Can I defend against ideological discontent or is a change of ideologies inevitable?

[Greasy Dave]

My second BNW game – shame, I know, I just have a seriously busy RL. Anyhow, I just got suckered by ideology pressure. Immortal Assyria game. I got the first ideology – freedom. Everything was fine. Then I noticed my happiness dropping, unexpectedly. I checked the culture screen and I see my population are unhappy.

Ethiopia – order- content. Caesar and the Songhai, both aurocracy – content. My pop- unhappy.

I haven’t been able to find the actual figures that explain – my cultural output compared to theirs. But the simple question is how do I combat this?

I have all the guilds and have them stocked with specialists and everytime one pops I’ve been creating a great work. I have all the culture CS’s allied. I’ve neglected archeologists, because there’s only a couple of digs in my empire. I’ve gone tradition, some piety, and the right half of rationalism. Plus freedom to the third tier.

If I understand the mechanic I need to pump out more culture? Right? Not easy this late in the game to suddenly turn this on. I missed all the early wonders so I’m pretty slack on wonder culture. I’d been relying on great writers in my libraries and cultural CS’s to get what I needed. I can rush build Broadway and/or the Eifffel Tower.

But bottom line – is there a short term fix? Or will I be having to swap ideology? If I swap – do I automatically lose the five ideological policies I have – I can’t swap them into order or autocracy, right?

And which ideology should I choose – to make sure I stop suffering unhappiness from discontent? Is there a way to judge the other civ’s ideological strength? I’d prefer order—but I think Caesar has all the culture. And it’s going to be hard enough rebalancing my civ when I lose all the specialist happiness bonuses, in any case.

I have to say this is the most fun I’ve ever had with a Civ game- awesome.

 

[Tinker]

If you swap, you keep all policies except the "early adopter" ones - i.e. in this case you can reassign three out of the five you had, and lose two.

 

[Novalia]

I run into the same problem most games as I don't really max out my culture. The key to survival in this instance is to really exploit your strengths. For me I always build a good economy so I am able to wheel and deal. You need happiness. You get it thru luxuries, buildings, policies. I'll usually pay attention to CS quests, make good use of spies, and trade like crazy with the AI.

Sometimes you need to bite the bullet and spend exorbitant amounts of gpt to secure one luxury that might then secure you a few CS allies as well as giving you happiness. Or at least get you close enough influence that you can pay for more or try a coup.

Then after the first three of four important policies you can snag one that focuses directly on your happiness problems. All the while you're building happiness buildings as needed.

I won't switch an ideology tho. I'd rather break my balls patching the problem than ditching well earned policies.

 

[Izmir Stinger]

So, the pressure to change ideologies policies actually comes from the other industrial civilization's influence on your culture versus your influence on theirs. There is a screen on the culture tab that breaks it down. The way it works is, if one civ has a higher level of cultural influence on another civ than that one has on it, a certain number of "points" will be applied towards the civ with less influence adopting the more influential civ's ideology. All of the points for all of the civs with ideologies are added up, and whichever ideology has the most points for a civ, that is the one the people will clamor to adopt. If that is the ideology they have (or it is a tie), they are content, if not, unhappiness, and the more points there are for the more influential ideology, the more unhappy.

So, producing more culture does make it so that more tourism is required for other civs to gain influence over you, but as you have noted, increasing it significantly is a fools errand. Increasing tourism is much easier in this stage of the game, and depending on the current state of your influence, it might be the easiest way to fix the problem - besides switching ideologies

Check which ideology your people are clamoring for, and from which civ most of the influence points are coming. Then look at what your cultural influence level with them is. If it is "unknown," you may be able to fix the problem with a single great musician. Bumping your cultural influence with them up to "exotic" will reduce the influence disparity by one level. Depending on how many levels they were beating you by, this could reduce the amount of pressure to switch ideologies by one or two points. All you have to do is make a tie.

You can also just ride it out. If other civs choose freedom, their freedom points might cancel out the order or autocracy points that are causing the problem. As long as your net happiness doesn't go to -20 its not the end of the world.

 

[Greasy Dave]

So, the pressure to change ideologies policies actually comes from the other industrial civilization's influence on your culture versus your influence on theirs. There is a screen on the culture tab that breaks it down. The way it works is, if one civ has a higher level of cultural influence on another civ than that one has on it, a certain number of "points" will be applied towards the civ with less influence adopting the more influential civ's ideology. All of the points for all of the civs with ideologies are added up, and whichever ideology has the most points for a civ, that is the one the people will clamor to adopt. If that is the ideology they have (or it is a tie), they are content, if not, unhappiness, and the more points there are for the more influential ideology, the more unhappy.

So, producing more culture does make it so that more tourism is required for other civs to gain influence over you, but as you have noted, increasing it significantly is a fools errand. Increasing tourism is much easier in this stage of the game, and depending on the current state of your influence, it might be the easiest way to fix the problem - besides switching ideologies

Check which ideology your people are clamoring for, and from which civ most of the influence points are coming. Then look at what your cultural influence level with them is. If it is "unknown," you may be able to fix the problem with a single great musician. Bumping your cultural influence with them up to "exotic" will reduce the influence disparity by one level. Depending on how many levels they were beating you by, this could reduce the amount of pressure to switch ideologies by one or two points. All you have to do is make a tie.

You can also just ride it out. If other civs choose freedom, their freedom points might cancel out the order or autocracy points that are causing the problem. As long as your net happiness doesn't go to -20 its not the end of the world.

Excellent explanation. JUst let me check I understand. My and the AI's cultural nifluence is tourism. And my defence is culture. If their tourism is greater than my culture, they get points and start to influence me. Right?

So if I increase my tourism and "attack" them, then I reduce the gap of their influence?

I just changed a great musician into a great work ;-( but I can rush build Broadway. So with the musician I'd go and culture bomb them with a concert? Right?

There's only three other civs left on the map - Songhai, Ethiopia and Rome - noone else is going to pick Freedom unfortunately.

I have to say, this is a pretty awesome mechanic. It's only my second game of BNW, I just haven't had time to play since the summer...and the game has rocked from the first turn -constantly challenging. I'd just been settling down to what I thought was going to be a steamroll to victory and this kicked me in the backside. cool

 

[Deau]

Influence mechanic is dependant on difference of tourism pressure.

If a player has 10% of an opponent's culture in tourism, he will do 1 ideology pressure. 30% bumps up to 2 (I forget further breakdown I believe 60% is 3 and 100% is 4).

Against each opponent, the difference of their pressure on you to your pressure on them is calculated. This INCLUDES shared ideology pressure. Thus, if you are freedom and produce 0 tourism and another civ goes freedom and has the highest pressure enough to achieve 30% of your culture in tourism, he will "help" you sustain your ideology by giving you 2 points.

The net resulting sum of differentials will determine the pressure on you.

There are 4 resulting ways to fight against ideology pressure.

1. Enact your ideology at world congress. If this is done too late after selection, you will get a big diplo hit with all other-ideology civs.

2. Increase your total culture so that it is harder for AIs to achieve 10%/30% of your culture in tourism. This means allying some culture CSs, getting hermitage out early, enacting +3 culture per wonder if you have managed to get a few wonders and finally, using great writers in a clever way 8 turns after a high CPT yield (like if you manage to ally all culture CSs for 8 turns). Sadly, this is the technique with the least impact as the AI still only needs to achieve 10% of any such extra culture to still pressure you.

3. Increase your tourism so that you achieve at least 10% on all AIs. This will effectively cut 1 point off of all other pressure sources. This plays against you only if there are more AIs with your shared ideology than AIs with all other ideologies combined (this happens only typically as Order). This is also difficult to achieve the higher the difficulty you play as AIs bonus to great people spam gets them early culture even earlier.

4. Select the ideology you expect to be shared by the most AIs to benefit from their pressure on you whenever you've ignored/had low throughput of both culture and tourism. With all VCs enabled, this is almost always synonymous with picking order.


If you are very fast on science and beeline radio or luck out coal and rush-buy 3 factories asap, you can often enact your ideology when there is 0-2 AIs with another ideology which really smoothens the difficulty of keeping your ideology. It is extremely powerful if you can time it right before a WC vote and since you won't have much opposition, it is easy to manage enough CS allies to enact.

Freedom is probably the hardest to keep as it does not provide good +happiness tenets AND has typically the fewest followers. With an early enact, you will possibly manage to flip some autocracy cities through the help of order pressure as the total pressure of freedom will still be highest thanks to the WC resolution.

 

[Novalia]

What always screws me up is the disconnect between guilds and artist buildings. I don't hit museums until much later on as its way off my most efficient tech path.

 

[kace_]

One way to boost your influence really fast on another civ is to use the Great Musician's concert tour tourism bomb. After 1 or 2, you'll be even with the other ideologies.

 

[Buccaneer]

In my science game, I simply combated being first and only to Freedom by having high happiness going in the Ideology game. I then kept unhappiness from getting too high but bumping up my Tourism (airports and Eiffel Tower).

 

[Deau]

One way to boost your influence really fast on another civ is to use the Great Musician's concert tour tourism bomb. After 1 or 2, you'll be even with the other ideologies.

That's only if you were already generating enough TPT for your GMs strength to be any meaningful...which in the case of you getting overrun by another ideology is false. GMs are worth 10 turns of TPT. 10 turns of low TPT is too weak to shift the ideology pressure.

 

[Txurce]

An alternative that may be too late for this game is to neglect tourism altogether, keep your borders one-way, try to trade only with CS, use your GW's after Golden Ages as political treatises, rocket into an ideology, choose the happiness tenets, and then maximize them (build those hospitals and stock exchanges!). This is the approach I always take playing with Freedom, and have only been forced to switch once in many, many games.

 

[joncnunn]

I've never run into the issue; I find that just building & running the guilds and building the standard cultural buildings to house them in provide enough culture & tourism to where it's my ideology being shoved down the AIs throats instead of the reverse.

 

[joshua43214]

We are missing the info on how big your empire is, and how many unique luxuries you settled. Are giving the AI open borders at any point? Never do this, in fact you should maintain their open borders once you have the gpt to afford it.

Unless you are going for a culture victory, Order is almost always better than Freedom if you have 3 or more cities. You just do not get enough happy from Freedom unless you have a lot of unique lux's - you can not depend on being able to trade for luxuries if you take Freedom. I find even with 3 cities, Freedom is almost impossible to grow tall and stay happy late game, so I only settle 2 unless I can get 2 unique lux's per city (I prefer 7 unique's for 3 cities).

I seldom run more than 12 tpt, and commonly on 6-8, I never build the musicians guild either.

If I know I will be happy starved later, I pick a local mercantile CS and get it allied up and keep it allied.

About the only time I ever change ideologies is when I play domination, and I often switch from Autocracy to Order at some point when I start to steam roll. I am sure I have switched in a peaceful game, but I can't remember the last time I did. Make sure every city has at least 1 unique luxury - ignore the advisors.

I am thinking maybe there is a combination of going to wide for freedom, not enough unique luxuries, and selling open borders to the AI

 

[Greasy Dave]

I stuck with freedom and just built happiness buildings and allied CS's. I had closed borders most of the time. My Tourism was super low, so when I tried the GM concert tour it had almost no effect. I did it twice and then gave up.

Interestingly, after I'd won the game I switched to order to see what effect it would have. I was struck by how small the differences were. With order I had the same bpt as I had with freedom - which surprised me -I'd thought all those specialists were going to bring me a significant boost - but I found the 25 percent factory boost under order is equally as powerful. My empire under order was happier - but that's a no-brainer. And the growth was probably worse, but didn't seem to be that much.

I guess the only benefit to be got from freedom over order was the fact I could work all the artist specialist slots and get those GP's. plus the 6foreign legionnaires -which were very welcome.

Not sure which way I'll go next time. I'll see where I am when I get there. i get that freedom is mostly a culture VC ideology, but I might try it again anyway and see if I can't get better growth out of it.

 

[joshua43214]

I stuck with freedom and just built happiness buildings and allied CS's. I had closed borders most of the time. My Tourism was super low, so when I tried the GM concert tour it had almost no effect. I did it twice and then gave up.

Interestingly, after I'd won the game I switched to order to see what effect it would have. I was struck by how small the differences were. With order I had the same bpt as I had with freedom - which surprised me -I'd thought all those specialists were going to bring me a significant boost - but I found the 25 percent factory boost under order is equally as powerful. My empire under order was happier - but that's a no-brainer. And the growth was probably worse, but didn't seem to be that much.

I guess the only benefit to be got from freedom over order was the fact I could work all the artist specialist slots and get those GP's. plus the 6foreign legionnaires -which were very welcome.

Not sure which way I'll go next time. I'll see where I am when I get there. i get that freedom is mostly a culture VC ideology, but I might try it again anyway and see if I can't get better growth out of it.

Some one here actually mathed out Order vs. Freedom a while back, Order was in general better. I only take Freedom for CV or OCC. For OCC Freedom is very nice, especially with Korea.

The useless concert bomb is why I never build the musicians guild. the thing is just a waste of hammers and gold, and each GM means one less GW, which means one less social policy.

 

[RonMar]

Great Works created by GM's can be a big help in creating culture and tourism. I don't use GM's for anything else, until maybe late in the game when their culture yield is worthwhile.

But, by that time I usually have enough Great Work of Music slots that I've got plenty of places to put them. So, it is a big decision which way to use them.

I usually put guilds only one to a city and not in the capital. It's easier that way to grow my first 4 cities. Make certain the capital (with the National College) can always fill the GS slots. Trying to keep growing all the GP for GWorks in the capital is problematic for me. Although I run occasional food routes to the capital, I usually use some to bolster my later-founded cities so I have more choice of productive cities. Yes, for the space ship, but at least twice I have found myself winning by Culture while aiming for my primary goal of a Science victory. -- especially since the Fall patch.

 

[Deau]

I stuck with freedom and just built happiness buildings and allied CS's. I had closed borders most of the time. My Tourism was super low, so when I tried the GM concert tour it had almost no effect. I did it twice and then gave up.

Interestingly, after I'd won the game I switched to order to see what effect it would have. I was struck by how small the differences were. With order I had the same bpt as I had with freedom - which surprised me -I'd thought all those specialists were going to bring me a significant boost - but I found the 25 percent factory boost under order is equally as powerful. My empire under order was happier - but that's a no-brainer. And the growth was probably worse, but didn't seem to be that much.

I guess the only benefit to be got from freedom over order was the fact I could work all the artist specialist slots and get those GP's. plus the 6foreign legionnaires -which were very welcome.

Not sure which way I'll go next time. I'll see where I am when I get there. i get that freedom is mostly a culture VC ideology, but I might try it again anyway and see if I can't get better growth out of it.

The primary strength of freedom over order is actually an easy full control over the world congress with added yield from CSs. Each trade route gives a perma ally and each spy does the same. When your pop is already 25-30 and you have good quality tiles, getting +6f from working 6 specialists *shouldn't* be game breaking growth-wise. It's only relevant if you've failed your own growth in the early game and are running too many specialists for your city size.

 

[Arachnofiend]

The useless concert bomb is why I never build the musicians guild. the thing is just a waste of hammers and gold, and each GM means one less GW, which means one less social policy.

That's actually untrue. The three cultural GP's are on separate counters, getting one doesn't bump up the cost of the others.

 

[Izmir Stinger]

Excellent explanation. JUst let me check I understand. My and the AI's cultural nifluence is tourism. And my defence is culture. If their tourism is greater than my culture, they get points and start to influence me. Right?

It doesn't have to be greater. If the total tourism they have applied to you is even 10% of the total culture you have accumulated, they will apply one point of ideology pressure, with more points being applied as they reach certain thresholds. However, the reverse also applies, so if they have 10% tourism on you and you have 10% tourism on them you both get one point, which cancel out and equals no pressure. The problem you are running into is that some of those civs probably have 30% or more of your culture in tourism, so they are applying many points, but shaving off just one by hitting that 10% threshold can make the difference in the amount of unhapiness forcing you to convert.

Check the numbers in the influence screen. One Great Musician may bump you up to the 10% threshold, or it might not. If the guy that is applying huge amounts of ideological pressure also has enourmous amounts of culture, this may not work, and that AI is probably threatening to win a cultural victory, so watch out.

Other options include sucking it up and converting, or killing them.

3. Increase your tourism so that you achieve at least 10% on all AIs. This will effectively cut 1 point off of all other pressure sources. This plays against you only if there are more AIs with your shared ideology than AIs with all other ideologies combined (this happens only typically as Order). This is also difficult to achieve the higher the difficulty you play as AIs bonus to great people spam gets them early culture even earlier.

You don't have to do all AI's, just the ones that are applying too many unwanted influence points. This will typically only be one or two civs, b/c most AI's will be too focused on Military and Science to bother much with tourism, and thus won't be applying many points. Reducing the pressure from the dominant ideology by just one or two points can make the world of difference in reducing unhappiness. A bit of unhappiness from ideology is easily overcome, it is only when it starts to mount that it becomes an insurmountable obstacle. That is why I suggest a great musician tour on the AI with the most influential ideology as the fastest, most cost effective way to put a dent in the problem. It's a band-aid, but it can help alot.

 

[Walter E Kurtz]

Capture wonders and great works from your enemies. Sometimes the works get moved just before you take the city, but that won't last forever.