City flipping

I am wondering, if you constantly send spies to make a nearby city unhappy, and poison its water, would this contribute the city to flipping to your culture? Or is this effect only really controlled by culture pressure?

And if it does have an effect, hopefully it matters more than 1% or it definitely isn't worth the risk anyhow.

I think cities' cultural flipping doesn't depend on spy actions.
Also, as a citizen of a city: would you join another country which poisons the city's water, supports revolts and so on?

This does not have a direkt effect. However by poison water/make unhappiness you prevent those citizends from working (lowering the comerce, preventing running artists) or might even reduce the city size, so the AI has less options to fight your spreading culture.

There is also a spy mission "Spread Culture", you have however to send and use a lot of spy's.

On a related question: is there a article on how culture pressure works somewhere ?

In my last game i had pressed on one of Jaos cities. The city was fresh settled - size 4 or something, having 5 culture/Turn. My city had 120+ cukture/turn. Jaos city was completely swarmed - it has just 3 ocean tiles left to work. Still the offs of revolt were very low (i had city visibility) and it never revolted to me How those odds are calculated ?

Culture flips are not related to the health or happiness of a city (somewhat counterintuitively). They only depend on culture and, to a small extent, the military in the city.

You could prevent citizens working with those missions, and so stop artists etc. but the effect would be miniscule. The AI makes very poor use of artists and sliders in these situations, and mostly rely on buildings - which will not be affected.

The spread culture mission will have a direct effect, but again a very small one.

Refar said:

Still the offs of revolt were very low (i had city visibility) and it never revolted to me How those odds are calculated ?

Click to expand...

I don't have an exact formula for them, but they'll never get above about 10% chance of a revolt each turn. Military can suppress the chances of a revolt (which could be the issue in your case). In large cities the amount of military required is usually impractical, but then a city with only three tiles to work isn't going to be that large.

For an account on cultural pressure (in vanilla Civ4) see http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=225927

I am about 2/3 done a Ghandi game on Immortal. I never used the spread culture mission yet, but that sounds like something I will experiment with for the last 1/3 of the game. I'll maybe write-up my results later on.

Boy this game is taking more hours to finish than I thought.
Anyhow, I sent a ton of spies and spend a kazilion spy points on adding culture to a foreign city. It did absolutely nothing (not even a revolt). The funy thing is the city was a dirt poor one to begin with, that was already being culture pressured by me for some time. I had assumed I could speed up it's flipping but the damn thing just wouldn't budge.

I finally gave up and just conquered it instead. Oh well, that's the last time I use such a futile feature with spies.

Note. For the reccord, I was doing from 300 to 500+ culture pts a shot on those missions. Over and over I went, to no avail.

i haven't spread culture with spies. i did use them to be a brat and pseudo-flip a city tho.

the AP has a vote option to "assign city to its rightful owner". it requires that the current owner be a voting member (the AP religion not their state religion) and that you're a full member and have over 50% culture in the city. it's not like a culture flip, you don't get an option to raze you, you have to keep it. but it is a way to pseudo-culture-flip a city that the AI has so many troops in that they've reduced the chance to flip to 0.

miss B did that once, had a city that was only 30% hers by culture but she had 20+ troops in it so the nationality bar literally didn't even have a "chance to revolt" line any more. i controlled the AP and i had CR, so i used spies to change her from full to voting member. then i put the city up for vote. twice she defied it, but the third time she gave in . it was rather fun watching her try to get any use out of her cities with double defying , since she had the AP religion in most of her cities.

i'm sure that vote is very annoying when you're at war, somebody else controls the AP, and they decide to have a resolution about whether a city you just fought hard to capture should be returned to the former owner.

I was under the impression that when the city read below 50% [owner; EX: American], the city would revolt to try and join you.

I play Vanilla, if that helps.

obsolete said:

Boy this game is taking more hours to finish than I thought.
Anyhow, I sent a ton of spies and spend a kazilion spy points on adding culture to a foreign city. It did absolutely nothing (not even a revolt). The funy thing is the city was a dirt poor one to begin with, that was already being culture pressured by me for some time. I had assumed I could speed up it's flipping but the damn thing just wouldn't budge.

I finally gave up and just conquered it instead. Oh well, that's the last time I use such a futile feature with spies.

Note. For the reccord, I was doing from 300 to 500+ culture pts a shot on those missions. Over and over I went, to no avail.

Click to expand...

Very similar to my experience. Extremely annoying.

The most annoying thing is - i am sure if the things were reversed, my city would have revolted the very same turn as my culture would have dropped below 50%.

It would be nice to see some exact numbers (mathematics) on this. I just don't trust it right now, and will save my pts for something that's proven to have an effect.

Lexicus: read the article linked in post 5, it has a lot of details. it's based on vanilla so it definitely applies to your games. afaik it stuff works the same way in BtS and warlords. when the city reads below 50% their culture, there's a chance it can flip. but any* troops in the city lower that chance, both quality and quantity found. it's possible to use so many troops that the chance goes completely away, even if the city is only 1% theirs.

any troops = the citizens don't even care who the troops belong to. if you don't want a city to flip to you, you can stuff your own troops into it. they apparently calm the people down. "nono, our leader sucks, you really don't want to come join us." and suddenly the people want to stick with their own country now .