Explanation of Ideology pressure with examples

I'm glad they made city flipping pretty rare.
 
I haven't flipped any cities to me yet in a game, but I did have a couple of my own cities flip in a game where I was going for a late Domination victory. Rebels and city flipping appear to be independent events with a similar cause (i.e. unhappiness). I was quickly and efficiently mopping up any rebels that appeared, but that didn't stop my cities from flipping to Persia. Additionally, Persia didn't have a huge level of ideological influence with me, only about 2 points, but in the absence of any defensive influence and compounded by already high unhappiness in my empire, that was enough to cause flipping. Of course, the AI gets enough bonus happiness that you'll need to have a lot more pressure and cut off their happiness from other directions if you want to cause a city flip.

And let me tell you, having one of your tall, founded cities flip (the mechanic seemed to ignore my puppets) is a real pain. It's in revolt long enough that there's no real ability for the other civ to hold it if you're already at war unless they can move an army in fast. Of course, in that case, you're still demolishing your own infrastructure.
 
hm yeah I can imagine if you're playing tall with puppets a city flip can be game changing
 
Still no city flip in my latest game, but I did force 2 Civs to switch to my ideology (and everyone else chose Freedom anyway, presumably because they anticipated the unhappiness penalty for not following me). France lost 8 policies because of switching.

Understanding fully how ideology pressure works made it a lot easier to anticipate and utilise its full potential.
 
btw, has anybody experienced changing ideologies yet?

I assume you lose all your policies, which I guess is pretty painful given how good they are and how long they take to accumulate in the late game.
 
You don't lose all your policies. You get to pick some new ones from the ideology you change to - not as many but almost, I think.

I've seen the AI change many times but haven't had to do that myself yet.
 
It isn't really even possible to neglect tourism over culture or vice versa. Those two come from pretty much the same sources, only they are affected by different modifiers.

That's not true. I tried to play a game without ever creating a great work of writing and paintings.

That doesn't mean that I neglected culture entirely (though I neglected cultural wonders). In fact I built my writer's guild pretty soon and then proceeded to convert every single great writer directly into culture, later on I built the artist's guild and then I converted them all to golden ages.

The benefits were quite good. On the long run a writer can produce more culture if you convert it into a great work, but if you just covert it into a culture straight away you get policies faster. More importantly that's still culture that adds up to your total.

To my surprise when I was in the mid game I had actually the highest amount of culture of every other civs, while at the same time I had the lowest amount of tourism.

Near the end game I got surpassed by two civs on culture, but I was still up there not too far behind.

I ended up having dissidents because two civs with other ideologies had exotic influence on me, but it was somehow mitigated by a friend that also had exotic influence on me, I had tons of happiness so I didn't mind.

The only tourism that I produced was from the tour Eiffel, a few excavated artifacts and great work of music which I started producing late.



You don't lose all your policies. You get to pick some new ones from the ideology you change to - not as many but almost, I think.

I've seen the AI change many times but haven't had to do that myself yet.

I've never tried, but you should only lose 2 tenets, which means you'll break even if you got the 2 bonus tenets for adopting the ideology first.
 
I'd like ideally to see at least some difference between unhappiness levels 1 and 2, and likewise between 3 and 4, as far as I can see there is none at all. I don't know what design considerations led them to treat it in this way, but have never really understood it.
 
I'd like ideally to see at least some difference between unhappiness levels 1 and 2, and likewise between 3 and 4, as far as I can see there is none at all. I don't know what design considerations led them to treat it in this way, but have never really understood it.

You're right, the problem is that if one civ has pressure over you, chances are the others do too.

So it very quickly spirals out of control. I imagine that's what led to the design of having several "stages" to a level, but in reality a lot of the time it's all or nothing anyway.
 
Scottjegg, that sounds brilliant. I love it when civs start imploding due to unhappiness. I managed to get one powerful civ embargo'd, and had his luxuries banned beforehand. It was brilliant seeing his materialized barbarians attacking him ,causing numerous problems.
 
Sonic, I have witnessed a city flip in my current game. The Incans were on the dissident level of unhappiness and I checked the culture screen. They had adopted order, I had freedom and Songhai had autocracy. The Incans preferred ideology was the Songhai one (autocracy). Soon after an Incan city flipped to the Songhai civilization. I had noted that my culture influence over the Incans was slightly lower than the Songhai influence. If I had been slightly more influential than the Songhai would the Incan city have flipped to me instead? And would their choice have changed to my ideology?
 
Somehow something still doesn't sound right. In all my games my culture output is reasonably high (I play on King), much higher than most other civs' tourism output. So their influence should never reach even exotic level. It should be sinking. But it usually doesn't. And yes, I'm factoring in modifiers like diplomats et al. (Btw: most civs will happily sell you open borders for a pittance even when you're in a head-to-head race for cultural victory - would you consider that an exploit?)

Another question: what does influence level dominant do? Any experiences?
 
Having a city flip to you has negatives as well as positives. It has an effect on your happiness.

I was next to the Zulu in my first BNW game. The flip was a complete surprise to me. Someone mentioned that the distance from the Capital was a factor. It must be the distance from their capital in my case. The flipped city was deep in their territory. There was only a very narrow corridor I could use to get some of my units to it. I was able to keep it but with difficulty. Their next two cities that flipped to me were on my border: much easier to cope with. Then, they decided to switch to my ideology,

I was still able to get a science victory. BTW, I don't think the neighboring Zulu ever attacked me unless it was very early in the game. After that I kept building my military so I steadily moved up to number one in military, at least on my continent. The Zulu seemed to respect that throughout the rest of the game.

Also, I made certain to trade with them.
 
Somehow something still doesn't sound right. In all my games my culture output is reasonably high (I play on King), much higher than most other civs' tourism output. So their influence should never reach even exotic level. It should be sinking. But it usually doesn't. And yes, I'm factoring in modifiers like diplomats et al. (Btw: most civs will happily sell you open borders for a pittance even when you're in a head-to-head race for cultural victory - would you consider that an exploit?)

Another question: what does influence level dominant do? Any experiences?

I haven't seen any special effects for influence level dominant except that when you reach it, you can no longer lose any influence.
 
Somehow something still doesn't sound right. In all my games my culture output is reasonably high (I play on King), much higher than most other civs' tourism output. So their influence should never reach even exotic level. It should be sinking. But it usually doesn't. And yes, I'm factoring in modifiers like diplomats et al. (Btw: most civs will happily sell you open borders for a pittance even when you're in a head-to-head race for cultural victory - would you consider that an exploit?)

Another question: what does influence level dominant do? Any experiences?

Exotic only requires that he have Tourism equal to 10% of your Culture, it's basically impossible to prevent Exotic once they have some Tourism being generated.

See the post on page 2, he explains it well: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=12668403&postcount=34

Basically no amount of defense will help if you have no offense, you can't hope to have 10x Culture someone's Tourism.
 
Somehow something still doesn't sound right. In all my games my culture output is reasonably high (I play on King), much higher than most other civs' tourism output. So their influence should never reach even exotic level. It should be sinking. But it usually doesn't. And yes, I'm factoring in modifiers like diplomats et al. (Btw: most civs will happily sell you open borders for a pittance even when you're in a head-to-head race for cultural victory - would you consider that an exploit?)

Another question: what does influence level dominant do? Any experiences?

Yeah the thing is to get to exotic you need to generate 10% of the other civ's culture.

So basically 1 point of tourism is worth 10 points of culture. So unless your culture is 10x their tourism after modifiers then they should have a rising influence and will reach exotic with you eventually. It's relatively easy to reach exotic to be honest.

If you build the guilds early enough and make sure the specialists are working them you should avoid any ideology issues. I just finished a domination game as the Zulu and my only problem was Siam being exotic over me (and they had 40,000 culture so becoming exotic over them was impossible, they were a complete nuisance with half the city states as allies and wonder whoring on the other side of the world).

In that case my only defence was to amass happiness and make my ideology the world ideology. I could have gone with their ideology (autocracy) but even with a giant puppet empire the 1 unhappiness per city was offset by the order belief of 2 unhappiness per monument. But the point is that even a cultural behemoth with 40,000 culture could only reach exotic with me because I built my guilds early.

As for open borders, most civs will sell you open borders for 2GPT if they don't hate you (in fact, I now use open borders as the hidden modifier test since you can no longer see if they will offer you 23 gold for 1GPT, instead I check if they'll offer you open borders for 2GPT) . If they like you a lot they will straight swap open borders for open borders, but even then I prefer to swap open borders for 2GPT because giving them open borders:

1. Allows them to build tourism against you
2. Gives them access to lands behind your cities which they will settle if you give them access.

I don't consider it an exploit to pay for their open borders. Also, your diplomat will only produce a +25% modifier if your ideologies are different (in which case you'll have a -34% modifier), so the diplomat just reduces the penalty for different ideologies to -9%.

As far as I know, being dominant over a civ doesn't do anything except increase your ideology pressure over them. Which means more chance of dissidents and if their city is going to flip, it's more likely to come to you.

BTW, something I discovered in my latest game (civ is such a huge game I pretty much learn something new every time I play), sharing an ideology with a civ gives you the same level of knowledge as having a diplomat in their capital in the world congress screen (in terms of how they will vote). If you have a diplomat and an ideology in common you will get even more detailed information on how they will vote.
 
Then it happened... I saw the rebels around his capital.

Hold on. Did you have units or territory with line of sight there? I was wondering why I could see rebels in Kyoto even though I didn't have any way to see that deep into his territory.

BTW, something I discovered in my latest game (civ is such a huge game I pretty much learn something new every time I play), sharing an ideology with a civ gives you the same level of knowledge as having a diplomat in their capital in the world congress screen (in terms of how they will vote). If you have a diplomat and an ideology in common you will get even more detailed information on how they will vote.

So that's how I managed to see Morocco having a "Strong Like" for their chosen option. This thread has been a gold mine.
 
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