(P)REVIEWS - Civilization IV Preview by Solver
The Death of ICS
This is a matter that many players want to know about, and there is even an extra reason for wanting Infinite City Sprawl (ICS) to be gone – the reason, of course, being the chance to see Yin eating cardboard pizza.
ICS is, simply put, dead. Expanding rapidly in the early game is hard to do by itself, thanks to how Settlers are now handled, and even if you managed to do that, you would find your empire collapsing because of too many cities too early. How does this work exactly?
A pretty radical change to how Settlers (and Workers, too) are built does a lot to put ICS in its grave. Now, your cities produce Settlers with both shields and food. That is, a city that has 5 food per turn and 3 shields will be producing a Settler at 8 shields per turn. At the same time, the city will not be growing as all excess food goes towards the Settler. Thus, you are either growing or building a Settler but not both at the same time.
While that makes ICS harder, it doesn't yet make it necessarily bad. However, the new maintenance system does. City improvement maintenance is gone – instead, there is city maintenance for which you need to start paying as soon as you build a new city. That maintenance cost is composed of two parts: distance from palace and total number of cities. The first one is, obviously, dependent on how far your city is from the capital, but the second one is more interesting. Number of cities maintenance costs goes up as you build more cities in all your cities. Thus, building a new city will, at some point, not only give you the maintenance expenses for it but also raise the maintenance costs of other cities.
With this system in place, attempting ICS is a fast way to suicide. You will, in the best case scenario, have more cities than your rivals but the cities will be smaller (thanks to not growing while those Settlers were being produced), and you will have to lower your research rate significantly to cover for maintenance costs. With that, you will simply fall far behind in technology by the Classical Age and become a non-entity. And no, you can't buy the techs without doing your own research. This will not be simply a domestic disadvantage for you. Falling behind in technology and ruining your economy will be a very likely reason for the aggressive enemies to turn their attention to you.
Finally, with regards to this subject, another significant change is that your Workers can't do anything when the game starts. You have to research techs to make them able to do anything. Researching The Wheel will allow them to build Roads, Agriculture to let them build Farms, and so on. Of course, if you want these technologies early, you are likely going to miss grabbing an early religion, which will be our next topic in this preview.
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