Civilization – Is Infinite City Spam a good strategy on Immortal/Deity in Brave New World

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Infinite City Spam (ICS) has been the go-to Win Button in the Civilization series for some time. In short, the idea is to build as many cities as humanly possible; even if some of those cities aren't much good, they're still better than not having the city. In Civ I, II, and III, there wasn't any reason not to build a hundred cities as quickly as possible. Civ IV introduced a per-city "tax", which increased with the number of cities in your empire; this stopped ICS, because a low-value city would damage your empire.

Civ V tried to prevent ICS via the Global Happiness mechanic. The idea was to make it harder to build extra cities by adding a per-city penalty to Global Happiness. Unfortunately, Civ V also has a goodly collection of per-city bonuses, making ICS workable again; it's telling that the answer to "How do I beat Civ5 on deity?" is Infinite City Spam. (Per-city bonuses include Martitime City-States and a wide variety of social policies.) Clever players found ways to do ICS despite the Global Happiness mechanic (mostly via the happiness-producing buildings).

Civ V has had several patches and expansions since its initial release, in an attempt to reduce the efficiency of ICS:

  1. Maritime City-State allies only give +1 food per city, not +2.
  2. Happiness buildings now produce Local Happiness, which cannot be used outside of the city that produces it. Tiny cities with all of the happiness-producing buildings no longer create a net-positive-happiness city (unless there are luxury resources or world wonders there, which are limited in supply).
  3. Happiness buildings produce less Happiness. (Typically +2 instead of +3.)
  4. The Social Policies have been overhauled; several of them no longer give per-city bonuses, or delay those bonuses until all 6 policies in a tree have been filled (to make it harder to accumulate a large number of these bonuses).
  5. Research costs now increase 5% per city (including puppets), and Libraries no longer have specialist slots; small cities will be a net penalty to Science production.
  6. Gold production was overhauled in Brave New World, reducing the power of improvements like Market and Bank while granting limited-number-per-civilization Trade Routes.

So, given the above changes, is Infinite City Spam still a good strategy as of the Brave New World expansion, in games on Immortal or Deity? Is it still viable, but now much weaker? If it's still possible, how is it done? (I'm assuming the guides from 2010 are obsolete.)

Best Answer

This comes down to the meaning of "Viable", so in this case, I am going to define viable as "Is this a good strategy on a typical Immortal or Diety game"?

ICS is not a good strategy on Immortal/Diety. You described several factors contributing to the decline of ICS, but most of them are managable. Happiness can be dealt with relatively easily using a combination of religious buildings, circuses, the liberty policy granting +1 happiness from city connections, and normal city buildings to spam an arbitrary number of happy-neutral cities fairly early on, so long as you limit their size when needed. So ICS is possible. However, its not viable.

However, while ICS is possible, its not a good strategy. One thing has shut down ICS, The fact that the incremental value of cities beyond the 4th has been decreased over and over again, until it becomes a dubious proposition to keep any city without excellent positioning or wonders.

This decrease in value has come in at least three separate places. The first is the science penalty per city, which is a very serious problem. On harder difficulties you spend most of the game behind on science anyway, so you don't want to take even more penalties. The second is the significant decrease in power for cities that don't have good resources. Resources are more important to making a city worthwhile than they were in civ 4, and the removal of bonus gold from river tiles has compounded that in BNW's new economy. The third is the tradition tree which is a very strong strategy that rewards you for the 4 city start.

The removal of whipping is probably a separate issue that also hurt ICS relative to Civ4 by ensuring that you have to halt production on something to build settlers, instead of "paying" hammers and gold over time (in the form of lost income)

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