After a near quarter century of playing Civ3, possibly my worst military setback

[RobS]

After some 23+ years of playing this game, I've obviously had my share of shocking events, but a couple of days ago I possibly experienced the worst - certainly one of the worst.
I was the Egyptians and had the agressive Indians next door. I mean even more agressive than me. We were neck and neck the entire game, with them always being slightly ahead. I'd had a semi-successful war against them a few turns earlier, but had to make peace after they showed up with a fairly massive stack of Elephants that would have wreaked havoc.
After a few turns of building up my forces again, I resumed hostilities. It was early Middle Ages and my dominant attackers were Knights. I needed to capture three cities that were intermingled with three I had captured in the earlier war, so as not to allow any cultural flips. The Indians already had Cavalry, so I needed to make it quick and make peace again.
I got lucky in a battle and received a Great Leader, which would be of immense help and which I promptly moved into a nearby city to form an Army. That city also had several recovering Knights. It was also a former Indian city from the previous war a few turns earlier. I had no choice. I had to use that city, or lose it, and Cavalry was already bearing down nearby. The Army would save the day.
Yeah, you know how this ends.
No sooner had I formed the Army in that city, along with about 6-7 recovering Knights and 2-3 defensive units, the city flipped on the next enemy turn and all was lost.

Nothing to do but a 4,000BC restart. As might be expected, I'm doing a lot better the second time around. Yeah, I cheat. Sue me.

 

[eachday]

Why didn't you go for an autosave? Is that a no-no?

 

[Chalito]

I hate that soooooooo much! I rarely play with Culture Flip on due to the sudden disappearance of a huge amount of units.

I’ve tought about keeping it on and just restarting from autosave too, but that’s painful after long turns in big maps. When playing with CF off, I’ve also thought about forcing myself to keep a number of units in conquered cities as a way to simulate what the creators sort of wanted with it. Making us keep units inside enemy towns.

 

[Spoonwood]

When playing with CF off, I’ve also thought about forcing myself to keep a number of units in conquered cities as a way to simulate what the creators sort of wanted with it. Making us keep units inside enemy towns.

Strategically speaking, that's not very wise. Given that the game got designed to punish behavior that the designers didn't want, they didn't want you to keep units in enemy cities, except for one turn.

That means that strategically, the intended way to fight wars would be that once you're capturing cities, you have borders with AIs in some towns on one turn, and on the next turn, your borders have gone beyond those cities that defenders no longer come as needed in those cities. That's not necessarily easy. And it's even more challenging if you have Spain as an opponent. For retaking cities which flip without a rail network, keeping units outside of cities can work.

Or perhaps the intended way to play was something along the lines of barely defending a captured city after a turn. Perhaps like there's some sort of tension between the military there and citizens which makes the military not want to be there.

Also, have you ever seen the numbers for how many units you need to prevent a flip if you are massively behind in culture... or on Sid level? Since I still have some saves from a Sid game I played last summer, I've managed to find some information with CrpMapStat:

The city 'Kno ...' was Knossos of Greece. I had 573 culture compared to the Greeks 29,510. I don't think they designed the game expecting us to keep 500+ units in a city. Probably more like we wouldn't have a fail safe way of keeping that city, unless we conquered that AI completely. In other words, cultural flips probably got designed to encourage players to completely conquer AIs if players couldn't keep in culture or to try to keep up in culture.

 

[Chalito]

I’m going to play with CF on for the next game and see how it goes. Because I typically play with “no raze”, it’ll add a whole new level of complication that should be challenging, but fun!

 

[walletta]

I threw diplomacy out the window in my current game, repeatedly breaking peace treaties. Now I’m in a position to raze my enemy’s cities & fully intend to do so

 

[RobS]

Why didn't you go for an autosave? Is that a no-no?

Sorry for the late response.
Autosave would not have made a difference, even if I had gone back several turns. As I pointed out, there were several of my own cities (newly captured from India) intermignled with several Indian cities, and those cities would have flipped back to India in short order. I had no choice but to immediately restart the war to quickly capture the nearby Indian cities and make peace. Didn't work.