No. In Civ2 Tech was more important than number of cities. The best way to get good tech was building lots of cities, but ICS was only an issue for the more extreme difficulty settings.
You manage to contradict yourself twice in 2 sentences. Not making much of a point there, good sir.
Incendiary Device
Hah, yeah. It was a very badly worded explanation. But it came after a day of people flinging micro-points and a combination of exhaustion and a desire to deal with points quickly. I'll try to explain it better if you like, not that it even matters, of course, because even if make the point make sense to Civ4 fanboys then I'll still get crap ratings, because... fanboys. I've also made the points before and the fact that they don't sink in are pretty demotivational to a detailed reply as well.
It was a reply to a criticism that older Civs were 'just' ICS and Civ4 was supposedly incline because it ended ICS. This is similar to the complaint that instigated 1UPT when the same 'just' morons wouldn't shut-up about Stacks Of Doom being somehow problematic.
I'm not an extreme difficulty player, never have been, never will be. If I feel like playing a more complex Civ game then I'll accept that shitty start location that a min/maxer will just reload away from. If I feel like min/maxing then I'll try to get a top score on a more regular difficulty setting (yes, I have Hall of Fame results for regular level Civ3 games). If I want a more interesting game then I'll select more interesting starting parameters, such as different world sizes, more inhospitable terrain, Raging Barbarians, etc etc etc.
So, for me, I never used ICS in Civ2. I could create a neat, tight, awesome core of cities that would provide what I needed to have the kind of game I liked. What I'm not very good at in Civ games is the every-turn stamina requirements of managing too many little things. Take Domination Wins, for example, I have no end of games where I stop bothering to play them when I have over 66% population but still only about 55% land, I just cannot be arsed with the constant repetitive routine of finishing off that last 10% of conquering, it feels like my job is done and I'm completely burned out from moving 40-100 Units every turn. So when I create my core empire, I also like it to use the least amount of cities required to do the job.
In Civ2, because Units have power ratings instead of RNG you can man your smallish core of massive cities with just a few top Units and the underdeveloped AI cannot take your cities, no matter how big their stacks. So, for me, neither ICS nor Stacks of Doom were ever a game issue, everything about how I played already rejected those concepts as not physically possible from a player stamina perspective. I never went onto the extreme difficulty setting for the same reasons, its just more stamina work without much change in how the game plays out from a variety perspective (managing 8 cities requires the same choices to be made as managing 80 cities, you're just repeating something 80 times instead of 8 times), in exchange for a very slight increase in 'challenge'.
I have played higher difficulty games, such as Emperor or even Sid in Civ3 and survived and even got Hall of Fame scores, but I didn't 'enjoy' it from "Civ is my time-filler game while I reboot for something a bit more immersive" perspective. The joy I get from a quick regular game is just as nice, or even nicer than the emotion I get from completing a higher difficulty game (which is more of a sense of relief). ICS was only relevant for min/maxing on higher difficulties, and it was the kind of people who only care about playing the game to the 'end of the difficulty line' and then getting bored that made an issue out of this. No doubt the huge level of stamina they put into each game burned them out far quicker then the people who just liked playing quick games but with world set-up variations (not all, obviously, someone will say, hey, I did both, I'm talking about you're majority 'whiners' here, the kind of people who think regular levels are unplayable because winning the game is their only objective and they cannot help but min/max themselves every second, thereby burning themselves out quicker, you know, the more autism-inspired personalities).
Now, moving onto Civ3. I tried to replicate this approach in my first game. I built up a solid core of cities and aimed for the Spaceship. I soon had each of my 8 cities at size 18+, at least half a tech age of tech superiority and at least 3 Infantry guarding each city with all the added defence combos of being fortified in a Metropolis with Civil Defence. It was awesome. Then suddenly an AI civ declared war on me. Hah, I thought, that backward numbskull wont get far. How wrong I was! The AI's cavalry marched in by the bucketload and tore through my Infantry defenders like they were butter. Game over. I'll put the stats here for you to fully digest:
Infantry: 6 attack, 10 Defence, 1 Movement + 100% Defence from Metropolis, +25% from being Fortified, +50% for Civil Defence = Unit has a Defence value of 27.5
Cavalry: 6 attack, 3 Defence, 3 Movement +zero bonuses to attack = attack value of 6
Holy crap, this is some 'different' shit going on here...
But Civ3 introduced Corruption. The purpose of Corruption was to prevent ICS, to try and limit players to just a core of strong and powerful cities (the way I always played anyway), but has completely shafted this concept by a change in another system which completely contradicts and works against just playing with a small core of cities, that of no Unit being a secure defence, the numbers are suddenly pretty meaningless in short stacks and only have relevancy when taken as a mathematical equation of huge numbers, like rolling a 10 sided dice for each battle, but 1-2/9-10 automatically result in a lost hit-point like some kind of critical miss/hit.
Because the game relates number of Units allowed to number of cities, the best way to have your (now more crucial than ever) Stacks of Doom was to spam cities for no other reason than it increased your army size and Diplomatic respect (you also get harassed less the more land you own, such as no declaration of war after refusing to give Montezuma Iron, for example). On top of this, Civ2's Tech could be mastered to the point where you could learn 1 Tech per turn (the ultimate aim of ICS), completely unnecessary unless you're going for an autistic maximum, but there nonetheless. For me I was happy if it took a whopping (! lol) 2 turns, or even 3 and one was just a bonus etc etc. So Civ3 introduced a minimum 4 turns per Tech, even if you were producing enough beakers to learn the tech in 1 turn then it'd still take 4 turns, thereby slowing down the rate at which you could 'get ahead' of the AI, resulting in a further requirement to keep more troops on hand to deal with any potential threat, meaning more cities to have more free Units.
And these were the concepts that Civ4 carried on with and even enhanced; greater economic punishment for building lots of cities while also greater requirement to have more cities because of RNG, Diplomatic pressure & Cultural Border expansion, and less zoomable Tech tree et al. Ironically, on the more extreme difficulty levels, people still recommend building lots of cities, the only difference really being that on the regular difficulties it's now actually less compelling to just go with a core. And this is why we got Civ5, because the autists couldn't help themselves in Civ2, as in, couldn't help WHINING about ICS... (and then Stacks of Doom).