Disputed tiles: How will ownership be determined now culture is global?

If I had to make a guess, it would be this:

Culture is still built up at a local level (by building culture buildings etc), but it goes automatically into the global pool.

When that pool reaches a certain threshold, you get an outgrowth in your city borders simultaneously.

The largest growth will probably be out from cities at the fringe, followed by tiles which are easiest to claim (along rivers, grasslands, coastline & plains), then tiles which get you closer to a desired resource. Any available tiles you can get from that threshold will then probably be allocated to any tiles-at the core-which you might not already own, & which don't fit the above criteria.
Of course, we know that land can be purchased with gold, but what I'm not so sure of is if you can spend a lump-sum of culture to purchase *specific* tiles (but, in so doing, putting off the next outgrowth).
As to which civs win out in a contest-I'm guessing that it will be down to the civ with the largest global culture-with local culture probably existing to break any rare deadlocks. Again though, I believe that if you miss out on a tile you can still purchase it-either via diplomacy or directly, but that the cost will be significantly higher because its already owned.

Aussie.

i think the real question is: will the ai be able to determine the strategic value of a tile a human player wants to buy?

i doubt it.

Well, I guess it's not that complicated, a simple formula could calculate if the AI's city will starve without the food, or the relation of hammers on the tile compared to total hammers in the city the tile belongs to, and so on. Ressources are easy, too.

What's hard is the strategic value...

Aussie_Lurker said:

Of course, we know that land can be purchased with gold, but what I'm not so sure of is if you can spend a lump-sum of culture to purchase *specific* tiles (but, in so doing, putting off the next outgrowth).
As to which civs win out in a contest-I'm guessing that it will be down to the civ with the largest global culture-with local culture probably existing to break any rare deadlocks. Again though, I believe that if you miss out on a tile you can still purchase it-either via diplomacy or directly, but that the cost will be significantly higher because its already owned.
Aussie.

Click to expand...

Are you sure about this hex trading thing?

From my understanding, culture will decide who owns a tile (like in current civilization), expanding gradually.

The big difference is that you might buy "extra culture" in each city (like you can do with production), which will expand to extra tiles...

I might be wrong, of course, but to me it seems the most elegant and simple mechanic for playing with borders without adding micromanagement.

Tomice said:

Well, I guess it's not that complicated, a simple formula could calculate if the AI's city will starve without the food, or the relation of hammers on the tile compared to total hammers in the city the tile belongs to, and so on. Ressources are easy, too.

What's hard is the strategic value...

Click to expand...

yeah, i really doubt they have an algorithm that is able to determine the strategic value of tiles.
sounds incredibly complicated.

Frank Drebin said:

i think the real question is: will the ai be able to determine the strategic value of a tile a human player wants to buy?

i doubt it.

Click to expand...

You choose the tiles you purchase, the AI chooses the tiles it claims with culture accumulation.

Mao Zedong :

Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

Click to expand...

I'm betting it will be pretty much the same with culture.

Trias said:

I believe it has been mentioned in one of the interviews (around GDC I think) that culture would be permanent to a city, i.e. when conquering a city you immediately gained its culture. (This in contrast to the feature of civ4 where conquered cities would be swamped in foreign culture.) This implies that culture is local to some extent, or at least that the ownership of certain tiles is bound to a particular city.

Click to expand...

Yep, that's how I remember hearing it too. Culture will be global for the purpose of determining when you gain new tiles (outside of buying them), but there will still be a local component to culture. As I said above-my guess is that this will *partly* determine which cities gain new tiles first.

Aussie.

Johnny Be said:

Are you sure about this hex trading thing?

From my understanding, culture will decide who owns a tile (like in current civilization), expanding gradually.

The big difference is that you might buy "extra culture" in each city (like you can do with production), which will expand to extra tiles...

I might be wrong, of course, but to me it seems the most elegant and simple mechanic for playing with borders without adding micromanagement.

Click to expand...

Well in the game you can buy unowned tiles using gold, & I do recall hearing in an interview that part of the expanded diplomacy system was to allow players to purchase owned hexes from other players. Now I could be wrong, or they might drop it for some reason, but this is my *current* understanding of things. The whole point, I think, is that they want to make the accumulation of land much more dynamic than it was in Civ3 & Civ4.

Aussie.

Schuesseled said:

You choose the tiles you purchase, the AI chooses the tiles it claims with culture accumulation.

Click to expand...

Yeah, doesn't sound too hard to put together an algorithm for this. Indeed, I'm sure you could program an AI to recognize the benefits in buying a tile that has a valuable resource on it.

Aussie.

Tomice said:

You need local culture, else all cities would gain an additional tile in the same moment. So while I have no idea how they will do it precisely, it would be odd if cultural buildings and such have no local effect for the city they are built in.

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I disagree. If you take into account most well known costructions in the world, such as the Pyramids or the Temple of Artemis, people will generally know the civilization that built them but far less people will know its exact location; which is equivalent in Civ terms to saying that culture is added globally to a civ rather than locally.

You're right about that. But I wasn't saying the pyramids had no effect on the population in some remote egyptian border town, I meant it would be strange if their effect wasn't stronger in their immediate surrounding.

Why would they give us reasons to build specialized cultural centers, when they had a system where culture mattered everywhere?

Well, in fact, apart from the cultural victory, culture did not matter much in Civ4 in the center of your empire. But in Civ5, it would - you need it to unlock social policies, so it would matter everywhere.

Semmel said:

I dont know anything for sure, but this is the way I would do it in Civ5 given the things I know.

Culture is global and there are no more shared tiles. Once a tile is owned by a civ, it isnt going to flipp back by it self. A bordering civ that could be owner of the tile if the other civ wouldnt be there, can by the tile in the diplomathy screen from the other civ. If the other civ denies, than there is no pieceful way to get it. However, it is possible to annex the tile with a unit. Of course, you would have to get to war first.

Why I think like that? Because as I can remember from my history classes, no land was ever just given to an other kingdom or state just because there was a big city with many "wonders" in it. Land always was either gained by trade (for our amarican friends: alaska is such a kase) or it had to be claimed in a war. There was no "free" peacefull land grabbing.

In civ 5, this would be very interesting since it would open up a lot of diplomatic possibilities, give land for an other civ to stay in peace, demand land from a weak neighbor because you are too bored to crush him.. well.. we will see how it is done in civ 5

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Lots of land changed hands peacefully in medieval and renaissance Europe due to royal marriages and/or kings inheriting titles from (sometimes distant) relatives. Although often these in pricincipal peaceful changes would result in wars because the locals weren't really enarmored of their new overlord or other powers thought they had a better claim (War of the Spanish/Austrian succession and the Norman invasion of England are some examples). Unfortunately Civ doesn't have a mechanism that replicates the massive influence the marriages, deaths and family ties of kings had on European history.