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

[Nexii]

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 find you can run Condensors but this requires Weather Paradigm.  Is it more optimal to push right for Tree Farms over Condensor crawling?

Now that I think more on it, it's true that Pop-booming is required when Nutrients per population goes up with base size.  I'm not sure really why this rate increases so quickly.  I guess it was intended to use Pop-booming at bigger base sizes.  The weird thing about it is you are capped to +1 pop per turn no matter how big the base is.  At a certain size this should probably go up.  A size 10 base goes to 11 that's a 10% increase.  But at size 30 to 31 it's only ~3%.

[Yitzi]

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.

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.

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.

True I think.  The one major exception is a momentum game: You're not building very many multiplier facilities anyway (you'd rather get units), you want a lot of support, and you're not pop booming.

-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...

I think now that we have a sense of our options, let's table it until I'm ready to do it.  It's probably going to be a while, as I'm sure there are a lot of more important features to do first.

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.

Keep in mind that with a rec commons and holo theater, you've only got 2 drones to deal with, so a few psych (3 on Free Market, 2 otherwise) should be able to handle it.

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.

Not really.  With a tree farm and hologram theater, a forest can provide enough nutrients and drone control (via psych) for the person working it; more advanced terraforming allows even more, of course.

I feel that late-game booms should be moderately easy, but early-game booms should be difficult.  I favor requiring a golden age (while running Planned) to boom in the early game (with Morgan and the Cyborgs unable to boom at all, because they're such good techers* they need a heavy downside to offset it), and in the lategame (with Eudaimonic) it should be easy, or somewhat difficult for Morgan and the Cyborgs.

*Yes, Zak is a good techer too, but he's got drone problems, which will make a boom incredibly hard anyway.

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.

Unless multiresource crawling is limited to crawlers in the base square.  Which is exactly why, when I enabled multiresource crawling, I allowed for such a limitation (which can then be lifted by another tech, or just left in place and unremovable.)

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.

There are no single-base projects that boost anything other than energy anyway...

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?

A farm in a moist or rainy square will be enough.  It won't give very many minerals, though...

[Archaic]

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.

[Yitzi]

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.

That doesn't look like ICS...you have 2 bases by 2191, and their radii don't even overlap.

[Geo]

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, and I believe a scenario created by Ete in in your patch from 3 months ago. Would you be interested to take a look as well on why the year won't progress? It means ingame planetary elections are locked (and of course, all other council proposals with a timer).

[Yitzi]

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).

The question is less "what population" and more "how many bases".

Another reason I mention it is that in this game the year counter stopped at 2199

Which game?  And does the year progress if you play it using Kyrub's patch?

[Buster's Uncle]

He's still talking about Waterworld - the game has hung up over the year issue.

[Yitzi]

If whoever has the last turn (i.e. the year changes after their turn) can give me their password (by PM) and the post number in which they've attached their last save (or just the save itself), and whoever has the first turn gives me their password as well (so that I can check both before and after it's supposed to change) I can investigate what's going on.

[Archaic]

That doesn't look like ICS...you have 2 bases by 2191, and their radii don't even overlap.

Huh. I wonder what the heck that game was then. Oo;

I haven't been able to find the zip file with the sub 2200 game (I retained save files for every year, but I have no idea where among my old backup DVD's it is), but I did find several other games, including the one from that CivGaming thread I linked above. My basic strategy between these and the sub 2200 game wouldn't have been all that much different, it was really just a matter of tightening up my game, so they should still be helpful.

I also located a 2208 game by Minute Mirage over on Poly. I remember him doing sub 2200 at one point as well, so it'd be worth a look. ErikM also posted a sub 2200 in that thread (though greatly assisted by some incredible luck on unity pods in that one).

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.

[Yitzi]

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 agree that that problem isn't as bad as it's supposed to be...which is why I made the option to make it worse.  Try playing with the drone rules at 24 or higher, and you'll find it substantially harder.  (Those rules would, in a typical large base of yours in the "terraform" game, translate to roughly 10 extra drones.  On the plus side, it does allow GA when over half your population is specialists.)
Another nice idea, if you feel like a more challenging game, is to reduce Democracy to +1 Growth.  It'll still be the best builder setting, but pop booms will become a lot harder (requiring you to get a golden age under Planned.)
Also, I think that "3000+%* alpha centauri rating" is a more interesting goal than pre-2200 transcendence, especially if combined with mods that make it harder to pull off some of the standard tricks, and perhaps add some new tricks...
(One of the advantages of a rating-based approach rather than date-based is that it encourages a more long-term-focused style of play.)

*Or 4000+, or 10,000+...I've never gotten 3000%, but I have gotten over 2000% IIRC and I'm not such an expert player...

[Lazerus]

Looking through some of the saves I've got on a portable hard drive here's one with my old ICS spam ... damn, I'm going to have to see if any of the other hundreds in here are from this series and piece them together. I remember playing some good MP games where I got really big but my SMAC is crashing when I'm trying to load them up. The pic is from an MP game different to the save, I had it as a facebook profile pic for awhile.

[Yitzi]

Looking at it, you have a roughly 400-square empire (out of roughly 4000 squares on the map, though a lot of that is water), and get from it:
151 income (~0.375 per square)
249 tech (~0.625 per square)
603 minerals (~1.5 per square)
164 population (~0.4 per square).

None of that is really that good for the midgame, so why did you ICS?  Just for the fast progression?

[Lazerus]

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.

[Yitzi]

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.

That does make sense, and it's certainly a valid (perhaps the best) way to play...and Hive is one of the better factions for ICSing due to their effective support and police bonuses from always running Police State.  You really need an aggressive (and unit-heavy) playstyle to make the most out of that, though.

(It is not, though, what I was really looking for in this thread; I was looking for a sense of the bad sort of ICS, which roleplay-inspired strategies are not.)

[NlmDth]

Well Yitzi, I do have a possible solution to discouraging ICS.
But first, here is why ICS will always be better then making fewer bases.
 1) the ICS player gets faster tech, faster grouth, more units up untill mid game. After that , arguably the player who made more base facilities gains the advantage.
 2) #1 is wrong because when you get access to orbial enhancements, all the bases benefit, Sky hydroponics labs make your bases grow,  and look at Lazerus's picture, his bases have 14 population! And all that means SPECIALISTS. You see engineers give +3 energy +2 tech(multiplied by base facilities).So when orbital enhancements become available ICS bases start to build.
  And not all facilities need to be built, just the cheap ones : Energy bank, fusion lab, tree farm, (150% energy multiplier).
 Also all those bases give near limitless support, and guess who has the bigger army(and probably better due to faster tech)

My solution to this is to invert the base growth nutrient,Let me be more specific
   -Small bases grow slow, Large bases grow fast
   -so a small base population 1 will take 40 nutrients to get to 2, then 30 to get to 3 , then20 to get to 4, and after population 5 cap at 10 nutrients
   -The way things are now, small bases grow fastest, just 20 nutrients to get to size 2, and then nutrient requirements increase
     plus the base square of the new bases gets a "free" worker, so a base with just 1 population, works in 2 squares. Of course
     ICS players win. Just give a growth incentive to large bases and see what happens.   
   -Also if its possible to only allow colony pods to be built at bases with 3 or more  population