea of multi-resource crawlers for this reason. It takes away planning for putting cities near important multi-resource square to work them. Otherwise, cities can be anywhere.
Yea and then you could triple-crawl everything to a base with a project like Supercollider / ToE (but I think as mentioned in that article, you get capped out at one tech/turn/city).On the downside though one supercity can only ever build one unit per turn. So you'd need a few others just for unit production purposes.
I always find Nutrients the harder part to get for Pop-boom than the Drone control. Is there any viable way to really Pop-boom before Tree farms anyways?
I dont really know if this counts as ICS but...Here is a game i played back in 2005 i found from apolyton. Unfortunately i dont have any pics or savegames from any of the great players\games showing ICS, back in those days it didnt occur to me to save up such things so people in the future could see. I couldnt find his savegame, but a player called archaic achieved the same result as in this game but with a sub 2200 transcend mark. I learned the basic strategy while playing this game out. You will easily find ways to improve the efficiency of this game if you look through bases and SE so hopefully you can see some potential in this strategy and overlook the poor implementation here.
Boo. Several months late, but someone's just tapped me on the shoulder and let me know this place existed, so I figured I'd drop in and say hi.Just looked through my old backups. I think the attached 2191 save file might be the one you're looking for, but I'm not certain. Don't currently have SMAC/X installed (haven't been able to find the ol' discs), so I haven't been able to check. The date is May 2004 though, which seems about right. I was transcending around 2213 going by this terraforming thread over a CivGaming back in '03.If this is the right save, I've also got saves every few years from 2124 onwards for this particular game.
You could take a look in the Waterworld MP game. There's two factions (Drones and Technocrats, played by Kataphraktoi and Kirov respectively) that popboomed to the 220ties/440ties population (again, respectively).
Another reason I mention it is that in this game the year counter stopped at 2199
That doesn't look like ICS...you have 2 bases by 2191, and their radii don't even overlap.
In particular, I think you might be interested in how I handle Drones as University. Honestly, I've always found that problem to be a little overblown. I never had any problems maintaining perpetual GA popbooms in Demo/FM/Wealth with 40/20/40 allocation, which honestly ends up a hell of a lot better in the long run than dropping into Planned for a few turns. The economic benefits of GA's are essential to a sub 2200 run.
I've just always viewed ICS as very Hiverian role play wise and that's the way I like to play rather than some mathematically 'best' formula :\ lol. I have a terrible time playing other factions because of that.
