Culture design decision input needed

[Blazenclaw]

@Toffer90 and I are torn between two options, and I believe some input may be helpful.

Option 1: "Equilibrium Culture"
In this case, culture continues to decay regardless of whether culture is actively being put onto a tile or not. This means that a city that stops producing culture buildings will after some time reach a fixed value of culture for that civ/buildings/trait/civic combination and not continue to rise indefinitely each turn.

Option 2: "Infinite Growth Culture"
In this case, culture will only decay on plots where culture is not being actively placed. This means that a city that stops producing culture buildings will continue to accumulate culture indefinitely (build 42 and prior, vanilla civ4).

Note that v43 currently is under Option 1 "Equilibrium Culture", but does contain a bug (of sorts) in which the decay is too slow, leading culture to seemingly never disappear when a city is conquered. This bug of non-disappearing culture will be fixed in v43.1 regardless of which option is chosen. (There's a second consideration here of whether a tile that loses culture input should immediately have control be lost or decay until it's lost, but that is independent of the two options above).

Reasoning/Implications of Equilibrium Culture:

• Opinion: "An old city does not necessarily have more culture by simple virtue of being older, but should have more culture because it has had more years to build shrines, temples, houses of learning, etc."
• As age plays less of a role in culture strength, it should be easier to tell when you are winning a culture war, and have such culture conflict be more dynamic. It, when balanced correctly, should make it possible to culture flip cities besides simply those that have been more recently founded than yours.
• Age still plays a factor for the culture level of city, which means it emits a larger strength at range. Even if a new city is rapidly constructed to have all current culture buildings, it will be many culture levels behind a long-established city, and so not exert as much influence at range even if base output is identical (unless a culture bomb is used to speed things up).
• "Culture doubles after X years" can be applied to more buildings; this will give old cities a further leg up compared to new ones once "all buildings" have been built. This can be done for infinite culture too, but has a much larger effect in this paradigm (as double culture in X years is more overshadowed by the simple age of the city).
• Greater impact/importance of things like civics, traits on culture output after reaching "all buildings" stage.

Arguments for Infinite Growth Culture:

• Opinion: "The right a culture/nation has to a plot should always increase as long as it is under their control, it shouldn't just stagnate at some value now and then"
• An old city, even if not heavily invested into culture production, would have a stronger cultural presence and ability to defend itself from usurpers.
• Slower but larger response to shifts in culture; increasing culture by 10% over your opponent will have a larger impact many many turns later if you can keep the 10% consistently.
• Less codelines to read per plot per turn and less code in general, "keep it simple stupid".
• No changes to effect of culture bomb.

Input especially appreciated from @Thunderbrd, and @JosEPh_II if it's not too much text

Edit: Included short ver of some of Toffer's args beow

 

[Toffer90]

• "Culture doubles after X years" can be applied to more buildings; this will give old cities some leg up compared to new ones once "all buildings" have been built.

Is not a reasoning for either, should remove the point as it is just as valid for both, it's therefore just a distraction.
▬▬▬
I just think the right a culture/nation has to a plot should always increase as long as it is under their control, it shouldn't just stagnate at some value now and then, 1000 years of outputting 10 culture shouldn't be outdone by a city being plopped down beside it year 990 and which through a lot of hurry production and perhaps a tech advantage manage to output 50 culture per turn for 10 years and thus claim a lot of territory that has belonged to the other for 990 years as if there is no historical right factored in.

Another reason to just let it continue to add every turn with no decay counterbalancing it is that it is less codelines to read per plot per turn and less code in general, "keep it simple stupid".
It won't overflow as when a player reach 1 billion culture on the plot the culture of all players on the plot will be divided by 10, effectively just zooming out (scaling) so that everything gets smaller without it really affecting anything real, kinda like looping the top end of culture values within the programmatically legal value range, like entering a huge roundabout after leaving a straight road.
Why should it be easy for a new car joining the race to catch up with a car that has should have had the time to drive a 1000 laps, all it has to do is build all the culture buildings and it will quickly catch up as the leading car stopped driving a long time ago, it is just waiting since it has reached its max culture on all surrounding plots.

Edit:
Another argument against the equilibrium system is that it makes great artists culture bomb practically worthless. The equilibrium system is a tug of war between culture output per turn and decay per turn, decay is a percentage of the culture on the plot removed every turn, so adding a big one time bonus will only serve to drastically increase decay while culture output per turn remains unchanged, this means decay will win the tug of war until things stabilize at the value justiefied by the current culture output from cities per turn. Take an example, two nations have a city, and they have touching borders, both cities currently have the same culture output, now it doesn't matter what city got built first or how fast one built up its culture output compared to the other, their borders will eventually be shared brotherly as decay will make sure the other catch up without having greater culture output than the first. Lets say one city use a great artists culture bomb, it will right away change the borders between the two cities so that the one that used the culture bomb gets a lot of territory from the other. Though culture output remains unchanged so this territorial change will with some turns regress back to where it was befopre the culture bomb. With the infinite growth culture which doesn't decay unless culture stops being added to it, a culture bomb will be a permanent boost, e.g. if it adds 5000 culture to a plot, then a foreign culture that adds 100 culture per turn more than you to the same plot will have to do so for 50 turns to catch up fair and square, or it would have to use a culture bomb of its own to catch up if its culture per turn output to the plot is equal/similar to your own culture output to the plot per turn. With the equilibrium system the foreign culture value on the plot would catch up to that temporary 5000 culture bonus eventually even if it adds the same amount of culture per turn to the plot as the one who used the culture bomb does; i.e. the culture bomb would then truly be a temporary worthless boost rather than a useful tool to get ahead or catch up to another players culture..

 

[Blazenclaw]

""Culture doubles after X years" can be applied to more buildings" is not a reasoning for either, should remove the point as it is just as valid for both, it's therefore just a distraction

It can be applied to both yes, but the influence it has on infinite scaling is largely overshadowed by the effect of how long ago the city was founded. I'm saying that by adding this tag to culture buildings, the net result will be something a little closer to 'infinite scaling' than if it were not added to 'equilibrium', whereas adding it to 'infinite scaling' has relatively little impact (or rather, impact in the opposite direction of equilibrium; if you want it to scale even harder with age than it currently does). If 'equilibrium' is chosen, I'd like to do this, and shouldn't be harder than a quick py script to add it to xml, or dll to auto add it to buildings that produce culture. Should be relatively easy.

1000 years of outputting 10 culture shouldn't be outdone by a city being plopped down beside it year 990 and which through a lot of hurry production and perhaps a tech advantage manage to output 50 culture per turn for 10 years and thus claim a lot of territory that has belonged to the other for 990 years as if there is no historical right factored in.
...
Why should it be easy for a new car joining the race to catch up with a car that has should have had the time to drive a 1000 laps, all it has to do is build all the culture buildings and it will quickly catch up as the leading car stopped driving a long time ago, it is just waiting since it has reached its max culture on all surrounding plots.

For how many years were there native tribes in the Americas before colonials came with a tech advantage and resupplies from Europe, building in a few tens to hundred years a culture that influenced tribes? Not just conquered, though that was done too, but influenced? Under infinite scaling, this is pretty much impossible, because culture producing at low levels for half the game tends to render a city immune to cultural conversion in my experience; you can only flip cities you've founded at least relatively nearby in timescale, or those you have an extreme tech disparity over. If there's any parity at all, typically age dominates all other factors. In equilibrium, it'd be a factor of ~1.5 plus greater range (so multiple cities defend each other better) rather than being overpowering.

Tokyo/Edo is ~400 years old, Osaka is ~1600 years old, Los Angeles is ~200 years old, Beijing is ~3000 years old. Their relative "cultural strengths" today in reality, for what good it matches to the game version, would seem to scale less with age than infinite scaling would suggest.

Another argument against the equilibrium system is that it makes great artists culture bomb practically worthless.

This is correct that in equilibrium, the value of culture on a plot would be more temporary. However, what it does remain very useful for is increasing the cultural level of a city, because even in equilibrium that does scale with cultural age. Even if a city is rush-built to have every cultural building, the city that's been around longer will have many levels on the newer one, and as a result push a greater cultural strength at each tile of distance.
E.g. City A is old and produces 1.25k culture/turn (1k buildings, 250 because half have 'aged up' to double culture, that half being less effective than newer culture buildings) and is level 8, so at a distance of 4 tiles it would exert ~750 culture/turn on tiles (100% at core, 25% at maximum range means ~60% at half range). City B is founded and (at non-insignificant cost) rushed to completion of every single culture building, and reaches level 4 after some short number of turns. It produces the same 1k culture from buildings, no benefits from age, and as a result exhibits 250 culture/turn at range 4; one third the value of city A at same distance.
This is also assuming A has no wonders, no buildings that B can no longer construct due to passing previous eras, etc.
However, if B uses a culture bomb to gain two levels to level 6, the outcome at range 4 is 1000*(4/6) or 666 culture/turn, which is much closer to 750 of city A. Bombs are not worthless; still, I should think, helpful for expanding the cultural influence of a city, if less helpful on super well-established cities.

Edit: Here's some graphs too for response curves to culture as function of time after a culture building is constructed. How long until a culture building stops impacting culture levels, etc.

Spoiler Theory/Graphs :

Gain: This represents a building constructed that gives this much culture (or several buildings totaling to this, or an increase to culture multiplier that has a net increase of this amount, etc)
Decay %: This is how much is lost each turn. I think 3% may be sweet spot

Above: At 3% decay/turn, if player gains 10 more culture per turn than they were previously at equilibrium for, they gain half effect in ~20 turns and no further effect past 90.

Above: Doesn't matter what starting value is, time to peak, time to halfway to peak is dependent on decay % and gain, not current equilibrium value. Here the gain per turn is 20, starting from the equilibrium value of 10 gain per turn. Still takes ~90 turns to max, ~20 turns to halfway. Notice scales are different, but curve is identical to graph above this one.

Above: Earlygame values are coarser due to rounding, but that's true of pretty much everything. You're not looking to culture flip in prehistoric, are you?

Above: Higher decay (faster gamespeed, setting) leads to faster/lower equilibrium being reached (~50 turns to max instead of 90 at 3% decay, ~15 to halfway instead of 20).

Above: Lower decay (v low gamespeed) almost works like infinite scaling actually, somewhat amusingly. You might actually build things faster than equilibrium ever is reached.

 

[Toffer90]

For how many years were there native tribes in the Americas before colonials came with a tech advantage and resupplies from Europe, building in a few tens to hundred years a culture that influenced tribes? Not just conquered, though that was done too, but influenced? Under infinite scaling, this is pretty much impossible, because culture producing at low levels for half the game tends to render a city immune to cultural conversion in my experience; you can only flip cities you've founded at least relatively nearby in timescale, or those you have an extreme tech disparity over. If there's any parity at all, typically age dominates all other factors. In equilibrium, it'd be a factor of ~1.5 plus greater range (so multiple cities defend each other better) rather than being overpowering.

If a team has a big tech advantage then it would catch up to old cities with new cities easy enough in vanilla civ (infinite growth is the vanilla paradigm). Also, new world civ spawning in C2C doesn't start before the first nation makes landfall on the new world, so they only get a certain amount of turns to build up their culture before the much higher teched foreigners arrive with cities.
Consider a landmass a player has mostly to itself for a couple eras, but there's a little neutral land left on the land, would it be fair for a newcomer who manage to squeeze a new city into this let's say 1 plot of neutral land should be able to easily flip territory without doing any conquest or even using great artists to catch up culturally to become an equally accepted culture within land controlled by the original inhabitants? The equilibrium paradigm will make this an annoyance, I also don't like how it will cause similarly teched players to brotherly share territory even if one nation got there first and claimed the territory first (this should give them an advantage in the influence race of the locals living there, an internal resistance in the populating against accepting foreign language and ways).

 

[Toffer90]

Another argument against the equilibrium system is that it makes great artists culture bomb practically worthless.

The same of course would apply for influence driven war.
If we take an ideal situation where two nations have the same cultural output to a set of tiles on the border between them (a stable border) where output is not expected to change for either of them going forward, then it is my opinion that influence driven war should be able to permanently push that border if a war breaks out (and we assume nothing changes with cultural output of relevant cities), that if combat cease it won't just regress back to the old border within some turns due to decay bringing everything back to the territorial situation that the system demands it to be.

I'm of the opinion that plot flipping and border pushing should have a lot of inertia, it should take time and require effort, if one gets ahead then the other needs to do more than just match the first, more than just to get the same cultural output as his adversary to claim a brotherly share of the land, he would need to outcompete his adversary to reach the point of brotherly share of the land, one have to win and do better than the current owner to claim ownership of the plot.

 

[Blazenclaw]

would it be fair for a newcomer who manage to squeeze a new city into this let's say 1 plot of neutral land should be able to easily flip territory without doing any conquest or even using great artists to catch up culturally to become an equally accepted culture within land controlled by the original inhabitants?

I don't believe it would be as easy as you say it is. Yes a new city if lasts long enough to grow borders several times might steal a handful more tiles than it would without equilibrium, but it will lose when the mainland grows to encompass the one tile it was founded on. Also while it is possible yes to build enough caravans etc to build an entirely new culture city from scratch, that does represent a significant investment. The equivalent hammers could have gone to a wonder, or a substantial army, or a city focused to science somewhere in or close to your territory, etc.

I'm of the opinion that plot flipping and border pushing should have a lot of inertia, it should take time and require effort, if one gets ahead then the other needs to do more than just match the first, more than just to get the same cultural output as his adversary to claim a brotherly share of the land, he would need to outcompete his adversary to reach the point of brotherly share of the land, one have to win and do better than the current owner to claim ownership of the plot.

Investing enough caravans to build every single culture building into a city does take time and effort. It'll also be behind in culture level which means it will not become equivalently brotherly for quite some time; in order to do so it would have to outproduce the one or more other cities it is fending off, whether that be done via what combination of tech, culture slider, trait, hammer-to-culture conversion, or such. A one-city beachhold is also vulnerable as time goes on, because eventually it will be in cultural threat by more than one city, unless the mainlander has extremely spaced out cities. And there's no way it's winning a 1v2+ culture fight.

The same of course would apply for influence driven war.

True IDW would have less of an effect prior to fixed borders, but looking at the graphs in my prior post, it's not like equilibrium is reset in a handful of turns, but in ~20 turns on normal gamespeed. That's 10 techs! And once fixed borders is in play though, it becomes substantially stronger. A temporary swing will stay permanently in the FB civ's control until the culture ratio dips too far. Say the 'default' ratio of civ A to B is 40/60 (so, owned by B), but IDW wins from A punch it up to 51/49. It will then stay in favor of A until it drops to 33/66 or lower, at least according to the current values iirc.

 

[Blazenclaw]

Alright, I'm gonna test with this. Seem a decent enough approximation? This is early/mid ancient era.

Spoiler Cheeky forward settles, earlier than probably we're discussing :

This one is just next to one city, will autobuild all available culture buildings

This one next to two, one capital. Same situation, obviously wb in w/57th inf for defense.

 

[arihant]

Less codelines to read per plot per turn and less code in general, "keep it simple stupid"

Dont really care. This is only reason i voted for infinite.

 

[Maltazard]

As far as gameplay is concerned, I'd want to be able to use culture aggressively and forward settle an AI and overcome them with superior cultural output in a short period of time. At the same time the AI can do that to me, it is doing that to me currently in fact, and it does make me kind of furious, and this is a dynamic that will force border culture issues into real wars, which I guess is realistic. Perhaps diplomatic penalties should be harsher as well here. At the same time, getting culture sieged is horrible, and I reckon the AI shouldn't really get culture modifier bonuses at higer difficulties, if it currently does.

Normally there is a defender advantage in C2C so that military conquest is hard, perhaps there should be some mechanism so that "cultural defense" is also a thing, and it could be a modulation of realistic culture spread/minimum city borders: cities get a positive modifier to their immediate surroundings, so that a city five tiles away can't just overcome the entire vital space of another city by getting +1. And if I understood those graphs correctly, it kind of already works like that.

I think there are some issues due to bloat here. You have revolutions modcomponent which can interact with revolt chance and culture, but it's an optional modcomp which is not mantained and complicates things futher. You have a variety of other optional cultural settings and frankly mantaining all these options that wildy differentiate gameplay with only one underlying culture spread mechanic is probably not a great idea. It could be the time to decide if realistic culture spread and minimum borders need to be baked into the culture mechanics of the mod, and simplify all the interactions going on. Fixed borders is another mess entirely. Influence driven culture yet another one. When you added more culture steps, realistic culture spread changed quite a bit. There's also larger cities without metropolitan administration that at this point I'd also make default and make it work from city size 12, whatever the culture level.

 

[Somebody613]

I have a more "aggressive" question that some people (*cough*Pit*cough*) will get angry about:
Why not make all already widely tested (read: for years now) modcomps INTEGRATED BY DEFAULT?
You may keep them MODULAR on the FILE level (in case they will clash with something new, or will get upgraded to better alternatives) - but why ever make them OPTIONAL in the GAME?
The whole idea of a MOD is that it, well, CHANGES THE GAME - so why leave the ability for "old-fashioned stubborn players" to outright ignore what the MOD suggests?
Again, this should only apply to TESTED features, after a lot of intensive examination and play-testing, obviously.
But why let players simply ignore what makes this mod what it is in the first place?
I honestly don't exactly support this attitude.
I myself have a feature or a few that I totally hate and never use (the forced use of siege weapons, for example, with "defense needs to be lowered first") - but I'd still vote for full integration.
I can hardly think of any TESTED feature that would make this mod WORSE for playing, expect for anti-player stuff like "always raze cities", which is more of a "deliberate nuisance".
But apart from that one (and a half, for Barbs) example, everything else actually forces the player to IMPROVISE, to LEARN, to PLAY BETTER.
Forced siege? Well, learn to use it as well, or play less war and more culture or espionage, or just overwhelm the world economically. There are always OTHER playing styles to explore.
And more complex traits and combat? That's a flat BENEFIT for the aforementioned reasons - to LEARN, to IMPROVE, to EXPLORE.
If someone wants to play Vanilla (or close to it) - how about they... ya know, PLAY VANILLA?
I want to play Caveman2Cosmos, though - and it means Complex Leaders, Complex Combat, Complex Gameplay, and nothing LESS.
Yes, I know some people will get angry or at least will strongly disagree.
Not. My. Problem.
/rant

 

[Blazenclaw]

As far as gameplay is concerned, I'd want to be able to use culture aggressively and forward settle an AI and overcome them with superior cultural output in a short period of time.

I think forward settling should be something more doable with equilibrium than with infinite, but you voted for infinite?
In both paradigms, one needs to outproduce the other city's culture in order to flip tiles. The difference is the timescale. In infinite, you're comparing every single turn ever for who has more, whereas in equilibrium you're effectively comparing the last ~100 turns on normal speed. There's 0% chance of overcoming them in a short period of time under infinite paradigm if you're forward settling in anything outside of the first maybe three eras (again unless you have a massive tech lead, in which case it doesn't matter anyway, as you've a massive tech lead).

I reckon the AI shouldn't really get culture modifier bonuses at higer difficulties, if it currently does.

According to Civ4HandicapInfo.xml it does not, but thanks for reminding me to check lol.

cities get a positive modifier to their immediate surroundings, so that a city five tiles away can't just overcome the entire vital space of another city by getting +1. And if I understood those graphs correctly, it kind of already works like that.

True in both paradigms. V43 has a linear decay from 100% of output on the cities own tile, down to 50% at maximum range. This means in both paradigms in order to flip a city in a 1v1 culture duel you'd need to be producing twice the culture of the smaller (when at maximum range) or less than that if the smaller city is inside maximum range. I'm testing lowering it to 25% at max range, meaning you need to be producing at least 4x the smaller cities culture at max range.

You have revolutions modcomponent which can interact with revolt chance and culture, but it's an optional modcomp which is not mantained and complicates things futher. You have a variety of other optional cultural settings and frankly mantaining all these options that wildy differentiate gameplay with only one underlying culture spread mechanic is probably not a great idea. It could be the time to decide if realistic culture spread and minimum borders need to be baked into the culture mechanics of the mod, and simplify all the interactions going on. Fixed borders is another mess entirely. Influence driven culture yet another one. When you added more culture steps, realistic culture spread changed quite a bit. There's also larger cities without metropolitan administration that at this point I'd also make default and make it work from city size 12, whatever the culture level.

Most of these have already been overhauled in v43 to be functional with each other. Fixed Borders in particular I think works well. Interestingly I'm actually against larger cities without metropolitan, because you get them way too early imo

You may keep them MODULAR on the FILE level (in case they will clash with something new, or will get upgraded to better alternatives) - but why ever make them OPTIONAL in the GAME?

There have been a number of options that have been folded into base - useable mountains for instance - but it's not something often done.

 

[pi4t]

Speaking as a new player, there's one very good reason that I can see for having at least the more complicated and interesting options, like size matters, be modular. Learning the game. To someone like me who hasn't been playing the mod for years as it developed, there's a lot of new mechanics to learn. An almost overwhelming number. I've managed to learn them - well, the key ones - by starting out with a game that was close to vanilla, playing it until I got the hang of the new mechanics (properties, autobuilds, the mechanics of the prehistoric era, buildings producing flat science/gold/hammers, etc), then starting a new game with a few extra options enabled, and so on until I was playing the game as it's really intended.

If I hadn't been able to play a vanilla like game, I would have been overwhelmed by all the stuff going on and would have given up.

 

[Somebody613]

Speaking as a new player, there's one very good reason that I can see for having at least the more complicated and interesting options, like size matters, be modular. Learning the game. To someone like me who hasn't been playing the mod for years as it developed, there's a lot of new mechanics to learn. An almost overwhelming number. I've managed to learn them - well, the key ones - by starting out with a game that was close to vanilla, playing it until I got the hang of the new mechanics (properties, autobuilds, the mechanics of the prehistoric era, buildings producing flat science/gold/hammers, etc), then starting a new game with a few extra options enabled, and so on until I was playing the game as it's really intended.

If I hadn't been able to play a vanilla like game, I would have been overwhelmed by all the stuff going on and would have given up.

Wrong Pit, lol - I wasn't talking about you there.
And I'll be honest - I totally disagree with the way you approach new features (I always start with the full package, even if it takes time to adjust to it), but that's why I'm me, and you're you.
I'm open to agree to disagree on that, though, lol.

 

[Maltazard]

I think forward settling should be something more doable with equilibrium than with infinite, but you voted for infinite?

Well that goes to show my impaired reading comprehension...

Not really though: I know it sounds silly given what I said, but at the same time I'm conflicted, as in I don't find it entirely fair to be able to overcome thousands of turns of tile ownership in a short period of time. I'm also not entirely sure what realistic game scenarios could allow this situation to take place. You'd need a very significant technological advantage to quickly overcome a large, established city. Normal conflict seems faster at that point.

Most of these have already been overhauled in v43 to be functional with each other.

Yeah, I've noticed a LOT of effort, it's great. I know it can't be easy to patch everything together, hence why I'd consider integrating some things to make the balancing easier, but indeed it's a rare event that needs a lot of consideration.
I think the main irons remain the in-conquest behaviour of culture, ie when you capture a very large city and it remains surrounded by enemy culture for a very long time, which if I understand correctly equilibrium would help more with? I might change my vote then, for what it's worth.

Interestingly I'm actually against larger cities without metropolitan, because you get them way too early imo

I thought it made sense to have it happen in the industrial era, but after the % modifiers on buildings yields were nerfed, playing "tall" is a lot harder and tile yields are very precious now. Considering how varied C2C terrain is, the large swathes of suboptimal tiles you can run into (barren, dunes, whatever) and that in general cities grow to very large pop numbers already by the medieval age, I think it's a must have at this point. I'd also bump the mincitydistance up one or two tiles though. Cities will quickly cover their third ring now with the extra culture steps after all.

This goes back to having a creative leader neighbour in vanilla civ: you either kill them quickly, or get culture flipped. It's part of the game after all.

 

[Blazenclaw]

Alright, I'm gonna test with this. [snip]

Update ~40 turns later, starting to lose control of city near egypt (not thru influence of their capital at all yet)

Spoiler Pics :

They've also forward settled me in turn lol

The one near China is fine. Their city is smaller/also in poor position, so makes sense I can steal a few tiles from them. Not more though, it's not "brotherly" sharing.

Edit:
Re "I think the main irons remain the in-conquest behaviour of culture, ie when you capture a very large city and it remains surrounded by enemy culture for a very long time, which if I understand correctly equilibrium would help more with?" -> That's the 'bug' in current v43, because decay is set to 1% without a way to speed it up when all sources are lost. Toffer implemented a way to make culture control disappear instantly if there's no more culture coming in, as well as faster decay (3% base, this is what the graphs were showing).

 

[tmv]

If you want to keep SM optional, you really have to go with Infinite Growth IMO. Especially with an established game. The problem is:

When your cities have already maxed out their cultural level, they have a hard time keeping their tiles. I have an ongoing game (by all means already won, but I am in Transcendent for the first time) where I now have to go back to a fixed border civic, but only because I have SM can I build units and split them down, covering a large area per built unit. If I didn't have SM, that would become a nightmare.

I cannot say how this would go with a newer game (that one I began at SVN 11316, and after a long hiatus I went from 11458 to 11529, at which culture went awry).

 

[Blazenclaw]

When your cities have already maxed out their cultural level, they have a hard time keeping their tiles.

Could you elaborate on this, or upload your save? Maxing out the level should not have any reduction in cultural pressure; each level just increases the range and therefore power on each tile, so I'm not quite sure I'm understanding the logic of "hit max level -> less culture"?

 

[tmv]

Here you go. The only modmod I use is Rescaled Latitudes.

Many cities are reduced to their own tile (if even that), although they have the highest cultural level. Only cities that have not yet maxed out have kept their tiles.

 

[Blazenclaw]

Many cities are reduced to their own tile (if even that), although they have the highest cultural level. Only cities that have not yet maxed out have kept their tiles.

Yeah this is 100% a bug of some kind lmao, will look into it later today. Is this still svn 11529 or have you kept up to date on svn?

 

[raxo2222]

Here you go. The only modmod I use is Rescaled Latitudes.

Many cities are reduced to their own tile (if even that), although they have the highest cultural level. Only cities that have not yet maxed out have kept their tiles.

Tremendous culture level is at 33280 for Blitz, so looks like it got screwed up when I removed TXT_KEY_ from infotypes...
Instead of fixing itself (it could since there is valid amount of culture) it decided to set level at -1.

It could be screwed up by something else though
You play without realistic culture spread, so Tremendous isn't valid level here.
There should be thing that fixes culture on recalc, but isn't there.