City defects to your civilization - How to do

I wonder if the event "A city defects to your civilization" (or YOUR city betrays yoz) is completely random in Civ 1. Or can it be influenced in a way? Do you have any idea?

Individual cities can switch alliance if they are in disorder (more unhappy than unhappy people) or when the balance between happy and unhappy citizens is even.
Roll the random generator dice and if the nearest by city is the happiest, they have a chance go towards that civ. Normally it's their own civ, but sometimes it's from another civ.
This means that border cities are most likely to 'switch' to happier civilizations.

If you see an unhappiness popup "rioting in..." or "corruption in..." etc, then it means the city is suspect to switching.

Wow, so it might be a strategy to destabilize cities to make them defecting ... that's completely new for me.

It could indeed be a viable strategy, but the problem with it is that you can't reasonably control which enemy cities switch over to you... But you can micromanage your good cities to make culture flips more likely. I've found that the pull of your cities is the greatest when they are in a perpetual celebration of WLTK or WLTP day. That seems to be either a prerquisite for a city to flip to you, or at least a very decent chance-bonus. I usually get more flips when I run a celebrating Monarchy, since in a Republic/Demo cities will often outgrow their capacity to celebrate and thus miss the 'chances' (read, they will not be celebrating on the turn the enemy city is rioting).

It's been how many years since the game came out, and only now I learn they did this?

Theov said:

Roll the random generator dice and if the nearest by city is the happiest, they have a chance go towards that civ. Normally it's their own civ, but sometimes it's from another civ.
This means that border cities are most likely to 'switch' to happier civilizations.

Click to expand...

I beg to differ. In my experience (which is not so thorough, since it does happen really rarely) - the switch does not depend on whether the city is nearby or not. The first time a foreign city defected to me it was actually situated inside an enemy territory (what a surprise back then it was . And in the couple of other occasions I experienced this I did not get the impression that it had something to do with "geographical distance".

Darkpanda has the whole formula buried somewhere within his ipressively immense piles of research, but I don't remember if distance factored in... It should, but it probably is not a main factor. Enemy disorder and your celebrating + a scandal/riot/corruption event seem to be the most important factors.

It's crazy rare, right?

It's not a common occurrence, but I wouldn't call it crazy rare. In many games it doesn't happen at all. In some, only once in a while. And then there are some games where cities defect left and right.