Were Culture Bombs Nerfed in BtS?

[cspyr0]

I played vanilla civ when it came out, then stopped playing for a few years and I've been trying out BtS recently. In a recent game I took a holy city from an opponent on the other side of a pangea continent (it was the holy city for a VERY dominant religion, and had a shrine), and I anticipated much difficulty in keeping it due to a culture flip.

From my prior (vanilla) knowledge, I brought along a Great Artist and culture bombed my new city, knowing it would end the riot and should soon give me the city's fat cross at least. WRONG. Even though taking the city had erased all the adjacent culture, the borders didn't expand, even after I waited several turns.

Eventually the city was consumed by opponents' culture, leaving me only some ocean squares. It was semi-late game (around 1500AD) and on Noble, so I understand that culture is well-established at that point. But I'm also sure that 4000 culture was more than any adjacent cities had.

With the exception of immediately ending riots, are Great Artists no good for warmongering now?

 

[Wolfshanze]

Culture Bombers were nerfed BIG TIME... simply put, they can help-out on your terrain, but they do very little in pushing back/taking-over your neighbors borders... frankly, I miss the old way of the culture bomb... the new nerfed one is nearly pointless... about all you can get out of a culture bomb now is end a rebellion/unrest.

 

[LegionSteve]

I don't think they were nerfed exactly - more like accidentally broken. One of the patches fixed it, but I can't remember if it was an official patch or unofficial. Try patching to 3.17 if you haven't already, and if that doesn't fix it get the unofficial patch from this forum.

 

[cspyr0]

So that means they changed culture mechanics too, right? A 4000+ culture city surrounded by mediocre cities should be able to reclaim its BFC at the least...

 

[say1988]

Keep in mind that a tile's culture does not equal the city's, and if you take a city, the culture remains in the tiles, and counts towards control if they are within reach of another city. Also, for only the outermost ring (at the time) does it get the culture the city is producing, each rign inwards gets a bonus (20, IIRC), so once a city has its second border pop, the BFC pop is producing 20+ city/turn, and original tiles are producing 40+city/turn, and the city itself gets a bonus of 60. And even if surrounded by mediocre cities, the culture previously produced by the captured city counts.
Now I don't know how culture bombs with with respect to this bonus, though, pretty sure it isn't just 4000 culture in each square.

 

[GooglyBoogly]

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=225927

and search for "Culture Bomb" for the mechanics of how a culture bomb works.

 

[theKurgen]

Yeah I find it's often better to just settle the GA in the city and have the 12 culture per turn build the culture out the slow way over time. You don't have to worry about the city flipping back to the civ that first owned it, only to any 3rd civ if their culture is in range.

 

[GatlingGun]

Culture bombing may have been nerfed, but the spy spread culture missions are a useful alternative if you are battling borders.

 

[Wolfshanze]

Culture bombing may have been nerfed, but the spy spread culture missions are a useful alternative if you are battling borders.

Yeah, and it only takes about 100 spies a turn to be useful too!

I tried this on a city I was outculturing, surrounded and it was "only a matter of time" before it culture-flipped to me... thought I'd speed it up with spies... man, that was a waste of time and effort... the amount spies helped with was pitifully small, and not really worth all the effort (and lost espionage points).

 

[Dresden]

If you are trying to use the spread culture mission under the original BTS 3.17, you're absolutely wasting your time. That patch rendered the mission utterly useless (it actually spreads 0.05% of your culture rather than 5%). Under earlier patches or mods that include the Unofficial Patch changes to that mission (version 0.19.1 or later), spread culture can be quite useful (and might even be too powerful in the Unofficial Patch case)