The "spread culture" spy mission

How does this work ? That is, if it actually does . .
There was an AI city which had my culture on three sides. Their culture was falling by a steady 1% per turn, and was down to 32% when I launched my spaceship. They having nothing better to do, I sent my spies to spread my culture into the city, by a stated 5% a time and at trivial cost.The AI culture still fell by a steady 1% per turn (except for one turn when it didn't fall at all) despite 23 successful "spreads" during my ship's flight, so the spy activity had no effect whatsoever. During that time, the city's garrison remained at 2 longbowmen and it completed no buildings.

I believe it is 5% of Their Culture. (so 5% of 32% is about 1%)

1). In that case, it ought to be called "reduce their culture", not "spread" - by implication, spread yours.
2). Their culture fall rate was totally unaffected by my spy missions. It had been falling by 1% a turn before my spies started to move in, and remained at that rate, unchanged, after 23 "spreads".

if your launching your spaceship and the ais still using longbowmen you are either playing on a very low difficulty level, using the worldbuilder, or you are very good.

hossam said:

if your launching your spaceship and the ais still using longbowmen you are either playing on a very low difficulty level, using the worldbuilder, or you are very good.

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Probably. But I once had a city in the middle of my empire that I never remembered to upgrade, and it still had spearmen in the modern era.

Actually I relooked at the code, what hapens is the "insert culture" changes the City Culture, not the Plot culture

Short culture lesson:
You city generates City Culture (for itself) and Plot culture (for all the plots in its radius)

The city culture is the amount you see, ie a Theater and nothing else means +3 City culture per turn

The plot culture depends on the plot... each turn a plot around the city with a Theater gets
+3 (the city Culture)
+20* (the City Culture level - distance from the city)
+1

Plot Culture determines who 'owns' a plot and it is what is reported in the city screen (the Plot culture of the plot the city is on)



So assume the AI had 200 culture in this city.... they would still have an ADDITIONAL 20-60 culture in the Plot for Every turn they had the city (which adds up to a lot)... as does the 'plot culture' from your cities.

What you added was 5% of 200 Culture to the city... so that if you Did take over the city it would start with 10 culture of your own (the next spy would add 5% of the total 210 culture to the city (200 culture of theirs and 10 of yours))

The amount of 'Plot Culture' you get for the 'spread Culture'
is
0
+20* (the level the city is of Your culture ie 10 would be first level -Distance)
+1

so you would get 21 culture (or 41 or 61 for some of your later spies) on the city plot. (not significant for an enemy that had had that city for a long time

The real use would be guaranteeing/speeding up the first border pop in a city you are about to take. (or looking at an early city)

hossam said:

if your launching your spaceship and the ais still using longbowmen you are either playing on a very low difficulty level, using the worldbuilder, or you are very good.

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May be (or may not be), but all that is really irrelevant to the purpose of thread. This unprovoked & irrelevant trend of "you're either playing at a wuss difficulty level or your cheating" posts lately is getting really really tiresome. Thanks to Krikkitone I learned something from this post, the OP did, and maybe you would too if you just focused on the point of the thread and stopped guessing critiquing irrelevant aspects of the OP's game.

MarkM said:

... This unprovoked & irrelevant trend of "you're either playing at a wuss difficulty level or your cheating" posts lately is getting really really tiresome...

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I completely agree.

Krikkitone said:

Actually I relooked at the code, what hapens is the "insert culture" changes the City Culture, not the Plot culture

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It calls CvCity::changeCulture() with the bPlots argument set to 'true'. That means it does plot culture as well. So each plot inside the virtual city radius gets the 5% culture figure, plus the 20*level bonus.

It works exactly as if you owned the city and that 5% figure were your culture/turn. So that spy mission can bring you closer to having a majority plot culture for flipping purposes, or increase your majority if you already have it (i.e. make it more likely that the city will flip).

Given the small amounts, however, I agree that it's more useful for preloading normal city culture, in preparation for conquest, so the borders pop immediately after resistance ends.

As matters of fact, this was at Emperor level in the late 1800s: the city owner, Ramesses, had robotics, but no units beyond infantry and SAMs(no oil - ha, ha, ha !): the city was a miserable pop. 2 and 1 hammer outpost in the desert, which he hadn't bothered to defend more strongly in the knowledge that I could, if I so wished, capture very easily.
But the city had accumulated 20% cultural defence, and goodness knows what that means in terms of "culture points" (if those exist). So from what Krikkitone has said, not only was the culture added by my spies an insignificant proportion, but the proportion actually decreased with time because the home culture points were rising faster than my efforts.

Regarding Krikkitone's final point about speeding up the first expansion of a captured city, I have found that setting such a city to build culture works very well, especially if you have the Eiffel Tower. The generated culture builds up while the city is still in resistance, and when resistance ceases out go the borders. The beauty of this is that bigger cities take longer to come out of resistance, so have accumulated more culture and expand farther.

Edit: just read Thanny's post. Alas, I didn't keep track of what was happening in my plots surrounding the city, and the game has now been deleted.. Good point to note for the future !

Bushface said:

Regarding Krikkitone's final point about speeding up the first expansion of a captured city, I have found that setting such a city to build culture works very well, especially if you have the Eiffel Tower. The generated culture builds up while the city is still in resistance, and when resistance ceases out go the borders.

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This isn't true. The city generates nothing whatsoever while in resistance.

Maybe you did some insert culture missions, which adds to a fixed value that the city receives as soon as it's out of resistance.

Thanny said:

This isn't true. The city generates nothing whatsoever while in resistance.

Maybe you did some insert culture missions, which adds to a fixed value that the city receives as soon as it's out of resistance.

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I think captured cities do generate ONE turn of culture before coming out of revolt. I have never used the Spread Culture mission, and whenever I manage to spread a culture-generating corporation to a recently captured city, it comes out of revolt with the equivalent of one turn worth of culture intact (usually starting with the BFC if I have a lot of seafood and Sid's Sushi). So either that's a bug, or some weird game mechanic, or bad memory on my part. Anyone care to diagnose?

jray said:

I think captured cities do generate ONE turn of culture before coming out of revolt.

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Before BtS they did. In fact, they got one turn of everything as they came out of revolt. Not so with BtS - your cities do nothing until the turn after coming out of revolt.

I don't know why they made that change.

Thanny said:

Before BtS they did. In fact, they got one turn of everything as they came out of revolt. Not so with BtS - your cities do nothing until the turn after coming out of revolt.

I don't know why they made that change.

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Ah, thanks for explaining. Was I really remembering from all the way back in the Warlords days? lol

Bushface said:

As matters of fact, this was at Emperor level in the late 1800s: the city owner, Ramesses, had robotics, but no units beyond infantry and SAMs(no oil - ha, ha, ha !): the city was a miserable pop. 2 and 1 hammer outpost in the desert, which he hadn't bothered to defend more strongly in the knowledge that I could, if I so wished, capture very easily.
But the city had accumulated 20% cultural defence, and goodness knows what that means in terms of "culture points" (if those exist). !

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Assuming normal speed

20% cultural defense means that the city has 10-100 culture (Egyptian culture) and if Ramses is the founder that is the only culture it had (until you spread culture)
that means that each time that you spread culture you would add 0.5 to 5 of your culture to the city.
And 21-41 of your culture to the city plot (essentially 1 turns worth)

Thanny said:

It calls CvCity::changeCulture() with the bPlots argument set to 'true'. That means it does plot culture as well. So each plot inside the virtual city radius gets the 5% culture figure, plus the 20*level bonus.

It works exactly as if you owned the city and that 5% figure were your culture/turn. So that spy mission can bring you closer to having a majority plot culture for flipping purposes, or increase your majority if you already have it (i.e. make it more likely that the city will flip).!

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You Don't get the extra... the City "Change Culture" function gives 0 culture to the plots

Your 'normal' culture production does
City Culture
and
Plot Culture

Seperately

the Spread Culture function works with Cities + Plots in the same way giving 0 extra culture to plots (only the free *20 +1 bonus)
[it goes through the functions: change culture(amt)->setculture(amt)->Plotculture(0)]

It works the same with Great Works (except they go through 20 cycles on Normal Speed so you get 20 turns worth of the 21/ 41/ 61/ or 81 Plot culture.. the 4000 culture you get only goes in the city)


What this mean is that if you want to make a city revolt from "Spread Culture" alone, you need to give it at Least as many "Spread Culture" events as it has had turns under the enemy. (and some more to account for all the Normal/non free culture that was deposited on the plot)

Krikkitone said:

What this mean is that if you want to make a city revolt from "Spread Culture" alone, you need to give it at Least as many "Spread Culture" events as it has had turns under the enemy. (and some more to account for all the Normal/non free culture that was deposited on the plot)

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So ... does the conclusion from this that the most useful aspect of spread culture (other than to expand in advance the fat cross of captured cities as soon as they come out of revolt) is to try to use it against a city that a second AI is about to capture from another AI ??? so you can try to get it to flip to you after it comes out of capture revolt?

Just trying to figure out the strategic usefulness of this. That's a pretty obscure usage, but it's the best I could come up with.

Supr49er said:

I completely agree.

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i dont

i find that reading from people (noobs) playing on low level talking about their games and strategies a waste of time.

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Seems like that even in the best of circumstances, its just not worth the possible loss of spies and espionage points to do the spread culture mission.

MarkM said:

So ... does the conclusion from this that the most useful aspect of spread culture (other than to expand in advance the fat cross of captured cities as soon as they come out of revolt) is to try to use it against a city that a second AI is about to capture from another AI ??? so you can try to get it to flip to you after it comes out of capture revolt?

Just trying to figure out the strategic usefulness of this. That's a pretty obscure usage, but it's the best I could come up with.

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Well the other major use is the Espionage Cost Modifier.. the Cost of performing an Espionage mission depends on the City culture (not the Plot culture)

Krikkitone said:

You Don't get the extra... the City "Change Culture" function gives 0 culture to the plots

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This is wrong. The CvCity::changeCulture() function takes two boolean arguments indicating whether or not plot culture is updated. The spy mission sets both to true.

I confirmed in a WB test that the mission adds plot culture to the city tile and surrounding tiles.