city flips

[robpurf]

i got very irritated with the game last night playing as the chinese with the japanese next door and the babylonians on the next continent that i can reach in 1 turn with my ships.anyway all my cities near japan i had building culture and filling them with units from other cities in the hope of getting a japanese city to declare for me.the opposite happened.then i go to war witht babylon to get them off my continent and while i was at it took a city on their continent and got peace off them.

about four turns later the city declared back for babylon and it was as near my capitol as theirs.so two questions,well two and a half.is it worth attacking japan to get the city back that flipped to them and if i do will said city be in resistance??? and how do i wage war on the other continent while stopping them from flipping back to babylon???

 

[Delphi456]

As a general comment - most people would clear their own continent before engaging in war on another continent.

 

[PaperBeetle]

And I just read in DanQ's latest CivRev preview that Revolutions will have city flipping, because Sid himself thinks it is a "fun" game mechanic! Good grief, now we know why they keep putting it in, even though it winds players up no end.

Anyway, I think that the citizens in flipped cities retain their original nationality (unlike citizens in traded cities) in which case you should expect few resisters if you retake the city by force. Whether it worth doing, I can't say without playing the game. But if you had a good reason for going to war with Babylon instead of Japan, it is certainly possible that the loss of this one city doesn't change that reason. In other words, you shouldn't attack Japan just because it is annoying to have a city flip to them.

As for the Babylonians, they are often a bit of a cultural monster, so their towns will be likely to flip back after you capture them. My solution would be don't fight it; expect the flips and plan for them. In practice this means you wouldn't leave units in their towns, except maybe redlined units in a town with barracks. But you should leave an attacker or two hanging around outside town ready to take back flips. They should only get one defensive unit per flip (though I have occasionally had games where the AI managed to produce a second unit in the town during the same interturn that it flipped). On a strategic level you overcome the problem of flipping by fighting fast. A good ROP rape can wipe out a civ without even allowing any cities the chance of flipping.

Or you can just raze their cities of course, which is a nice quick way of getting slaves. But it means you have to bother settling their land yourself, and if you aren't quick enough then the place will be crawling with barbs and AI settlers faster than you can say "lebensraum".

 

[robpurf]

thanks for the comment when it came to clearing my own continent i was taking a couple of isolated babylonian cities on my continent to expand a bit and decided to keep going i was thinking of going down the road of razing the cities but thats against my entire principal of playing the game