Explanation of Ideology pressure with examples

Jatta Pake said:

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 and my overall unhappiness is -15. 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.

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Well it's really situational. Open borders gives a 25% boost to tourism towards that civ. Basically if you give them open borders, you're increasing the gap between you and them. If they give you open borders, you're decreasing the gap between them and you.

Most of the time open borders is given as a straight swap for open borders so it depends:

-Are you near a boundary (e.g. 9%, 29%) which would decrease their influence over you
-Are you producing more tourism than them?

If so then open borders is probably benefitting you more than them. If not, then closing your borders can be helpful, as can reassigning your trade routes and changing your religion.

Note that having a different ideology gives a big modifier to tourism anyway. Because of that it's usually better to see if you can boost your CPT (check - have you got specialists who can generate culture? can you take policies to give you a big culture boost? Is there some wonder you can build to give you a percentage bonus to culture?)

Popping a great writer might just push them back under a boundary.

btw, edited the original post to reflect that the abilities of great writers/musicians can boost your tourism/culture and help defend against ideologies.

First off, great work, Sonic.

sonicandfffan said:

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.

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Perhaps you were being facetious, but if you have to prepare well ahead of time, that actually means there is no way to react to it, except maybe to issue some expletives.

I think it's a legitimate criticism of BNW to say they made it possible for a civ to get painted into a corner where there's no ideology that will save you from unhappiness. This is particularly bad when combined with the nerf to happiness buildings and the outright gutting of many happiness sopols (apparently Shirk and the gang were operating under the inaccurate assumption that everyone is always milking plenty of happiness from religion).

To say everyone should always be doing culture and tourism elicits a frequent bone of contention with civ games in that it's the game playing you, not you playing the game. That is to say, you're not able to do the strategy you want because you're forced into a reactive strategy of just trying to keep pace. You have to do science, you have to make food, you have to build armies, you have to do religion for happiness, and you have to produce culture and tourism. Then, after all that defensive stuff you gotta do just to keep your head above water, you can use whatever resources you have left over to actually do things you want to do.

Yeah perhaps I was. I do think most situations are avoidable and it's bad prep that leads to ideological pressure overwhelming a civ, the problem is that it snowballs, you only have to fall behind half the pack to be facing revolutionary wave because the effects of each civ are added together. In my celts game I neglected culture by not opening tradition and going piety and I paid the price until I passed the world congress resolution.

Culture is fairly important anyway for border expansion so it should be part of everyone's build plan. A healthy civ is one which doesn't neglect any aspect of its growth and is well rounded. Rather than completely disregarding an area like culture you should be making small tradeoffs in key areas. (e.g. letting army slide to about 5th biggest rather than maintaining the best military in return for focusing more on building science/culture). I think it's impossible to build a civ which completely neglects an aspect on the higher difficulties (except maybe religion).

The three things you can do as a quick fix are popping a GW/GM to boost culture/tourism and reduce those gaps or change the world ideology.

sonicandfffan said:

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.

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Culture Pantheons have become a lot more powerful in BNW than they were in G&K as well. All those Pastures you have been working with God of the Skies for 200+ turns adds up. Not to mention that your border growth is actually measurable rather than glacial speed.

I decided to go tall and invest in culture in my Brazil game and I have the second highest value for land in the demographics(France has more but then France has conquered Venice and Carthage). Before this game I didn't fully appreciate how useful culture was.

Thanks very much- that took some reading first thing in the morning.

If I could just clarify a point. When you say:

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

you are talking ideology influence numbers as per your list, not the numbers under the suitcases in the screenshot?

Cicerosaurus said:

Thanks very much- that took some reading first thing in the morning.

If I could just clarify a point. When you say:

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

you are talking ideology influence numbers as per your list, not the numbers under the suitcases in the screenshot?

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Correct.

Perhaps a better way of putting that is that the civ with the higher influence level will influence the one with the lower influence level by the difference between the two levels (and the lower influence civ will not influence the higher influence civ at all).

Quick clarification on this point

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)

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The culture of 10,000 referenced here is cumulative culture since beginning of time or culture generated in those 10 turns?

It's not clear. I always assumed cumulative but with the 10 turns = 100 tourism bit, one could read it as it's only compared to culture generated in those 10 turns.

Thank you! That makes sense now. I'm assuming this is why I received a city from another civ in my first game of BNW. I never had a city join my civ before and haven't since. Any ideas how exactly that occurs?

dexters said:

Quick clarification on this point



The culture of 10,000 referenced here is cumulative culture since beginning of time or culture generated in those 10 turns?

It's not clear. I always assumed cumulative but with the 10 turns = 100 tourism bit, one could read it as it's only compared to culture generated in those 10 turns.

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Yes it's cumulative. If you have +5 culture a turn then after 50 turns you will have 250 culture, even if you "spent" some on policies.

The 10,000 is the total culture on turn 10. I was just explaining how tourism accumulates and how to calculate its percentage value (although the game does this for you).

The reason altering your tourism/culture outputs isn't an effective response to ideology pressure is that they're per turn values, so you're just altering the rate of change, when it's the total values you need to alter (obviously they work as a long term solution, but they're not a quick fix unless you're close to a boundary).

David Squires said:

Thank you! That makes sense now. I'm assuming this is why I received a city from another civ in my first game of BNW. I never had a city join my civ before and haven't since. Any ideas how exactly that occurs?

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I'm actually wondering the same myself, I've not yet experienced city-flipping so I can't explain how it happens, but if it does I'll look into why it happens (I assume the ideology pressure over a particular civ exceeding a ridiculously high value for a certain number of turns will be the trigger).

Thanks. It does stress the importance of culture from the get go- even choosing a pantheon that will generate culture.

I also think this thread should be a sticky.

It pains me that people can read the entire writeup and still get the wrong idea.

Culture in of itself is an AWFUL defence if you're just concerned about ideological pressure. Culture is a decent last resort to slow down an opposing culture victory. But at that point ideological pressure should be a footnote.

By far the easiest way to defend against ideological pressure (other than passing a world ideology which can be dicey to get) is to get some tourism of your own. Getting exotic on everyone else is quite easy. A civ has to produce 10 times your tourism (after modifiers) to stop you from getting to exotic which is for all intents and purposes pretty much impossible (well, more practically it's like 7 or 8x, but even that amount is pretty unreasonable). Familiar is possible to fend off for some time, but getting just culture likely isn't enough.

The best way to look at it is in terms of ideological influence, if you're unknown with a civ that's pressuring you, tourism is worth 10 points of culture. If you're exotic, tourism is worth ~3 points. If you're familiar, tourism is worth 2 points. If you're popular, it's worth one point. If you're influential uh... you should be finishing up the game if someone else has dominant but if you get there it's worth half a point. It's not quite that simple, but unless someone's completely stomping you in tourism and culture, that's a good baseline to work with.

These are, of course, raw values. You get more SPs with more culture, which can have an impact on your tourism output (both directly and indirectly).

I don't see anyone suggesting neglecting tourism, or even suggesting culture should be given precedence over tourism.

AgaresOaks- which post(s) are you referring to?

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.

First of all, thanks to the OP for the very thorough explanation of these mechanics, it confirms most of what I had learnt from experience. I should also say this is hard to infer from Civpedia, so it should definitely be made sticky imo.

David Squires said:

Thank you! That makes sense now. I'm assuming this is why I received a city from another civ in my first game of BNW. I never had a city join my civ before and haven't since. Any ideas how exactly that occurs?

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Like David, I still have a question though. Does anyone know under which circumstances you get rebels or city-flipping ? Is it related only to the dissidents/civil resistance/revolutionary wave aspect, or do you have to take into consideraion the total unhappiness as well ? For instance, in one of my games I stayed at civil resistance for quite a long time, yet managed to get positive happiness (or unhappiness below -10 at worst) all along the way, and I didn't see any rebel appearing. Any clues ?

I believe it used to be 20 angry red unhappy faces for rebels but that seems to have been lowered. At 20 now, the city can (may) revolt and join the other side.

lb1785 said:

Like David, I still have a question though. Does anyone know under which circumstances you get rebels or city-flipping ? Is it related only to the dissidents/civil resistance/revolutionary wave aspect, or do you have to take into consideraion the total unhappiness as well ? For instance, in one of my games I stayed at civil resistance for quite a long time, yet managed to get positive happiness (or unhappiness below -10 at worst) all along the way, and I didn't see any rebel appearing. Any clues ?

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20 unhappiness, and cities start flipping. The target is decided by cultural influence and distance (by capital).

I got my first two flips last night, going for Culture win with Brazil. Was very close to winning, so it wasn't as important, but nice.

Montezuma had bullied my continent the whole game. He wiped out Portugal's three cities and was still looking for blood. I paid him to go against Persia (also my target), which he did. Once I had taken my fill of Persia's best cities, I was consolidating when Montezuma turned on me. I was superior in tech, but he had gone Autocracy and had so many units it was hard to push him back. I did managet to Liberate Porto and Lisbon for a lasting ally in Maria. Montezuma then took peace, but everyone had enough of him by that time. Harald, Askia, and Kamehameha all DoWed him. Harald and Kamy had also chosen Freedom by this point. With my new allies, world ideology of freedom was passed.

Then it happened... I saw the rebels around his capital. He was having to fight off GW infantry. a turn later, boom, Teotihuacan flipped - his second city, as bg as his capital, size 26, three great works, no wonders - great city though, and put a nice green wedge right through his empire. He does nothing about the unhappiness, and a few turns later Milan flips too - size 22. I liberate them for another easy ally, after which he went back under 20 unhappiness. I hit the internet soon later and the game was over.

Fun.