Explain mechanics about border expansion

Redwaller66

Chieftain
Joined
Nov 13, 2014
Messages
31
Location
Canada, Ontario
Hello again, I am really liking this mod so far. On a side note my original game I had to delete because I set the barbarians to be extremely aggressive and plentiful, and they ended up destroying other civilizations and destroying one of my cities during the prehistoric era. XD Funny enough, I conquered a civilization (ethopia, i was england) within the first 150-200 turns on the biggest world size on noble difficulty on the length setting of snail. XD

Anyways, I am currently on a save on the GEM as England, and a while ago the game told me my borders had expanded. However, they did not expand! I am almost certain this was due to one of settings I put on during the custom setup. Is there a way to "undo" this setting so that my borders expand? Or, how does my current setup work? I have it on that mode so that flat areas are more easier for culture to expand into, whatever that setting is called. How does this work? Will my city's borders still expand but a different way?
I just need to clear this up for my own understanding and sanity.

Cheers guys!:goodjob:
 
It will expand into more rough terrain eventually, but it takes more border pops to do it. The game option also adds a number of intermediary border pops to make up for the slower cultural expansion. In the meantime you can build roads and shop down forests on tiles next to your cultural borders to get them quicker. Or you can build fortifications to claim land. They don't border pop in the prehistoric era but you can still put them down next to your borders and then you can replace the fortification with some other tile improvement once the tile has accumulated enough culture to stay yours.
 
The Realistic Culture Spread is based on pre-Civ V but is designed for agricultural nations, ie after you have agriculture. It does not work well with the prehistoric era and needs to be worked on some time. Putting a wooden tower on a plot which is next to your current borders is the only way to expand to some plots. In most cases if you have had at least one cultural expansion you can immediately replace the wooden tower with the improvement to give you the resources on the plot.
 
Interesting, so plots DO accumulate culture over time?
Cause I remember seeing an odd "bug" with Wooden Towers:
Sometimes, when playing "expand the borders through towers 9000 tiles from your cities", I was confused by having this sequence:
1. I build the tower and claim the tile.
2. Then, I build an improvement on the tile, cause it LETS me.
3. The improvement "eats" the tower AND my ownership of that tile.
4. ...FOREVER, cause I don't seem to be able to RE-build the tower back - nor is the tile ever becoming mine again (or maybe I never waited long enough).
Totally weird and confusing.
 
It depends on how far away the plot is from a city and the cultural level of the city. You cannot rely on watchtowers to accumulate culture on a tile on it's own. But if the tile is within the cultural range of a city it accumulates culture as if the city had already expanded it's border to the tile.
 
All fortifications and towers do accumulate culture but at a much lower rate than cities. If the cultural area of the fort/tower is not touching the cultural area of your nation then it is likely to be overwhelmed by the neighbouring cultures, including none and barbarian when the fort/tower is removed. Towers have the lowest cultural output in to the plot.
 
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