Explanation of Ideology pressure with examples

sonicandfffan

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Right there seems to be some confusion as to whether tourism or culture defends against ideology pressure. The answer to this is both are required to defend.

Click the tourism button at the top of the screen. This gives you the following screen:

Spoiler :




You can also choose from the dropdown menu to pick other Civs and see their influence over everyone, including you:

Spoiler :




How tourism works

Firstly you need to know how tourism works. Your tourism is your offensive culture. Each turn your current level of tourism (after modifiers) is added to all Civilizations who you have met. Your total tourism for that Civ is then compared to the total amount of culture that civ has generated. For example your tourism is +10 after 10 turns your tourism for that Civ will be 100. If that Civ's culture is 10,000 your percentage will be 1% (since 100 is 1% of 10,000)

Levels of influence

Most importantly for ideologies, notice the levels of influence. These change once your tourism reaches a certain percentage of a Civ's culture:

0: Unknown: Less than 10%
1: Exotic: 10% - 30%
2: Familiar 30% - 60%
3: Popular: 60% - 100%
4: Influential: 100% - 200%
5: Dominant: More than 200%

The conditions for a cultural victory are that your level reaches influential with every Civ.

Notice the number before each level. Let's call this the influence level

So how does ideological influence work?

Well while your tourism is being pitted against the culture of other civilizations, their tourism is being pitted against your culture. If you click the drop down menu in the above tourism screen you can see how influential these Civs are against your Civ.

To calculate that Civ's ideological pressure over you (or yours over them) you do the following:

Ideology pressure = Other Civ's influence level on you - Your influence level on them

So if you have high culture and everyone is unknown to you but you have no tourism output, your Civ will be fine. Likewise if everyone is exotic to you but you are familiar with everyone else, your Civ will be fine.

If the number is negative, your civ will be influencing the other civ. If it is positive they will be influencing you.

For example In the above screenshot Brazil is familiar with Spain and Spain are unknown to Brazil. So Spain's ideology pressure over Brazil will be 0-2=-2 so Brazil will have 2 pressure over Spain with its ideology (and Spain will have 0 pressure over Brazil).

Of course, it doesn't quite end there, there are three ideologies. Let's say your Civ is following ideology A. Calculate the ideology pressure for every Civ following ideology A and add the positive numbers together (if you influence the other civs then this counts as a 0 for these formulas). This is your ideology defense.

Ideology defense = (Sum of positive ideology pressures from ideology A)

Note if ideology A is the world ideology then the formula becomes:

Ideology defense = (Sum of positive ideology pressures from ideology A) + 2

For example If I was Spain and I chose Autocracy, if Brazil has 2 pressure over me (as above) and France has 3 pressure over me and they both have Autocracy then my Ideology defense is 5. If Autocracy becomes the world ideology then Spain's Ideology defence is 7.

The total unhappiness level your Civ is subject to from ideologies X and Y that your civ isn't following is given as follows.

Total unhappiness level = (Sum of positive ideology pressures from ideology X) + (Sum of positive ideology pressures from ideology Y) - (Ideology Defense)

For example: If Spain was as above and had ideology defense of 5 but Austria (Freedom) has a pressure of 4 and the Maya (Freedom) has a pressure of 3 then the total unhappiness level is 4+3-5 =2. Then Spain would have dissidents thanks to Freedom. If Autocracy becomes the world ideology then the total ideology pressure returns to 0 and Spain is content.

For example 2: Spain's defense is 5 (as above). Freedom has a pressure of 4 and Order has a pressure of 2. Then the total will be 4+2-5=1 and you have an unhappiness level of 1 or dissidents.

For example 3: Suppose instead only you follow Freedom (defense =0), order has a pressure of 2 (i.e 2 civs have an ideology pressure of 1 over you - their influence over your civ is one level above your level over theirs) and autocracy has a pressure of 1. Then your total unhappiness level will be 3 which will be Civil Resistance

The unhappiness levels

0: Content (0 change)
1-2: Dissidents (1 :c5angry: per city or 1 :c5angry: per 10 population, whichever is more)
3-4: Civil Resistance (2 :c5angry: per city or 1 :c5angry: per 5 population, whichever is more)
5+: Revolutionary Wave (4 :c5angry: per city or 1 :c5angry: per 3 population, whichever is more)

Note revolutionary wave is the highest level of influence a Civ will reach. You can be at an unhappiness level of 7 and still be revolutionary wave, see the following image:

Spoiler :


How to avoid happiness penalties

-The most effective way is to make your ideology the world ideology. It provides 2 defense for your Civ against other ideologies and 2 offense to convince other Civs to change. Also note that if a civ is hugely influential over everyone it will have no ideology defense (since nobody is influencing that Civ with an ideology) so it will experience dissidents from a world ideology. You can pay other Civs to vote for you in the world congress to get this through.

-Increase your culture to reduce the influence level other civs have over you

-Increase your tourism to increase the influence level you have over other civs

-Choose the same ideology as the Civ most influential over you to get some ideology defense

-Remove the most influential Civ from the game through warfare.

-Use the great writer's ability to boost your Civ's culture

-Use the great musician's ability to boost your tourism with an influential civ

What won't work:

-Removing a few cities from an influential Civ (their CPT might drop allowing you to increase your tourism influence over them, but their culture total won't drop). Also this will only affect one civ directly, whereas pressure will be coming from all directions.

-Increasing your pressure over Civs you already influence, it is only those who influence you that matter. If they convert you won't get any benefit either because they don't influence you, but them converting might cause them to influence Civs who influence you and cause them to switch, so it can help indirectly.
 
Thank you! It makes perfect sense now. This should be in Sticky.
 
I also couldn't find any mention of how this works in the game at all.

I looked through the civilopedia but all this information came from game experience and loading old saved games to confirm what was going on.
 
Civilopedia is very vague and poor in V. Thanks for compiling this, although I too had already learned most of this by experience.
 
Quick question, how often is ideological conversion? I rarely see AI switch once they've picked an ideoogy or are you referring to city flipping?

no I mean ideological conversion

it does happen.

In my Celts game two civs changed after a world ideology was put in place.

I imagine it's not common because the AI doesn't suffer much from the unhappiness, firstly because it gets a lot of happiness bonuses which keep it from going into negatives even in "revolutionary wave" and secondly because going negative isn't as bad for the AI as it is for a human player (I'm not sure on the specifics here, but I seem to recall reading that the AI doesn't get the same penalties for empire wide unhappiness as humans).

Also the AI loves the early adopter bonuses for ideologies so expect them to take up ideologies you don't have (and the AI doesn't like freedom, which seems to have the best tenets).
 
Thanks. I do see the AI go into steep -10~-20 happiness often; Once Washington had -40 and had rebells popping up which exploded as it pillaged several of my trade routes to him, creating even more rebels.

It took them a while but the AI seem to crush it and kept on going, eventually returning from the brink to less unhappiness. It's interesting that they put that in and the AI seems capable of handling it.

My experience is, they seem to stick things out, even when I get my ideology as the world ideology. Good to know they can switch.
 
I still have no idea what I'm looking at in that first screen. The second one is clear to me.

Ah I meant to upload Brazil's screen as well.

The first screen is just your total tourism vs. each civ's total culture. It's what decides your influence level over other civs.
 
Do happiness buildings reduce ideological unhappiness? I've built several but they don't seem to be reducing the unhappiness. Is culture/tourism or switching ideologies my only options?
 
Do happiness buildings reduce ideological unhappiness? I've built several but they don't seem to be reducing the unhappiness. Is culture/tourism or switching ideologies my only options?

The unhappiness from idealogical pressure works just the same as any other unhappiness, it goes into the giant happy pool to determine your civ's overall amount of happiness/unhappiness.

What's happening is that at the same time you're building a happy building or two, something else is happening to cause more unhappiness (cities getting bigger, more idealogical pressure, luxuries getting flipped from city states, etc.)

Also, note the formula for amount of unhappiness includes a term that depends on the number of citizens you have. So not only does growing a pop produce another unhappiness, it can generate extra unhappiness due to the idealogical pressure.
 
Do happiness buildings reduce ideological unhappiness? I've built several but they don't seem to be reducing the unhappiness. Is culture/tourism or switching ideologies my only options?

Ideological happiness just gets tacked onto the end of your overall happiness/unhappiness so yes, having more happiness will help (in fact, in my Celt's game I experienced Civil Resistance for a long period of time and managed to limit overall unhappiness to single digits, so my growth was killed but nothing else).

The thing is, if you have 5 cities and experience a revolutionary wave that's at least -20 unhappiness (probably more unless you have less than 12 people in each city). You have to be prepared for that. Usually the unhappiness penalties are so large that you have to react to it.

By react to it, I mean prepare well before ideologies come into play, you should be buffing up your culture so that you aren't weak to other Civs and you should invest some time into offensive tourism, exotic status is easily achievable and gives you a nice little buffer against other Civs. If Civil Resistance gets thrust upon you, you should either switch ideologies if it's not too painful to lose the tenets or try to buy the world ideology proposal using city states and trading votes, that's the fastest solution.
 
btw the reason people are finding that the penalties get so large so quickly is that they neglect their culture/tourism and then half of the civs in the game are at least one level higher in terms of influence than them. Although it's only 1 influence per civ, it adds up to be about 5 or 6 overall and then you're in revolutionary wave.

A low culture total can be deadly because of this. It really makes the tradition opener vital, people who neglect building a few wonders and investing in the guilds will suffer (guild specialists will add a good amount of CPT).

Also, although more cities = bad for social policies, more cities = good for culture total. The total is just the running total of your culture so far. In other words more cities will produce more CPT, even though the checkpoints where you get social policies are further apart. That's why the culture giants in your games are usually the runaways with a bunch of cities.
 
I've also noticed that if you're first to reach ideologies and research radio before anyone else can get theirs, you can propose your ideology to be the world ideology. Before the AI has an ideology of its own, it won't get angry about that and is less likely to vote against it and may even decide to support it "in advance". Works on Emperor, at least.
 
I've also noticed that if you're first to reach ideologies and research radio before anyone else can get theirs, you can propose your ideology to be the world ideology. Before the AI has an ideology of its own, it won't get angry about that and is less likely to vote against it and may even decide to support it "in advance". Works on Emperor, at least.

true but this requires you to reach radio 25 turns before the AI adopts an ideology, which means you must have been focusing on BPT pretty heavily (and probably neglecting your culture as a result), so it's a pretty risky strategy.

That said if you are that far ahead you don't need spies, so just turn them all into diplomats, wait until they finish making introductions, trade for support on the world congress vote and then rotate them to other civs and eventually buy everyones support.

You need to move early to buy votes, because you have to rotate your diplomats to get round everybody. Extra copies of luxuries are very useful for these trades.
 
Thanks for this post, it goes to show that just because Tourism is "the offensive one", it doesn't mean it's not important for defense as well (by way of reducing the pressure gap).

Also this post should be considered for the War Academy.
 
Nah, culture and science go almost hand in hand with the former only requiring you to keep the guilds up and running, and build a new art slot every now and then.
 
Can ending Open Borders agreements buff my culture/tourism defense?

Most civs in my world are Order which is the ideological preference. The most powerful civs are Freedom, and I'm with two oddballs having Autocracy. I have seven cities plus one puppet. My base Revolutionary Wave unhappiness is -32:c5angry: and my overall unhappiness is -15:c5angry:. I refuse to change my ideology and a large number of luxuries have been banned by the World Congress otherwise I feel I would be fine. I'm building Castles and Arsenals in all my cities with the intention of taking Fortified Borders in 20 turns when I can take a new policy.
 
Can ending Open Borders agreements buff my culture/tourism defense?

Not retroactively. When your borders are open to someone, their tourism against you grows faster. When you close the borders, the extra growth modifier is removed, but the damage already done remains.
 
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