Attacking Cities with Culture

[RAL2000]

To plan a good strategy on this, we need to understand some fundamental answers that I have not seen definitively addressed. If I have overlooked these, please point me there. If anyone can answer these without guessing and intuition, please do so.

These questions are directed more toward a cultural 'offense', i.e. how to get the other guy's cities to flip without a war, than toward avoiding having your own city flip after a military capture. The latter has been addressed several times.

1) What specifically causes a city to flip?
2) Is there an absolute ratio, or is there a randomly determined result with increasing cultural disparity creating greater odds of a random flip?
3) Does the presence of roads between tribes influence flips? How? Are rails more powerful than roads in this regard?
4) How does cultural power attenuate with distance?
5) Does population of a city relate to its 'cultural offense'? For example does a city with cultural value of 200 and a population of 3 trump a city with a cultural value of 50 and a population of 22?
6) Does terrain have an impact?
7) What is the relative impact of overall culture of the tribe vs. individual culture of the city?
8) Does cultural flipping get harder to achieve at higher levels of difficulty? How?
9) Do the relative happiness levels of the cities make a difference?
10) Do military garrisons play a role? (Again, these questions are directed at peaceful flipping through cultural attack, NOT militarily captured cities?)
11) Are there any other factors? For example relative tech levels or presence of culturally relevent advances such as radio?
12) What is the impact of multiple cities, for example 4 smaller cities surrounding a larger one?
13) Does cutting off a single city by culturally controlled areas make it easier to flip? Does this also hold true for ocean squares?
14) Is there an equation for all this?

 

[goodyhut]

From what I can tell the cultural assimilation of cities is based oon culture and proximity only. Build your cultural buildings early and especially in you cities that border cities. I will sometimes even build cities right on the border of the ai, build a temple right away and watch that cities already improved squares apear within my borders! That is especially important if I need an extra special resource.

 

[Magnus]

The most important thing is the relative culture of the emipires in question and the distance to the respective capitals. i.e. if the city is closer to your capital than his and you smoke him in culture, the city is primed to flip.

 

[RAL2000]

I build cities on the border of the enemy all the time, often to capture strategic resources that are sitting there waiting to be taken for free. It is because I am trying to develop this kind of cultural offensive strategy that I posted all the specific questions. Everyone understands how a military units fight, even though the outcome is occassionally and randomly counterintuitive. There is very little solid information addressing how cultural assimilation works.

From experience proximity to the capital is important, as are early building of units, I agree. The question is HOW important vs. other factors. If I attack a spearman across the river with a cavalry, I know their relative strengths and can actually compute the odds of success. There is nothing similiar that I have seen that says if I have the following factors in play I have an X% chance of converstion each term.

For the capital proximity factor for example, what is the attenuation? Is it linear? Does each square of distance decrease the effect of the capital by 5%, or is there a sudden dropoff?

This is not idle curiousity. It would have a rather profound impact on the design of your empire especially at the highest challenge levels.

 

[goodyhut]

In your post you were mentioning non-cultural things such as happiness of a city, size of the city, roads, and terrain. I think you are making it too complicated and none of these have a direct impact on your assimilation of cites. It is simply culture rating vs. culture rating had a probability roll IMHO. That culture rating is determined by structures in neighboring cities and by your over all culture score.

 

[RAL2000]

I do appreciate the replies and input. I am looking for something definitive, just wondering if it is available.

One of the reasons I ask is that I have had several successful games at lower difficulty levels in which I attacked enemy borders and took resources and flipped cities by building a half dozen cities around an enemy city and rushing cultural improvements.

In these I often achieved a victory without ever once going to war, and even with a very weak military (half of my cities were garrisoned by one warrior (sic).

It has seemed to me that this is MUCH more difficult at higher difficulty levels, not because of military factors but because enemy cities are less prone to flip. I currently have a game at King Level in which we are about to complete the Appollo Project and have yet to convert a single enemy city. This is in spite of the fact that I have the leading culture on the "histogram" and I have several cities completely cut off and surrounded by culture generating cities cranking out at the max available.

I have achieved this by staying ahead in science and selling advances, a well described strategy. But while I can steal border resources and surround the bad guys I can't seem to flip them.

That leads me to believe that it is more complicated than meets the eye. It would make sense for example that population of the city have an impact, as would a means of disseminating culture such as roads or radio.

 

[xRamsesx]

Two things that affect cultural assimilation that I didn't see mentioned are garrisoned units in the city and city size.

One of the Firaxis guys (I think it was Soren) said that for each unit garrisoned in a city, 1 pop unit is less likely to leave the home culture. So typically when i conquer a city or with cities adjacent to other civs I tend to match the pop with units inside the city, and that has actually been quite effective. Obviously with a 10+ size city its unrealistic to use that method, but it works great with smaller cities.

The other thing is city size. If your border cities are larger in size compared to the adjacent civ and you have a higher culture rating the other civ's cities seem to switch sides more frequently. I don't have any hard numbers, but I have noticed that i absorb a lot more cities that way with culture.

 

[Magnus]

I have absorbed cities bigger than my border cities. I got a size 8 one once, damn big fish! Luckily roads were already in place connecting it to my empire and I had 7 luxuries otherwise the city would have been a mess. (I was in Republic).

 

[xRamsesx]

Originally posted by Magnus
I have absorbed cities bigger than my border cities. I got a size 8 one once, damn big fish! Luckily roads were already in place connecting it to my empire and I had 7 luxuries otherwise the city would have been a mess. (I was in Republic).

Oh don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that you need big border cities. I'm just saying it helps. I too have absorbed larger cities. There's definitly a lot of things that go into cultural assimilation, and once we figure out what exactly is needed to "encourage" other civs to switch sides, the rest should be a walk in the park.

 

[bakant]

I read somewhere than the chance of capturing cities is slightly increased with monarchy and republic and increased a lot by communism and democracy.

 

[RAL2000]

Just after posting that i had not flipped any cities I got LA at population 11. It was taken by three smaller cities which had been pumping out max culture for about 200 years. I also lost one of my pumpers on another part of the map which was probably built too near the Aztec capital.

I am at one level of difficulty off the top, huge map. So I am relieved that it is in fact possible. I have yet to fight my first battle, and everybody seems to love me. Most of my cities are garrisoned by a single warrior although there are a few cavalry scattered about. The AI continues to pay through the nose for almost every advance.

I believe I read in the manual or somewhere that if you govt form is superior to the other tribe you have a better chance of a flip. I'm a Democracy right now, don't know what the Americans in LA were.

It's actually a pretty interesting strategy, but I feel like I'm in the dark over what works and what doesn't. And learning by trial and error would take literally a hundred years.

Hope to hear from others who are trying this approach.

 

[ruru]

I am also interested in the mechanics of flipping cities. It is vague, very vague. My story of yesterday experience (monarch level): I have surroundeded a fine English city of Hasting, size 6 or 7, with three my cities of approx the same or lesser size. As expected, it eventually defected. It had aqueduct only. However, what was the surprise, when later, after I made couple of improvements there, it defected back to Britons! And even more curiously, after the defection it had no boundary with them (i.e. my surrounding cities were already culturally "stronger"). Thus, it defected even if its area of influence was completely in my domain! ... After a while it defected to me again - not a big surprise, but now I see that we do need to know the math of cities behavior.

 

[RAL2000]

Interesting. Actually rather frustrating that nobody can address it other than 'I think this or that...'. Nobody seems to really know.

For a game that is supposed to be largely skill based, flipping adds a huge element of luck it seems. I have seen too many go one way or another without a good explanation as to why.

Right now I am playing the easiest level, just for a break and to experiment. My culture is about 70% of total on the histogram but there have been only a few cities come over to me. Amazingly when they did, it was all of a sudden in 1 or 2 turns, then nothing since. It makes me wonder whether there is a random oscillator that gets set for a few turns at a time.

I like the idea of flipping, but it would enhance the game if it could be explained and quantified, or there were an indicator saying how likely it was a city would flip. In the real world it seems that a change in loyalty would be apparent long beforehand. Imagine waking up one day and finding out that Seattle just joined Canada with no warning!? Wouldn't happen.

 

[Moulton]

My first game, at chieftain level to get the feel of the game, I won by culture, and assimilated about 10 cities. People built on my continent, and the cities swapped to me.
Next game, Rome stagnated early, -- had no iron, and I would not sell to him-- but built a city on m y far side. I kept getting reports that Rome was in awe of my culture... but that city never converted. All the right things were in place-- high culture, surrounded with culture laden cities, far from his capitol, but he remained Roman until conquered.
I think it may have something to do with the civilization. Engish have come over a lot, Axtec, and French. Even Persian. Not Roman, and not Greek.
I now have cities from four cultures on my continent--South America, far from home. I am rushing culture in my surrounding cities. We will see what happens.
aside from this point... I know there is rubber in that jungle, and have my resource covered. There is more that I had not gotten to, since one or two is enough ( but I want it all ) Persia sent a Trireme across the ocean, hit the beach, bypassed a couple of good fertile and productuve locations, and planted a city in the middle of the jungle. They don't even know what rubber is... supposedly.

 

[Polonius]

This is an intriguing question, and perhaps my recent experience will shed a small amount of light on it – although it won’t provide the answer.

I’m sure I’ve read somewhere that the calculation takes into account cities within a certain number of tiles radius. The further from the “target” city, the less the effect. Presumably after a certain number of tiles the effect is zero. To this calculation a modifier is applied based on the relative overall strength of your total culture points (not the individual cities’ points). This accumulates until the city flips.

No doubt there’s more to it than that. But here’s an interesting example. In my current game I reached 1954 with a very powerful culture (over 500 points per turn), over 30 cities, and a big lead on points. A few cities flipped along the way, but no huge rush. In 1955 I won a 100,000 point culture victory.

So I then reloaded back to 1950 and sold off every saleable culture scoring asset that I could (I was going to try and delay the culture victory long enough to try another type). I got the points down to around 100 (all from Wonders).

This time, when I reached 1954 another city flipped and defected to me. The interesting thing is that it DID NOT flip in 1954 when I had the 500+ culture points per turn, and cities stuffed with temples etc.!

So perhaps there is at least some random element. Certainly it does seem to prove that the culture points in the surrounding cities is not the key element (the second time through there weren’t any regular culture buildings and no Wonders for miles!). I had also made no troop movements in that area.

It would be great to know the full formula.

 

[eyrei]

I am not sure I want to know the formula. Culture is hardly an exact science, so I don't think the player should know exactly what to do to take a city with culture. It adds an element of mystery to the game, which, to me, makes it more interesting. I take a couple cities with culture per game with only a general idea of why, and I am personally satisfied with this. That, and I almost never have lost a city to cultural assimilation, so I think I am doing something right.

 

[Sam_Catchem]

I am sure there is some randomness..but mostly it is based on your overall cultural score. There is probably some equation tied into it...but as to whether it flips..I think there is some percentage of chance. Or else I would see a lot more cities flipping my way. Usually it is like 2 or 3 a game.

 

[ruru]

Now I am almost sure that there is no randomness . Today I played again and once my city switched to French (monarch level, republic, two cities were 5-6, I placed my city specially to swallow the other, but it happened the opposite . But, I have saved the game a turn before that and replayed it like seven or eight times trying to find the remedy against. So, in my city were 2 happy, 2 normal, 1 unhappy, library, phalang. Firstly, it switched every time, tried 3 or 4 times to check randomness - flipped always. Than I tried to have entertainer to remove unhappy, increase the global level of luxury - no help. BUT a horseman from outside came and saved the city! Thus, it depends on troops inside. So, almost facts:
1. No randomness, at least in simple understanding.
2. troops help to save city
Hypothesis:
1. There is pressure which one city imposes on the opponent's one, which is the difference of cultural levels of cities divided by distance (or another finction which drops with distance).
2. This pressure accumulates with time. (Otherwise any opponent's city built inside your domain would be swallen no sooner it is originated -- that time it is culturally weakiest).
3. When the accumulated pressure exceeds some threshold, city flips.
4. The threshold depends on armies inside, and, seems does not on city size.
4". Maybe it depends on nationality of citizens: concurred cities easily flip to their native nations.

What do you guys think of it?

 

[RAL2000]

I am in awe of anyone trying to solve this problem on an empirical basis, especially on a large map. Reloading over and over and trying different variables is a project worthy of Hercules!

Personally I returned to Chieftain level on a huge map, just to experiment with some things. I have flipped several cities (it is about 1814), and my overall culture is about 60% of the total. Which cities flipped made no particular sense to me. I wish I could say I saw a pattern.

If there is a significant random element it could take a year of testing to show how this works. I wish somebody from Firaxis would pay us a visit and give us some answers.

And for those not wanting to know, ok, we won't tell you. Would you prefer to play not knowing what the population of your cities is, and what units are garrisoned there? Just wondered, to each his own. Somehow I think you will change your mind when a big city in the middle of your Empire suddenly starts dancing to another empire's tune.

 

[nklatt]

Remember when saving/reloading, though, that the random number seed is saved, so the outcome of the "random event" you're experimenting with will be the same unless something in the line of events leading up to it changes. I.e., you need to do at least one thing, cumulative different each time between the time you reload and the event you're experimenting on.

Hope that made sense - ugh!