Ideology Strangeness

psparky

King
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Feb 24, 2011
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I guess you guys will have seen this before, but it was a big surprise to me. I was Rome in a small/quick/emperor game. America had eliminated their one continental rival so five civs left. America were big and the science leaders. They were also my friends and I had converted them to my religion. The Shoshone were very strong on culture and tourism (having two levels of influence over everybody else). My tourism was the worst by some way.

America was first to Ideology and went Order. I was second so to maintain good relations, I also went Order. America proposed Order as world ideology and this got passed. The other three civs all went Freedom. When the Shoshone went for Freedom I was braced for unhappiness, but it didn't happen. And when I checked the details, the only unhappy civ was... The Shoshone! :crazyeye:

I was OK with 3 points for Freedom (2 Shoshone, 1 England) balanced by 3 for Order (2 from world ideology, 1 America), America was 2-2. England and Venice were also 2-2 getting 2 for their chosen Freedom from the Shoshone to counterbalance the 2 from world ideology. But the Shoshone only had the negative two from world ideology, and so had dissidents.

I always believed that the way to avoid this unhappiness was to be strong on culture/tourism, so this rather upset my perception on how to play. I was in some danger of falling a further level behind the Shoshone, but it seemed the best remedy was to let America get another level on me and avoid getting any influence levels with them. One thing I immediately did was give America open borders to increase their tourism over me.

It seems that it may often a good idea to let other civs with the same ideology as you gain tourism influence on you. Any thoughts on this or other possibly non-intuitive techniques regarding tourism?
 
Not unintuitive actually is it? That's how influence works. That's exactly how you do it if you haven't emphasized your own tourism. :)

you can almost completely ignore it in some games and avoid unhappiness by choosing order. Some games it gets split so that you are unhappy with any ideology though (usually games where all 3 ideologies are present and influential) so I wouldn't say this will always work perfectly. This is why it is important to generate enough tourism to get exotic on all other civs before they hit ideologies. Then none of the exotic civs on your empire will affect you. However, many standard games you can ignore it almost completely and just choose the one the AI liked (usually order).
 
Among the Freedom ideology civs, the Shoshone were the culture/tourism leader, and so couldn't use the influence of other people with the same ideology to offset the World Ideology effect.

Dissident level just requires you had some spare extra happiness before it struck in order to remain non-negative overall.
 
Thanks for the replies.

@jon I think I understand the mechanics OK (but see below); it was the consequence of how only the culture/tourism leader was penalized that surprised me. In the game in question I didn't have a lot of happiness to spare so if I got multiple levels of unhappiness I would have been in trouble.

@dan I guess your intuition works better than mine! :)

Some games it gets split so that you are unhappy with any ideology though (usually games where all 3 ideologies are present and influential)

Is this true? I thought the one with the most influence points became "preferred", and as long at that was your ideology you were OK. Are you saying that if there were 3 influence points for your chosen Freedom (say) and 2 for both of the others they would combine to mean you were unhappy?
 
The tourism leader should definitely get some bonuses, I agree with you that this is bad game design. Maybe the idea is that the tourism leader is usually the cultural leader too, so they aren't in danger often?

Letting America influence you more was definitely the right move there, and I think that part is actually good game design. As a real world example, say you're Portugal in the cold war, and you have a communist block who is unhappy with capitalism. Well, as a capitalist country, you can try to increase your own culture or tourism to create your own propoganda, but you can also just let more American propaganda videos in your country, invite their musicians on concert tours, and do what you can to let them influence their people in to supporting your government. I think that's actually really awesome you can influence others influences on you that way.
 
Thanks for the replies.

@jon I think I understand the mechanics OK (but see below); it was the consequence of how only the culture/tourism leader was penalized that surprised me. In the game in question I didn't have a lot of happiness to spare so if I got multiple levels of unhappiness I would have been in trouble.

@dan I guess your intuition works better than mine! :)



Is this true? I thought the one with the most influence points became "preferred", and as long at that was your ideology you were OK. Are you saying that if there were 3 influence points for your chosen Freedom (say) and 2 for both of the others they would combine to mean you were unhappy?

Yes, if ideology is split, it is almost never a good thing. For example, to simplifying it, you are unknown to every other civ. Suppose that civ A, B, C are freedom/order/autocracy respectively and all had familiar over you(2 levels). No matter which ideology you pick you will always have 2 foreign influence level and thus equates to dissident status. Usually if your culture is bad, then multiply civs will influence you at the same time. The only way to fix it is to increase culture significantly by getting culture CS, winning WF, building landmarks etc.

However if everyone is order, and you're freedom, the simple fix is to switch and all your problem goes away.
 
If someone can explain this, I'll be astounded. I went with Freedom, but when I added "urbanization" to the second tier my happiness went from -6 to something like -76. <snip> ridiculous. Everything seems to be working fine except that my culture went to -34 per turn. I have a moderately sized empire with several random puppet cities far away that had flipped to me. The majority of my cities have most of the +happiness and +culture buildings that are available. I'm in the lead in just about every category. I like the new ideology thing, but it seems broken.

Moderator Action: Please make your point without swearing.
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889
 
If someone can explain this, I'll be astounded. I went with Freedom, but when I added "urbanization" to the second tier my happiness went from -6 to something like -76. <snip> ridiculous. Everything seems to be working fine except that my culture went to -34 per turn. I have a moderately sized empire with several random puppet cities far away that had flipped to me. The majority of my cities have most of the +happiness and +culture buildings that are available. I'm in the lead in just about every category. I like the new ideology thing, but it seems broken.

Moderator Action: Please make your point without swearing.
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

Well almost none of this makes sense so you'd have to post your save file so people know what is going on.
 
Strangest moment I've had with ideologies was when I got my first King win few years ago. I mobilized my massive navy + Land forces and was locked to charge into chinese and stop them from pulling off a science win.

The moment I declared war, all the autocratic dissidents in china came out of hiding and brought china to it's knees and as the result, chinese forces was easily routed by my forces. We're talking about stuff like my dessys shooting down enemy jet fighters suffering from -40% malus.

War was completely onesided and china got steamrolled instantly.

You can see it in this thread.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=503954

I'm still scratching my head over it years later. Anniversary of the victory is in next five days.

Best part of it is all the AIs that fainted from fear as my military forces sailed past them to hurt china. They panicked big time and all the city states that became allied to me thanks to gunboat diplomacy.
 
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