Rookie Question: how to keep other nations from grabbing my territory

Learning the game, and already exhibiting addictive behaviors.

But what I really need to learn is how to keep other nations from grabbing new territory that I fought for before my cities/empire/color expands to absorb the new territory. It has happened multiple times that I have fought a tough neighbor, only to see the gains disappear into another peaceful neighbors territory. Any suggestions on what I am doing wrong?

Huge thanks in advance. I am getting frustrated.

The problem is that you have only just taken the new cities so there is very little of your culture in them, whereas the peaceful neighbor has been there for a while and built up some culture. As you hold the cities and create your own culture in them it will start spreading to those squares and you will regain some of them.

The mechanics of culture spreading from cities to squares is very complicated and I don't fully understand it. The first ring of squares immediately adjacent to your city are relatively easy to recapture. The second ring is often much harder and it will depend on how close the opposing cities are as to whether you will ever be able to reclaim them practically. For example, if the opposing city is only 2 squares from your city such that your second ring is it's first ring you will have a very hard time claiming those squares.

Its something to be aware of when planning attacks and reckoning on what you can achieve. There are a few things you can do to help:

1) Obviously creating culture in your city is the goal. There are several ways to do this.
2) You can sabotage culture buildings in the opposing cities using spies (assuming BTS)
3) If the attack is long planned you can build up culture in your border cities so it is already spreading into the target territory once you attack
4) You can capture/raze the cities of the peaceful neighbor which are culture opposing the squares

Getting into a culture war with a neighbor typically turns into a race in which both sides sink resources into and neither side sees much benefit. Option 4) is often the most efficient. Option 1) with perhaps a bit of 2) is usually enough to reclaim the first ring within a reasonable number of turns.

Really you just need to play some more and get a feel for the culture mechanics and perhaps lower your expectations of how much territory you can really claim in these types of situations.

^^ 1) Building Library and Theatre. They are relatively cheap buildings which produces Culture. Also Build Culture (the process which is a purple musical note) is very helpful regaining "lost" land.
You can mouse hover over the land and see how much is is owned by you and others (in %). Getting majority over the land and it will be yours. (if only 2 civs are "fighting" for the land, then 51% will do).

But... perhaps the best solution is "genocide". The civ which you have taken a city from, will continue to have its culture in the city (though slowly fading as you produce culture in the city).
When you erase the last city of that civ, all the civs culture will disappear, and you will gain 100% culture in the cities (unless a third civ have had control over the city previous). It will also remove the unhappiness "We yearn to join our motherland".

3rd party civs culture swarming your newly captured land is one of the most annoying results of the culture mechanics in Civ4.

If we are talking early in the game a theater or a cheap wonder might be all you need, but it doesn't take long before cultural fights becomes impractical. Soon you can use several Great Artist without gaining a single tile.

Before you fight, take a look at nearby civs. Do they have any strong cities close the ones you want to capture? If yes, you really only got two options:
- Make the civ you fought capitulate and then gift the city back.
- Take the 3rd civs cities too...

I see that my problem is an inherent part of the game to overcome.

I may be overthinking/overbuilding before going to war, but I spend a lot of resources on catapults and forces to overwhelm the neighbor, if I have to destroy the neighbor, and immediately my neighbor's neighbor, war is going to be an extremely expensive and inefficient option.

I just finished my first game at Prince level last night and came in fourth, but by about 2002, I couldn't even see a path to victory. I fought like hell to get access to iron (no one had it as a tradeable resource) but by the time I acquired it, my large neighbors had destroyers. And I had spent enough on warmaking that didn't have particularly advanced research. So I knew I was toast.

As Macksideshow wrote, it will take time to get a feel for the game.

Yes, captured cities close to enemy culture are always at risk from enemy culture. An option is to capture some cities of an opponent and raze the last 'ring' of his cities.

I believe that the mechanics work like this: Every turn, you add culture to all tiles within culture range of your city. In the outermost ring, you only add the current culture/turn of your city, but in the closer rings, you add an additional 20 cpt (If I recall correctly), which helps you keep the closest rings.

I envy you Jackstraw, you have so much fun ahead of you learning about this great game. Making it to 2002 in 4th on prince with no easy access to iron is not a bad result for a new player at all and you have found the right place to learn.

Do you have the Beyond the Sword expansion pack?

It's relevant here because it includes espionage. Something to know about culture producing buildings is they double their cultural output every 1000 years. So by 1000AD early builds like monuments, libraries, monastaries and temples can have significant cultural outputs. However the espionage cost to destroy them stays low. This means using spies to sabotage these buildings can be a really cost effective way of culture fighting.

Do that immediately after or even before taking the city. Then, as vincentz said, build a theatre and maybe a library asap (pop rush preferably because you will likely have more citizens than good tiles to work anyway) then build culture in the captured city and you should see territory being regained.

Rebuilt buildings don't immediately get the 1000 year doubling of culture points that the original buildings had?

This is why it's usually better to vassal enemies. Leave him with his cities that border enemies and vassal him. This way you're:
- Not helping other rivals
- Keeping that land somewhat under your control (vassal contributes some army / gives resources / contributes to dom score)
- You can control which techs your vassal researches, setting up ideal tech trades.
- You can avoid long wars, which may take longer to recover from, or prevent you from using your tech advantage to conquer two civs instead of one.
- Don't have to dedicate as many troops as revolt risk garrisons.

I've had this problem before when conquering cities and from individual experience from trial and error, what I do now is try to conquer cities that are closer to my civilization and away from other civilizations and cultures.. Taking cities that are closer to my borders is much easier than going straight for the capital because of the revolution. If another city from the civilization you're conquering is causing rebellions in the city that you just captured, then you need to conquer that city.. Destroying a civilization eliminates all of its influence in the cities that you captured from the civilization that you destroyed..