tourism vs adjusted tourism?

Anyone know the difference.

Last game i had like 900 culture and China has 800 or so tourism. However there adjusted tourism to me was like 1250 so they still defeated me with culture victory.

I tried declaring war on them to see if that changed the adjusted tourism but it didn't seem to. What's up with this.

Also for some reason Poland was a really weak civilization and extremely resistant to China's tourism. Despite 800 tourism the adjusted for them was in the 300's or so.

Someone explain please.

In the culture screen you see a percentage modifier after the base tourism you're generating - this is the bonus you get from open borders, shared ideology, shared religion, having a diplomat, ongoing trade routes, and one of the Aesthetics social policies, or conversely the penalty for differing ideologies or warfare (the tooltip explains the calculation). The positive modifiers are each +25% increments (40% with the Aesthetics policy); the negative ones are each -34%.

The adjusted tourism is the result you get once you add the % tourism modifier to the base tourism, and this is the value that's used to calculate how much tourism you're imposing on a civ (or suffering from).

This is why it's a good idea to avoid open borders with a civ that has high pressure from tourism and why (unless they're sufficiently influential already that you'll suffer happiness penalties) it's usually a good idea to choose a different ideology from any cultural victory contenders (you can't control whether they're trading with you or using a diplomat except by going to war with them). Conversely, if you're the one pushing culture you want open borders and diplomats of your own, and to be trading with culturally vulnerable civs - you also want them to adopt your ideology.

Ya I had no choice but share ideologies.

I didn't have open borders but i was trading with them a lot. Perhaps I should have put an embargo on them so they couldn't send trade routes?

What else could I have done

The best defence against tourism is culture. They can only have influence on you if their tourism overtakes your culture. Try to optimise the amount of culture you are generating, be it from cultural city states, working Great Artist/Musician/Writer slots, choosing culture boosts in your religion, or beelining culture wonders such as Sistine Chapel.

I find taking a different ideology to everyone else will always be beneficial to you if you can keep the City States on your side. If you manage to pass your ideology as the world ideology (this is where the City States control comes in) you shouldn't have any problem with unhappiness.

Acrobatc101 said:

Ya I had no choice but share ideologies.

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Sadly, this is often the case, and why it's a good idea to focus heavily on culture and tourism even if you aren't going for culture victory - it denies them tourism boosters. The way cultural "defence" works is somewhat opaque - while your resistance to other cultures' tourism is based on your culture (not tourism) output, your ability to resist ideological pressure seems to be based on your own tourism output (since the preferred ideology of a civ is determined by the combined influence of the civs following that ideology) - so you actually need high tourism to counter rival ideologies, not just high culture.

I didn't have open borders but i was trading with them a lot. Perhaps I should have put an embargo on them so they couldn't send trade routes?

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That's an idea - I hadn't considered that use of embargos.

What else could I have done

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Well, you've already had one idea I hadn't! Unfortunately the culture system as now implemented is not very dynamic - if you have an opponent with high tourism, and you don't have key culture boosters of your own like Sistine Chapel or Alhambra, all you can really do to respond is use two temporary measures: propose and win the World's Fair to double your culture output, and so defence against influence, and use your Great Writers to create political treatises. And neither GW creation and winning the World's Fair are entirely within your control.

The only other factor I can think of is religion - make sure you aren't sharing a religion with that civ; if you are, and have a religion of your own, make that your majority religion instead. If you don't, steal someone's missionary and create a city you can use to create faith-spreaders of that religion. There should probably be a negative tourism modifier for differing religions, but sadly there isn't.

EDIT: Culture-boosting Congress resolutions may be helpful (if you have access to Natural Wonders you can try Natural Landmarks - however you'll need to control the voting to pass it since the AI has a curious tendency to avoid settling NWs and will always vote against Natural Landmarks), but beware of Cultural Heritage Sites. The AI always loves this, and it will boost your culture output a lot, but as worded the culture counts as being generated by the Wonders. This means that hotels and airports turn it into tourism. If CHS is in effect, try to repeal it; any civ with a high enough tourism output to be a cultural victory threat will have a lot of Wonders.

Cultural Heritage Sites was in effect but it seemed like it was benefitting me a lot.

I had 800 culture per turn, and at least 300 of it was from that. I controlled new zealand\Australia area which has most of the artifacts\sites that i turned into culture generators.

I was playing immortal so I had only 2 wonders...

I actually won the game with diplomatic (I sold all my units off and spent it all bribing city states right before vote) prior to the cultural loss.

However, it seemed impossible to stop as I had 800-900 culture per turn which was a lot and i still lost. I assume they got internet + CN tower and that was the win

Acrobatc101 said:

Cultural Heritage Sites was in effect but it seemed like it was benefitting me a lot.

I had 800 culture per turn, and at least 300 of it was from that. I controlled new zealand\Australia area which has most of the artifacts\sites that i turned into culture generators.

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That's Historical Landmarks, not Cultural Heritage Sites. If you had only two Wonders, Cultural Heritage Sites (+3 culture from each World Wonder) was doing you no good at all. In that scenario, repealing it should be a top priority.

I'm not sure how tourism vs. culture scales in terms of the rate at which influence grows - evidently it's not a 1-to-1 relationship since for most of the game all civs will have much lower tourism output than culture output, however tourism is still increasing relative to culture (for instance you can have 100 culture a turn and the other civ 10 tourism a turn, and their influence will still be "Rising Slowly"). Given that Cultural Heritage Sites turns 50% of a World Wonder's culture into tourism, but influence is going to increase at a rate much higher than 1 tourism of theirs for every 2 culture of yours, unless you have more Wonders than your opponent CHS will always benefit the "cultural aggressor" more than the "cultural defender".

EDIT: Another tip I hadn't thought of before: denouncing. If you denounce a civ, the embassies are cancelled. If you have no embassy, they can't send a diplomat. Since that's a 50% increase to their tourism, that could be a very important way to cut down on their influence.

Thanks for this thread - it's making me realise there's actually quite a lot of dynamism involved, and several countermeasures available that I hadn't thought of.

If you're not squeamish about war, you can go find some Great Works to steal. Ideally you'll take them off the person who's ahead of you in Tourism for the biggest swing, but if you don't think you can take them in a fight, there's always the option of looting some Works from a third party.

There's some secondary effects to this too, namely that they'll stop trading Open Borders with you and will often try to avoid sending you Trade Routes if you're being a warmonger. They don't want you receiving Gold. War will also cause any diplomats to flee your lands if you declare it on them.

I think war may be quite important for cultural victories - if there's a civ you can't easily culturally dominate, just wipe it out and work on the rest culturally. Particularly if you end up missing key wonders and you can take them from someone else.

Though I was wrong about the adjustment - there is no penalty to influence from being at war, only for having differing ideologies.

I've been inspired to try for a cultural win in my Portugal 12-civ Immortal game - surprisingly, despite missing all the key Wonders up as far as Eiffel (Broadway and Louvre are still available, and no one else seems to be actively pushing culture - Sejong's the only one with more tourism than me, and he's remained static on 50 or so while mine's nearly doubled), I'm so far already influential with Venice (twice - somehow they briefly caused my influence to fall back down, but it didn't last), familiar with the Ottomans, and getting there with everyone else.

I tried placing an embargo on myself to stop them, but honestly didn't do much. The tourism adjusted seems to be cumulative.

So they have 180000 tourism to my 112000 culture. It would take me many turns to catch them even if I developed a surplus.

Having said that I'm not sure what the embargo did.