Cultural Conquest of Cities

Playing with revolutions on and cultural city conquest enabled there seems to be a problem:
Cities do not seem to defect. Even when you get the culture up high and even if you get them to revolt they never join you peacefully.
Fixed borders is also enabled (don't know if it matters)

Do you have to switch revolutions off to enable the cultural peaceful conquest of cities?

fixed borders pretty much negates all culture, which is bleh,, considering that latter age civs should remove fixed borders but you still cant get any tiers ,

really? is there any fix for this? because i love cultural swaps, AND i love fixed borders :\

VladDaImpaler said:

really? is there any fix for this? because i love cultural swaps, AND i love fixed borders :\

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supposedly culture should matter when civs stop having fixed borders.. but it doesnt.. hopefully it will be improved in further beta, try grabbing city, and then let ai surrender as vasal to you.. his smallest down will hog half the land,and big down you just took will sit in 3x3 square ;(,

ok now I switched up to 176beta5. I did not find the game setting to switch on and off fixed borders any more. Is it still there?

I found that apparently an early barbarian city has fixed borders. (I have recently invented monarchy.) That seems to be a bug.

Barbarian cities always were the easiest to conquer culturally.

you have fixed borders, so do they

You are saying Barbarians always have the fixed borders if the player has them?
So I have some more questions:
1.) How would that work out in multi player?
2.) I do not have fixed borders. I have invented Monarchy but I am still running Chiefdom which does not give fixed borders. So what really determines whether the barbs have fixed borders
3.) My real question: Where in the game settings can I enable/disable fixed borders in general?

Fixed Borders is enforced option.
Afforess said he is willing to listen to analysis and criticism of the how system work, but won't make it optional (AFAIK now).

Oh, that is interesting. Especially since it was still optional in AND 1.75

I find it a pity to lose the cultural conquest feature. Some people like me like to play build style. We do not send armies to neibourghs but instead develop our cities. And then there is the nice CIV4 feature of cultural conquest.

I do like the fixed borders idea but each game (now about 3 or 4) which I played with it had some problems. If the way it works is improved that would be nice.

E.g. - Some tiles revert when you leave the square to get the next square.
- Barbarians should have weak culture. But with fixed borders their strong cultural borders win the cultural battle for the resources

So if you can't even take barbarian cities with culture, doesn't that make culture a bit weak?

Cultural Conquest began it's slow death with the inclusion of REVDCM into RoM back at version 2.0. Each succeeding version of RoM and then AND as a Modmod culture began to recede even further into the background. I brought it up to both Zappara and Afforess that Cultural Conquest was becoming impossible to achieve. But there wasn't at that time enough ppl saying what I was saying/eXperiencing. Even now we who want a Cultural Victory to be usable are in the minority. I havn't had a city Culture flip in Ages! And Great Artists Great Work is a joke, even with Fixed Borders removed. But with FB now Enforced you have to hope that the AI will eventually chose a Gov't beyond the 1st 3. Even then don't waste a Great Artist by using it toproduce a Great Work to expand your influence. You'll just *iss your GA away for no gain.

JosEPh

JosEPh_II said:

Cultural Conquest began it's slow death with the inclusion of REVDCM into RoM back at version 2.0. Each succeeding version of RoM and then AND as a Modmod culture began to recede even further into the background. I brought it up to both Zappara and Afforess that Cultural Conquest was becoming impossible to achieve. But there wasn't at that time enough ppl saying what I was saying/eXperiencing. Even now we who want a Cultural Victory to be usable are in the minority. I havn't had a city Culture flip in Ages! And Great Artists Great Work is a joke, even with Fixed Borders removed. But with FB now Enforced you have to hope that the AI will eventually chose a Gov't beyond the 1st 3. Even then don't waste a Great Artist by using it toproduce a Great Work to expand your influence. You'll just *iss your GA away for no gain.

JosEPh

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I'm with you on this, I also think it's a shame that culture oriented strategies are not more effective. Specific suggestions for changes would be helpful.

JosEPh_II said:

Cultural Conquest began it's slow death with the inclusion of REVDCM into RoM back at version 2.0. Each succeeding version of RoM and then AND as a Modmod culture began to recede even further into the background. I brought it up to both Zappara and Afforess that Cultural Conquest was becoming impossible to achieve. But there wasn't at that time enough ppl saying what I was saying/eXperiencing. Even now we who want a Cultural Victory to be usable are in the minority. I havn't had a city Culture flip in Ages! And Great Artists Great Work is a joke, even with Fixed Borders removed. But with FB now Enforced you have to hope that the AI will eventually chose a Gov't beyond the 1st 3. Even then don't waste a Great Artist by using it toproduce a Great Work to expand your influence. You'll just *iss your GA away for no gain.

JosEPh

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I have to agree with you there.. I do miss being able to Culturally crush a Civ into submission without open war until I am primed to do so. That and being able to achieve cultural victory is more of a challenge than sitting there and waging war.

+1 for Koshling, Joseph and Darkforce;

I used to love having the Sistine Chapel with temples + monastaries built in each city with the pacifist civic combined with artists guilds on my exterior cities. This strategy is no longer a viable strategy for aggressive yet passive cultural border expansion because it requires both you AND your opponents to not be using the 1st and 3rd civic option.

I think the only quick fix to satisfy everyone is to simply make this feature optional once again. Another suggestion would be to remove fixed borders completely however make it such that when a civ captures a city of a rival faction fixed borders is applied to that captured city for a fixed number of turns (at least 50 on normal speed) or until the population of the city is dominated by the owner. Just food for thought.

Arkatakor said:

+1 for Koshling, Joseph and Darkforce;

I used to love having the Sistine Chapel with temples + monastaries built in each city with the pacifist civic combined with artists guilds on my exterior cities. This strategy is no longer a viable strategy for aggressive yet passive cultural border expansion because it requires both you AND your opponents to not be using the 1st and 3rd civic option.

I think the only quick fix to satisfy everyone is to simply make this feature optional once again. Another suggestion would be to remove fixed borders completely however make it such that when a civ captures a city of a rival faction fixed borders is applied to that captured city for a fixed number of turns (at least 50 on normal speed) or until the population of the city is dominated by the owner. Just food for thought.

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Actually I see another possibility that might work for everyone, since it doesn't involve removal of fixed borders. How about if you have fixed borders, then cultural pressure against you operates by (significantly) increasing the local rebelliousness in the culturally over-powered cities. That way the fixed borders would continue to operate as now (so cultrure wouldn't slowly win you tiles), but full on rebellions (and city flips?) would start to occur to the player who is being culturally overpowered.

I haven't looked at the code at all yet - just throwing this out as a mechanic we could explore...

Let's look at it this way : what is the point of fixed borders?
1) To let you get fast and easy new resources far from cities.
2) To prevent your territory from being overtaken by culture.
1) is very nice, bu I feel 2) is making fixed borders overpowered and culture "attacks" very hard to achieve. What if only 1) was kept? You couldn't claim non-neutral tiles and your claimed tiles could be overtaken by culture...

Koshling said:

Actually I see another possibility that might work for everyone, since it doesn't involve removal of fixed borders. How about if you have fixed borders, then cultural pressure against you operates by (significantly) increasing the local rebelliousness in the culturally over-powered cities. That way the fixed borders would continue to operate as now (so cultrure wouldn't slowly win you tiles), but full on rebellions (and city flips?) would start to occur to the player who is being culturally overpowered.

I haven't looked at the code at all yet - just throwing this out as a mechanic we could explore...

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BlueTemplar said:

Let's look at it this way : what is the point of fixed borders?
1) To let you get fast and easy new resources far from cities.
2) To prevent your territory from being overtaken by culture.
1) is very nice, bu I feel 2) is making fixed borders overpowered and culture "attacks" very hard to achieve. What if only 1) was kept? You couldn't claim non-neutral tiles and your claimed tiles could be overtaken by culture...

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To be honest I like both of these ideas immensely and would be happy with either of them.
-BlueTemplar's would return to a more original BTS style of culture with the added benefit of being able to claim the neutral territory.
-Koshling's protects civ's from having smaller cities dominated from the start because they lose all of the land that could be used in the producing of culture producing buildings, yet if neglected the cities will still flip sides. But like he hinted at, the coding for this one could be much more complex.

BlueTemplar said:

Let's look at it this way : what is the point of fixed borders?
1) To let you get fast and easy new resources far from cities.
2) To prevent your territory from being overtaken by culture.
1) is very nice, bu I feel 2) is making fixed borders overpowered and culture "attacks" very hard to achieve. What if only 1) was kept? You couldn't claim non-neutral tiles and your claimed tiles could be overtaken by culture...

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You forgot
3) claiming enemy territory so your units heal faster and cost less in maintenance.

Koshling said:

Actually I see another possibility that might work for everyone, since it doesn't involve removal of fixed borders. How about if you have fixed borders, then cultural pressure against you operates by (significantly) increasing the local rebelliousness in the culturally over-powered cities. That way the fixed borders would continue to operate as now (so cultrure wouldn't slowly win you tiles), but full on rebellions (and city flips?) would start to occur to the player who is being culturally overpowered.

I haven't looked at the code at all yet - just throwing this out as a mechanic we could explore...

Click to expand...

I would approve of such an idea as well. Adding new RevDCM modifiers is fairly easy.

ok, I had my own thread, but it should go here:
I just woke up and had some ideas on fixed borders. I think the discussion deserves to have an own thread. It should not about "please make it optional", as Aforess has decided to keep it. We should collect ideas how to make it more balanced.
As far as I understood, fixed borders is a possibilty to move borders with units, opposed to only culture as in vanilla civ. However, currently some posters and me have the feeling that it made culture too weak. Here are some ideas to balance it again:

When both nations have fixed borders, a tile remains in the first nation even if the second one has a higher cultural influence. It remains (in peace time) even if no unit is stationed on it, and this needs to be changed: when I claim neutral territory and move my unit away it becomes neutral again. This should be also the way it behaves with other civs. If the influence of one nation is above 50% the tile should change to the more influential nation. However, I can prevent the change if I post a unit on it. With this setting, I would need to use a substantial amount of units when I want to hold the territorry. Also, it would prevent holes of friendly territory inside ones empire, as typically the freindly AI do not have unit on it. We could also move this concept further: If the cultural influence goes beyond 75%, you will need at least two units on the square to keep it in your empire. This would increase further the need for units and balance the ratio of units/culture to manage your borders.

Something else that bothers me: The small cross of the city has always the culture of the city: I wait till the AI builds all the improvements around the 2nd cross in the city and then grab them all by building a city that holds the improvements in my first cross. I can do it without loosing much attitude towards the AI. This is quite exploitable. You should suffer a large relation bonus when doing this. Also when the above proposal is implemented, you would need more units to hold the territory.

btw I have often seen the issue that even if the AI civ is on republic, the hover says that it ahs fixed borders!

Please add your comments to make this new feature more balanced.
Baha