Nationality & Culture Drive Me Nuts

[Envomni]

So I've been slaughtering the enemy. Taking cities. Burning Russians.

In the 1950's I take Moscow. I rush-buy through all the culture-based buildings. I post 8 units to the city. Then after all that, I set the place to only produce Culture, along with 8 Artist specialists. So I get 246 culture per turn. I'm doing so good, I set my Research and Gold to 0 and my Culture to 100% so that I'm also generating 6000+ culture per turn overall by 1980. BUT...

It's taking 2 turns to get my Nationality to go up 1% though! At that rate it'll take me 140 more turns to make the culture of the original city converted to 100% of my own.. and all the way along, I have to keep putting up with them "rightfully asking to join the Russians" again. To hell with that, I fought my butt off to steal it, I'm keeping it.

Is it just me, or does this nationality / culture thing suck for any sort of conquest game? It's rediculous that it would take so long to convert a city. Yes I know, use a Great Artist.. sure, but how many can I expect to earn? I take a city every few turns towards world domination. I can't pump that many out.

What am I missing? Does someone have a great way to quickly convert the city to your own culture/nationality (ie: less than 100 turns!) I mean 20 to 30 would be reasonable. This is just stupid!

 

[kamigawan]

The dominance of enemy culture in a captured city will depend a lot on how long that city was producing culture. If you are warring late-game and capturing very culturally old cities, it will take forever to convert to your own, and even popping several great artists will barely even make a dent.

Luckily, nationality doesn't make really any difference whatsoever in terms of real gameplay, so I would ignore this unless nearby remaining uncaptured cities are generating cultural borders that swamp Moscow's resources.

My suggestion would be to continue the war until you eventually capture or raze any nearby cities that are creating cultural borders that are engulfing Moscow. The most preferable situation is to wipe him out completely, which instantaneously removes all of his influence over nationality. Or failing that, force him to capitulate. Capitulated vassal's cultural borders will not overtake your own borders if that particular resource square is closer (or equal) to Moscow than any of his remaining cities. Things that I use to generate cultural borders in captured cities; Sistine chapel, theatre, artists specialists, free speech, eiffel tower (broadcast tower), mercantilism/statue of liberty.

 

[frob2900]

In the 1950's I take Moscow
...
What am I missing?

1950's.

Do you have any conception of how much culture the russians have pumped into those tiles since 4000 BC?

Does someone have a great way to quickly convert the city to your own culture/nationality (ie: less than 100 turns!)

"Easy." Conquer/raze all the neighboring (or even more distant) enemy cities. Better yet, wipe out the enemy Civ (automatically erases their culture from tiles).

The latest I've realistically tried to win a "culture border war" is ca 500AD-1000AD without further conquest. Perhaps later in some odd game, but that usually takes Hermitage+Cathedrals+Free Speech.

No, deeper conquest is the way to go.

 

[Gnarfflinger]

If one of your cities wants to join another civ that badly, then kick their teeth in and shut up that city. Sometimes I will gift the city to a neutral third civ that the city wants to join if I need the relations boost, but otherwise, I simply ignore the demands.

 

[Envomni]

Ok but really.. sometimes.. don't you want to use an approach of semi-slaughter? Take a third or half the guy's cities (varying from civ to civ), and not have to do the huge chase to wipe out each and every one? You know, make a big footprint on them, but don't kill them off per say, just make the suffer with your presence?

Maybe its just me, but I think this reveals an over-protection "bug" on the part of the game design. It just shouldn't be SO exceptionally problematic and rediculously slow to convert an enemy city nationality over to your own after you've fought tooth and nail to take it. If you take it, and you can keep it after counter-strikes, and have it for say 25 turns or more, it should at least convert to 75% of your own people readily. It really bugs me. I prefer to spend the start of my game with a focus on tech and one or two wars, then let loose later when I have a big tech advantage and well.. you know, nothing else to do because my cities have all the good stuff built up in them.

Well I'll try these things mentioned to a more focused degree and see what happens with adding a plan to put specific speciality buildings like the Hermi and Cathedrals into the places captured on top of the rare Great Artist I can develop.

BTW.. anyone know how many GA's are in fact available in total throughout a game? I figure there must be an actual total max it would be able to present.. how many have you gotten? Anyone keep track?

I read elsewhere that if you raze the city, then resettle, you still lose out anyway (it starts you off with a city that still has 99% enemy nationality because your in their territory.. if you manage to even come up with a little whole somewhere within their culture borders).

 

[dozenlong]

I disagree that this is bad...in fact, I think it is quite realistic in the late game. Look at how nationalistic people in the "real world" are. How many Russian satellite states chose to stay with mother Russia after 1989? Just looking at all of the threads devoted to Poland and such should demonstrate how long-standing nationalistic pride can run deep.

I think they implemented this right; appeasing culture increasingly grew difficult. Can you imagine any country taking over Europe successfully and holding it today?

If you want to reap the benefits of nationalism, there is a price!

 

[Gooblah]

The 1950s thing was the main thing. The longer a city has been pumping culture, the longer it'll take to get to a point after conquest when thoughts of revolt subside. Moscow's had culture for 5950 years. Anyways, once you conquer the Motherland, each and every city, you'll have complete grip over the cities.

 

[UncleJJ]

With a long established city like Moscow in the 1950's the culture in its city tile will probably have significant contributions from neighbouring cities. When several large cities have been pumping culture for centuries their cultural zones overlap each others city tiles and add even more culture on top of what the city produces itself. It is that effect of multiple overlapping cultural zones that makes late game warfare so complex and why it is advisable to capture a whole region of cities rather than just one or two and then face cultural problems.

One way to speed up the conversion time Envomni is complaining about is to use overlapping cities culture. If cities are only 3 tiles apart they only need to reach 100 culture before they start affecting each other's city tiles. So in the game in question if Moscow has some neighbouring cities he could pump up the culture in those as well to speed up the process of overcoming Russian culture in Moscow.

 

[Cer]

I agree with the people who say, just go raze/capture the cities near moscow.

You know, make a big footprint on them, but don't kill them off per say, just make the suffer with your presence?

In civ1, (only other civ version i played) the way to do this was to capture a few of their cities. In civ4, i've tried that and it doesn't work. In order to capture a city (late game) and have the use of all its tiles, you need to raze or capture all nearby cities.

If you want to make a big dent in an AI without any long term commitment to fighting culture wars, defending cities, whatever, then razing enemy cities is the way to go. I had a game where I was desperate to get the pyramids (state property) to deal with war weariness, but the pyramids were built in mansa's capital city and surrounded by other old high-culture cities. It pained me to do so, but I razed that capital. Mansa's ability to compete in the game was torn to pieces after that.

 

[Envomni]

I hadn't remember the spy was also able to offer up an Influence Culture mission in bts.. so went looking to use that.

It's not coming up. Every single other option, from revolts to stealing tech are appearing in my mission options list, but nothing for influence culture. I thought.. ok, maybe its really expensive (I saw someone here posting in another thread that they thought it was weighted too heavy actually). So I +1 on Catherine and set esp. to 100%, leaving a couple of cities on wealth to cover the op costs.

Over 110,000 ep points built up now versus Catherine, and STILL I don't get an option to conduct an Influence Culture mission against her in Any city. So I checked in against a weaker civ.. and its not showing up against them either. Is this mission only available at a certain time or something ?

I like Uncle's idea of surrounding with other cities.. but that also depends on you have the open, non-culture square around him to start a new one if none are there to take.

 

[Grimz101]

I hadn't remember the spy was also able to offer up an Influence Culture mission in bts.. so went looking to use that.

It's not coming up. Every single other option, from revolts to stealing tech are appearing in my mission options list, but nothing for influence culture. I thought.. ok, maybe its really expensive (I saw someone here posting in another thread that they thought it was weighted too heavy actually). So I +1 on Catherine and set esp. to 100%, leaving a couple of cities on wealth to cover the op costs.

Over 110,000 ep points built up now versus Catherine, and STILL I don't get an option to conduct an Influence Culture mission against her in Any city. So I checked in against a weaker civ.. and its not showing up against them either. Is this mission only available at a certain time or something ?

I like Uncle's idea of surrounding with other cities.. but that also depends on you have the open, non-culture square around him to start a new one if none are there to take.

You have to already have some culture in the city.. dont remember what % it was though

 

[Winston Hughes]

Yes I know, use a Great Artist..

Since this looks to be a mid- or late-game problem I assume you're referring to the culture bomb. This is something that got me very puzzled in a recent game (BtS)... I'll explain what happened:

I invaded and vassalised Boudica, keeping her capital even though it was surrounded by Celtic culture. Being my vassal, her borders were pushed back to accomodate mine.

But this is where it started to get weird - the city went back into revolt soon after it came out of the post-conquest revolt. So, with the city still in revolt (was this my mistake?) I culture-bombed it, expecting to rob a ton of land from her (which had worked beautifully in one of her other cities) and to fend off future revolts.

But instead it did nothing at all, except adding the culture boost to the city's culture-meter. The culture in the tiles didn't shift my way at all, and, after coming out of revolt, only the tiles in it's fat cross were under my control. More revolts followed, and the city took an eternity to switch to my culture despite my building culture buildings, running artists and whipping/quickly regrowing the population.

Sorry to threadjack, but perhaps someone could explain what happened here?

 

[Envomni]

Still horrible results.

Using the Espionage Advisor screen, I finally found another russian city where I had the Spread Culture option available. Rostov had 11% of my culture there already. So I had over 110,000 points saved up, 12 spies moved into the city. Sat them there a while to decrease the cost - got that down to 15,000 a mission.

When you roll over the mission description, it even tells you how much culture the mission will inject - in this case over 9000! (like 9265 or something).

So I did it.. and succeeded with 5 spies. FIVE.. over 45,000 culture spread to his city, which already had 11% of my culture. The effect?

My nationality in his city went up 1%.

It cost me 9 spies (4 failed in the mission attempt), and according to the inject stat is says you're doing, I pumped more culture into him than ANY of his cities even have in the first place (no one but me has 50k plus listed for city culture in the Victory screen).. and it did screw all.

This is broken in my opinion. Its utterly broken. There is no way that using spies, buildings, surrounding influence, free speech, free religion, and so on should have so pitiful of an overall impact on converting a city, even if it is one that has been taken late in the game. And you can't use spies on your captured cities to spread culture of course.

Solver.. are you out there king of unofficial patches? I think this is a job for you with your DLL corrections. I'm ticked. They develop a concept where bloody war is not supposed to be your only avenue of success.. but they cripple the effect they claim the game concept should offer.

I found another thread discussing this same problem..
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=14337&page=7

 

[UncleJJ]

Have you read Culture Mechanics Disassembled this thread in the Strategy Articles forum? That explains how culture works and how it is applied to the tiles surrounding your cities including neighbouring city tiles.

I haven't tried using the spy mission to shift culture so I don't know what was going on there. The main thing to note is that you are trying to shift culture late in the game. If a city has had 400 turns to build up plot culture in its tiles it is going to take a lot of culture per turn and a lot of turns to do much. Cultural warfare is a slow process best conducted over 100s of turns. If you had the same sort of problems you describe in 1000 AD I would be worried but in 1950AD the game is definitely in the end stages.

I found another thread discussing this same problem..
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showth...t=14337&page=7

This is a Civ3 article so you'll have to explain how that is relevant to Civ4 as I think the two cultural systems might be different (I haven't played Civ3).

The cultural system in Civ4 seems to work very well in my opinion, I think you might be expecting too much to happen too quickly at a point in the game when that is very difficult. The cultural system is designed to produce stability and slow changes down.

 

[Winston Hughes]

Have you read Culture Mechanics Disassembled this thread in the Strategy Articles forum? That explains how culture works and how it is applied to the tiles surrounding your cities including neighbouring city tiles.

Well, that cleared up my confusion. Thanks.

It seems that vassalising (rather than killing) Boudica was my real mistake, since her culture remained on the tiles - including, which is the issue here, the city tile itself. The culture bomb was a complete waste in an area with so much pre-existing Celtic culture. What I didn't fully grasp was that although vassals' borders are pushed back to accomodate your fat cross, their culture remains (perhaps even at nearly 100%) in the tiles, meaning a revolt will always be a distinct possibility.

I also hadn't realised that more modern units are better at preventing revolts, so leaving only warriors in Boudica's city (since there was no danger of it being attacked) was another mistake.

 

[Envomni]

Ok, that dissection of culture was good info thanks.

So out of curiosity, I tried an experiment with culture bombing. I searched around some forums, and found comments about someone creating a mod where they made Missionary's able to do mini-culture missions. Drawing from that, I went to the extreme.

I wanted to know how much culture I would have to pump into a City late in the game. So I made Hindu missionary, my state religion, able to do a Great Work that pumped in 300,000 culutre. Yes, that much. I just wanted to know what it would take.

4 Great works later.. Moscow at 1.2 MILLION culture.. and guess what.. my nationality content increased by just 5%. The surrounding border tiles went up just 3%. After running a few more turns, no more bombs added, it just carried on increasing at 1% per turn in city, and about 1% every 3 turns in the surrounding tiles.

So really, it is indeed utterly useless and hopeless to take a city and keep it late in the game unless you completely kill off that civ to wipe out their cultural existance. As this test shows, there is no way you'll ever get a decent change in nationality no matter how much culture you put into the city under normal gameplay, when in this insane test, it did next to nothing.

Thanks again for the inputs and information everyone. I guess I have to change my type of game play.

 

[DaveMcW]

Nationality is a ratio.

It's easy to go from 1% to 2% (add +1.01% to total culture from ALL civs, including your own), but much harder to go from 98% to 99% (double the total culture from ALL civs, including your own)!

Even though you will never wipe out their culture without killing the civ, you can get it low enough that it only causes 1 or 2 .