WeirdoJoker
King
Is there any purpose to culture at all, other than for a cultural win or histograph points? (I hate histograph wins, but I'll take them.)
What Use Does Culture Have?
- Thread starter WeirdoJoker
- Start date
Yes there is! You can expand your borders with culture! You can claim control over resource-rich areas by sending a Settler over there fast and then building a Temple or Library (whichever is faster, according to your civ's traits!) as your first building! Other civs can't build cities in your territory without declaring war on you, and you can keep expelling their spearmen-accompanied settlers from your lands if you control a bottleneck territory. Also, whenever your borders expand into barbarian territory, you take the 25 gold without actually having to fight for it!
(and, also, of course, having more territory under your control means that the barbarians will have to settle farther out, assuming you leave them any space at all.)
(and, also, of course, having more territory under your control means that the barbarians will have to settle farther out, assuming you leave them any space at all.)
To understand Culture, you have to understand where it came from, why it was designed as a mechanic in the first place.
In Civilisation 1 and Civilisation 2, each town had the normal cross radius of interest, the area within which it's workers could work squares. You put down a city and that was your border. There was no Culture expansions which moved your borders ever further into the ether.
The annoying aspect of this system, and one which raised a lot of annoyed voices, was instances where your territory juts out a little bit, you know, those weird jagged edges and pointy bits going out to sea. No matter how well you positioned your cities it was just a complete pain making sure your bit of land was fully controlled by your borders. If you left even one square un-bordered then the AI would drop in and put up a city.
So in Civ 3, firstly, I do believe the AI is programmed not to place a city directly onto your border and never inside your border. Corner to corner maybe, and maybe they will right on a border, but it's not the usual, they will normally only settle your border +1 square away. Having borders that expand also gets rid of those awkward squares that no amount of tessellation will allow you to cover them with the regular cross shape.
These expanding borders were called Culture. And they have many uses, but you wont ever win a game (other than culture victory) by waiting for your Culture to subsume the rest of the planet. It's mainly just a neatening tool, a way to more accurately allow a player to fully dominate a region they are obviously dominant in.
The resultant positive aspects or general game uses of Culture are as follows:
Barbarians will only build camps in the fog. Your border clears the fog by +1 square each time they expand. So, if you have an awkward Mountain range that sticks out and is going to always be in fog (because you can't settle on a Mountain), instead of stationing a soldier there permanently to push out the fog, you're nearby city can eventually cover that area with border expansions, freeing up your soldier.
Sometimes resources are right in the middle of you and another Civ, border resources. You can have Culture competition to dominate the resource (or just favourable squares).
Sometimes, a close-by neighbouring Civ's city will be near one of yours and the Culture war will go beyond lines in the sand and become a full Cultural Conversion. This is actually quite rare and often happens to towns with no culture at all or ones with low Culture that are surrounded on many borders by one with high Culture. My own experiences of Cultural conversions extend to:
Ai Civ capital on neighbouring Island, the borders touching one of my coastal cities with no Culture, I lost my city to a cultural conversion.
Ai invades my lands while I'm going for a Culture Win. They take one of my too-many-to-defend cities in the middle of a huge island. The extent of the radius of that city is one square, because it has zero Culture and all the close-knit surrounding Culture borders push it in from every side. After 20 turns of it not naturally flipping back to my control I quit the game in disgust, on principle.
Sometimes the Ai will forward settle, sending out a city right next to your borders when the rest of their civilisation is miles away. If you quickly build Culture around it you can normally win it over with a Cultural conversion without having to war it out the way.
When you invade a Civ, each turn their cities make a roll for "flip-back" to the Civ you're attacking based, I believe, on Culture rating. Most human players quit if they think they're being overrun, so rarely see it on their cities, but if you experience enough situations where you lose cities but stay in the game then you'll probably see it happen with your cities.
The more unknown quantities of Culture involve how they effect international relations and the extent to which an enemy Civ goes into resistance when you take their cities. These are the kind of topics where the stat junkies might get really interested. For example, I often have Ais go to war with me right after a telling border expansion, while I also might have better trading terms with a Civ that is in awe of my culture. I might invade one city and get 6 resisters, but invade it's neighbour and get only 2 resisters, even though both had populations of 10.
If any opposing unit wanders into your borders during peacetime you get a choice of options as to what to tell them, either "please can you move them" or "either move them or declare war". You really want both of them to always be options, but most of the time it just gives you "please move them" which is really frustrating if you really want them moved or you really want them to declare war on you.
Culture points play a large part in expanding your private palace, if such a thing interests you.
So it's something that's not crucial to a non-Culture win, but something that has it's part to play in wider mechanics and general gameplay enjoyment, together with a few, very scenario dependent areas where it's crucial, or at least very important.
I remember some years back someone on the forum said that the AIs just automatically choose yes to the "do you want to change government type" option screen you get when you discover a Government Technology, so, with Fascism being the last one they'll probably discover, that's the one they end up on.
I'm sure there must be more to it than that, but it's the kind of logic you expect really I suppose.
WeirdoJoker
King
Oh, duh, I actually did know that, just forgot when I asked the question. <mad at self> Didn't realize that about the barbarians, though, because I don't think I ever expanded borders into barbarian territory ... just always fought for it.
Global culture is mostly relevant for conquest. Depending on the culture rating(fascinated etc.) a certain portion of citizens will be resistors. Also the rate to convert those resistors back into regular citizens depends on the culture rating. Further the chances of a city to flip depends on the culture ratio. If your culture is 10 times as high as that of your enemy, than you donnot need to fear flips and can easily prevent them for sure with only few units as military police(regarding flips this does not depend on government). If however your enemy has 10 times your culture, than you must calculate in that taken cities are likely to flip and any units left in the city would be destroyed. So being low on culture comes at a price. You can avoid the flip issue by genociding your way through the enemy. Raze everything and rebuild the area with your own settles. Naturally that will give you some diplomatic mali.
AI is eager to switch goverments. As AI often has medium sized empires it will not go for communism. This however leaves fascism as the best government without war weariness. One should also be aware that military police for content faces is quite important for AI. Afaik AI does never use luxury rate, so the amount of citizen per city is limited by importing luxuries and using military police.
In a prior version of C3C feudalism had no building maintenance. This made AI to pretty much ignore any other government type.
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tR1cKy
taking over the world
1) border expansion
2) lowering the chance for your cities to defect to the enemy; this is expecially important for captured cities
and, on a minor basis:
3) raising the chance for an enemy city to defect to you.
This is the purpose. The usefulness is a completely different matter. Sometimes it's very useful to build culture, and sometimes it doesn't matter at all.
WeirdoJoker
King
Ok. That's really what I've been doing. Didn't know if I was missing something when people are talking about destroying temples.
tR1cKy
taking over the world
You may have noticed that if you build a temple, reach size 2 and then destroy the temple, the culture produced so far is retained, and the city remains at size 2. Destroying the temple may have a marginal benefit if you need to save money, but it's really a minor issue.
