Culture-Flipping Exposed

[Exile_Ian]

First off - thanks to Dan and the Firaxis guys for explaining an area of the game that was causing some confusion.

Apologies if I repeat some of the obvious (I haven't had time to read all the responses fully - but I think I picked up the flavor).

For those that are complaining about the culture-flipping being broken - I think they need to chill a little. Who's to say what the right 'formula' should be for this type of feature? It's surely a subjective arguement to say the garrisoning of military units should or shouldn't have a bigger impact than (for example) historic cultural scores? I'm please to see that the calculations that Firaxis are using are complex enough to produce a meaningful but unpredictable outcome.

Personally, I'd prefer that the precise algorithms used in a game are kept mysterious (other than a general guide as to the factors involved). I don't want to get to the point that the actions of a game are purely predictable with a list of formulas and a bit of arithmatic!

One thing that the whole aspect of cultural flipping does make me review, is my policy on relocation my Capital. Usually its something I consider to be too expensive (if based purely on the effect on corruption). However, if I can have a more positive effect on culture flipping then I might need to rethink that position.

For instance, in a Real Map game I'm currently playing, I'm the Zulus and have approx 2/3rds of Africa, and steadily pushing (culturally) northwards into Egyptian territory. My capital is well down in South Africa, though and is obviously not exerting much impact on the northern border. Maybe now's the time for me to relocate as far north as is practical and see if I can achieve a bit of culture flipping in my own direction.

 

[joespaniel]

I agree with Bill Chin and Exile Ian, its a simple workable strategy.

Dont put all your eggs in one basket.

I would like to see the game-freezing conditions addressed down the road, that IS a program flaw.

Culture borders and flipping cities is one of the best things about civ3, and I hope it stays the way it is. Its so much better than the simple days of Civ2, and unlimited rail movement in enemy territory. Good job Firaxis.

 

[Moulton]

For the record, I am a LAN/WAN administrator/engineer. Have written and published software, but that is not my cup of tea. I also write and play DND games. Have played computer games since HeathKit days, H89 and Space Pirates and DND in Basic.

THis makes me an expert? By no means.

The idea of cultural flipping is a great addition, and knowing the basic rules helps. Don't need the exact algorithm--randomness is part of the game.

The only suggestion I would make it there should be a time after conquering a city when the city is acclimated to its new civilization. 500yrs? 500 turns? I don' t know, sometime. It could still flip back if the conditions for flip are there, but if you do all the right things, enhance its culture, increase it popultation, provide happiness modifiers.. then you should be able to rest easy in thinking it is now one of your cities. Now, you can never be sure, and that makes investment into the city risky.


I can think History::: Quebec is still more French that English, after about 300 years. San Diego (California) is still more mexican than American (US, that is--Norte Americano) If flipping were possible in reality, not just concept, then either of these two cities could flip. Miami has become more Cuban than American... Tampa Florida, however, which was always a Cuban flavored city has pretty much become United States...
Now If Quebec flipped to French... and then later decided to expand... Buffalo, NY is on the border... Is it likely that they would flip to the superiou French culture? If the French culture began to pervade, yes. If Quebec absorbed Buffalo--by war or something, in order to gain the Niagra Falls Power center, It would probably be extremely hard for them to hold onto it.

 

[Aanar]

What I'd like to see is when you conquer a city and have the box pop up with the option to capture or raze it, add two more options - "Liberate" and "Occupy". Liberating a city would only be an option if a majority of the citizens were of a nationality other than that of the owner before you took it. I.E. in WWII the Americans and Brits didnt' keep Paris for themselves, it was liberated and given back to the Fench. Liberating should also give you quite a few brownie points dimplomatically with the benifactor.

Similarily, Germany didn't become the 51st state, it was occupied. When occupying a city, it should cut it off from producing any units (buildings might still be acceptable) and any gold or science would simply be lost. However, there should be no chance of the city flipping as long as at least one unit is stationed there (perhaps the greater of either one or however many resisters there are), there should be no chance of flipping back since of course it still belongs to the original owner.

If peace is declared, an occupied city should convey all benifits (science, gold, culture) to the civ with the buliding of military units disallowed. Non-military units might have to be popped out outside the city since the game currently seems to disallow two different civ units from occupying the same space.

With the occupation ability implemented, a captured city that culturally flips would become an occupied city in which case the "please remove your troops from out territory" is the option. This way peaceful flips can still occur, or they could decide to declare war and quickly retake their lost city. Just make sure that if a civ is completely occupied and has no military left, it doesnt ask you this ever turn or at the very least declare war again for refusing.

Currently an effective method of conquest is the rapid extermination of a civ to prevent flipping. This never really made sense to me. Many countries have been completely conquered at one point and yet they exist today (France, Poland, Germany, Norway...). Cultural flipping should still be possible, bringing a civ "back to life".

Oh occupation and liberation should not cause war weariness (or much less than capture) which should be a big incentive for doing it. I could see this happening when you're trying to play peacefully, but your neighbor declares war. Just go occupy some of his cities. Occupation should also be easier to mend diplomatic relations than conquest.

Well this all would need to be thought out better, refined, and tested, but if it could be implemented well it would definetly make the gameplay more interesting.

 

[Todd J. Derr]

Does the number of citizens of your own country in the city count at all? The original post only says that the number of foreigners and resisters count.

 

[Cruiser]

Originally posted by ainwood
. . .And no, I'm not sucking up. I just don't want to see another useful thread hijacked by a few idiots. . .

Enough already. . .

Indeed.

Yes, ENOUGH. Anyone who doesn't share YOUR views about excessive Culture Flipping and disappearing garrisons is "an idiot". And you're the resident genius, I assume?? How arrogant.

A small town with a large garrison should never flip. Why? Because the citizens are not insane and don't want to be slaughtered by the veteran troops inside. And if a city tried to flip it should lose population points as we assume it battled the garrison in a bloodbath. At the very least, the garrsions in flipping cities should automatically retreat back to the near home tile.

We should be given warnings or indicators to tell us the likeliihood
of a town/city flipping. It could tell us this every turn, and every turn we should have the option of razing the city.

Since we have no way of telling if flipping is imminent, it is stupid to post any garrison in a city. We should post the garrison adjacent to the city, and if it flips, wipe it out. If you get labelled a war-monger, too bad.

As that option is not good, we have to use the better option: RAZE EVERY CAPTURED CITY or TOWN. :crazyeyes

Not even the worst barbarians in History razed every city. Not Tamerlane, not Attila, not Genghiz Khan.

If you want a Fantasy game, great. I loved Final Doom. But a game with a tradition of being concerned with realism and History
has to do better than this. And that also applies to weird unit values, excessive costs for spying/espionage, the poor way navies are reflected, etc.

Firaxis sycophants, Culture Flipping is the biggest problem with the game (excess Corruption is another). Absurdly long lags between turns is another.

But cheer up! I've been playing the game since it came out, so it can't be too bad! Yes, instead of a '10' it gets an '8'. No, not bad at all. But why not improve it with a real patch??

 

[Ironstone]

Thanks for some useful extra info Dan.

Interestingly, the extra knowledge about the weighting applied to the various factors, and the extent to which Culture plays a part doesn’t seem to change what you should actually DO about flips.

As far as I can see, the way to respond to flips still roughly boils down to what we already knew. The Civilopedia may have been maddeningly weak on detail, but it does look as if it had the bases broadly covered as far as general factors were concerned. In other words it’s still Foreign Nationals, Proximity of Capitals, Happiness (which is the underlying factor for both Civil Disorder and WLTK days), Garrisons, and Culture. There’s no new “Aha!” secret factor listed here that would cause us to take a totally new approach.

It was great to have it confirmed that the city does retain its own ‘culture history memory’ – which always seemed a logical concept to me. But although it’s interesting to know that Culture bites in 3 ways (overall civ , border and city) there seems to be no major new revelations that would cause a dramatic re-appraisal of tactics (unless of course, you never used to pay any attention to the factors Dan lists and what the implications of them are).

A while back there was a post (from Polonius – and there may have been others) that suggested that following the guidelines in the Civilopedia would provide reasonable protection from flipping. From Dan’s post I’d say he was right. Certainly, ways of coping with all the manageable factors that Dan mentions are covered there – either directly under “City Defection” or via links from there. It’s also been suggested that you can probably never be 100% proof from the 1000 to 1 chance (or whatever it you get it to add up to) one day going against you, despite the odds.

I can’t see anything in Dan’s post to suggest that you can get a 100% flip proof rating no matter what you do. So it looks as if the best approach is still to maximise the factors that you can control and learn to live with a degree of risk from those that you can’t. Fortunately, that’s just what I’ve been doing, and so far my luck has held and I’ve now taken over 200 cities without a flip back yet (with very high culture happy civs and a modest garrison). One day that random chance will get me, but I can live with that!

For those that have other objectives than high culture, happy peasants, etc the genocidal approach (raze and rebuild, or starve down and repopulate with your own nationals) still looks like a reasonable bet.

It's interesting that Foreign Nationals is actually at the top of Dan’s list, and it’s presumably why the starve down approach has been reported to be successful (the new citizens who are born are then your own nationals). It may also explain why I’ve been so “lucky” as I always go out of my way to win over Foreign Nationals with attractive stuff like Luxuries, Temples etc, plus forces to encourage their new culture such as Libraries, Unis, etc.

Enjoy it, whichever approach you take. I’m off for a break. Cheers to you all, and happy Civving.

 

[Cruiser]

BTW, I find Culture Flipping to happen very irregulary - but that is because I always go for a Culture First strategy. Those who don't have problems.

Since the AI cheats all the time in various ways, I have no problem returning the favor. If a city/town flips I just go to AutoSave and go back a few turns, and, one, evacuate the garrison, and two, rush build the temple that is usually in the works. Seems to be effective. I don't like cheating, but the AI started it and does it often. I'd rather it not.

 

[Beam]

Great posts and many thanks for Dans input!

Well, to summarize to practicality in brief:
Have culture follow the army and rushbuild in new occupied cities.
Starving down the city only helps.
Garrizons help as well.
If in proximity to a cultural center of gravity razing and rebuilding is a valid option!

Anything missing?

 

[BillChin]

Another effective method I have found to combat culture flips is to take another enemy city every two turns or so. There is zero chance of a flip the first turn I capture a city, I believe the minimum is three turns. If I capture another city within two turns, the first city is usually protected. Unfortunately, on higher difficulty levels (I play on Emperor), rapid capture is not always an option.

Now that I know the rules (thanks to the first post in the thread), I can play by them. In my opinion, flipping is a minor annoyance, not a major problem. If I were designing the game, I might have chosen different rules, but I do not think the current ones are all that bad. It provides a way for empires with a weak military to expand and defend themselves. Maybe this is a farce as most militarists see it, but I think that it makes for a more interesting game with more options to play with. As for name calling, there is plenty of that on both sides. Geez, it is just a game.

 

[Sam_Catchem]

Man..I take some time off from Civ3 and pop on to see if there is anthing new..and BLAM!..here it is! Thanks, Dan. I must keep this in mind.

 

[rikhis]

Another solution to flipping is to depopulate the conquered city by rush building a settler, then sending in a swarm of settlers from your core cities. It still irritates me that you can't airlift settlers though.

 

[DrJambo]

Originally posted by Rhandom
"1. USe artillery to bombard the population down... you can't seriously expect to take a 15+ population city and expect the population to be loyal to the invaders....!? In this day and age all wars around cities involve the use of shelling, look at Chechnya for an example! "

This has zero effect in the game at all. Reread the rules. A big force can remove even 8 resistors in one turn, and I've never seen more than that. The fact remains that a size 1 city with a single happy citizen, 8 of your units, and no conection at all to the civ you took it from can flip. The reason is the "cultural memory effect" - if the city had several thousand culture already generated, NOTHING you do can overcome this penalty. While it may only be the third most significant factor, it is the one factor that you can do absolutely nothing about, and can be absolutely enormous by the 1500's. Reducing the city to a size 1 still doesn't change the fact that the city had 5 to 10K culture before you took it, and rush building every single cultural improvement available will still result in the old culture being higher than the new culture for the next 250+ turns. The only way to avoid it is to capture the cities before they can generate the culture, meaning conquest before the industrial age, or genocide of captured cities.

This is bollox from my experience! I have never seen this happen matey... once i have severely bombarded a city and moved in on its small population of resistors and improvements, i have never seen it flip back to them...

Originally posted by Rhandom
"3. Make sure your culture is higher or at least comparable to the culture of the enemy city, then the foreign resistors might actually want to join you. IF your culture is lower then just raze the cities instead.

Again since my culture is always a top priority i have never had a flipping city. Combine this with a serious bombardment first... = no problems"

I've seen dozens of cities flip to inferior overall cultures, even when I owned by 3:1.

Once again i have never seen this with a superior culture... but make sure you combine your high culture and taking cities that have been heavily bombarded. I have never taken a city with a population of more than 4 left after my artillery have reduced them from around 20.


Regards,

DOC

 

[ainwood]

Originally posted by Cruiser


Indeed.

Yes, ENOUGH. Anyone who doesn't share YOUR views about excessive Culture Flipping and disappearing garrisons is "an idiot". And you're the resident genius, I assume?? How arrogant.

Would you care to explain to me what my views on culture flipping are? I sure as hell didn't put them in my post. Therefore, I don't really see how you can draw the conclusion that I think my views are 'better' than anyone elses, nor that I am arrogant.

In fact, to use your term, it is the 'arrogance' of such posts along the line of "This is unrealistic, patch it now!" to which I refer to as being those of idiotic people.

I do not consider their opinions to be idiotic; far from it. I consider their approach to the issue to be idiotic. Please re-read my post and look at the context of what I wrote.

Overall, in my post, I was trying to highlight that some people don't like certain game elements, demand that they are changed, and often criticise Firaxis.

I don't like this, and think that it is a destructive approach that is likely to alienate Firaxis and drive them away from providing more information such as that that Dan shared.

There are constructive and destructive ways to voice opinions. I like reading peoples' suggestions, I don't like reading their (in many cases ill-qualified) demands.

And to Rhandom: To paraphrase, you state that this post was the reason you gave the game another chance, and it shows that Firaxis are listening. Completely agree. As stated, I am trying to encourage people to feedback their suggestions in a constructive way, so as not to alienate firaxis. This will hopefuly encourage them to continue their feedback.

 

[etj4Eagle]

Originally posted by Rhandom
"1. USe artillery to bombard the population down... you can't seriously expect to take a 15+ population city and expect the population to be loyal to the invaders....!? In this day and age all wars around cities involve the use of shelling, look at Chechnya for an example! "

This has zero effect in the game at all. Reread the rules.

I think you need to go an relook at the rules. The first factor given was the number of foreign nationals w/ resistors counted twice. Hence if you take a pop 20 city (even w/out resistors) verse bombarding it down to a pop 5 city, that first factor will be 4x larger. And if you get the city down to pop 2 or 1, you can pretty much eliminate that factor.

I myself never take a city without shelling and bombing it for a while first. This is to both weaken the defenders and to drop the pop down to that of a town, minimizing the enherent defense bonuses. While I have lost a few cities to cultural flips, it has never been a recently captured one.

 

[Peteus]

I can’t see anything in Dan’s post to suggest that you can get a 100% flip proof rating no matter what you do.

You should be able to get a 100% flip proof city by getting rid of all the foreign nationals and pushing the enemy's borders back off your 21 tiles.

The first can be done by bombardment, worker building, and whipping (or eventual assimilation.) The second can be done simply by getting your culture in the city up to 10 (unless a nearby enemy city has more culture and can work some of those tiles themselves.) As I read Dan's factors, that means the prob of flipping is (0+0) * (the result of the other factors) = 0!

That 21 tiles thing was definitely the biggest revelation, and now plays a key role in my cultural attacks! It's great to know that plunking a settler in a chink between two enemy border cities (a la the AI) will encourage them to flip!

 

[eyrei]

Originally posted by etj4Eagle


I think you need to go an relook at the rules. The first factor given was the number of foreign nationals w/ resistors counted twice. Hence if you take a pop 20 city (even w/out resistors) verse bombarding it down to a pop 5 city, that first factor will be 4x larger. And if you get the city down to pop 2 or 1, you can pretty much eliminate that factor.

I myself never take a city without shelling and bombing it for a while first. This is to both weaken the defenders and to drop the pop down to that of a town, minimizing the enherent defense bonuses. While I have lost a few cities to cultural flips, it has never been a recently captured one.

Right on! I have only ever lost a couple of cities to cultural 'flipping' for this very reason. And I have conquered many, many cities. Patience is one of the greatest assets to war strategy in civ3.

 

[Soufie77]

Some excellent suggestions here from all quarters. I suppose both destructive and constructive opinions might both have chance to produce a good outcome. Nevertheless, I guess I do have to fall in line with those who feel that the current rules can be improved.

I suppose the main problem here is WHY Firaxis allowed these rules to be implemented in this way. It certainly isn't an oversight as these guys are some of the best game designers in the world. I'm sure they have some philosophy or focus behind this reasoning, so why don't we ask them directly?

Just a personal opinion here, but the best idea I have come across so far seems to be the system whereby units are expelled to the periphery of the city borders upon culture flip. The military hierarchy and chain of command is hardly a democracy. They assets of the government and not owned by the people per se, so I suppose unit loyalty is a factor to be considered. On this note, I would like to make an additional suggestion: that unit experience be factored into the likelihood of a unit being lost or "damaged" upon a culture flip.

 

[Spyder1]

So, the rules make it risky to "flip" a city culturally, or to take it by arms, especially since the latter can result in the complete loss of all garrisoning forces. Utterly ridiculous. A pop2 town garrisoned by two cavalry and two musketmen would make mincemeat of the population if it rose up...

But that's not my biggest gripe with Civ3. If I choose to attack, for instance, the English to my southwest, and they have two cities total, then I attack... and again for this example let's say I crush the two cities (including the capital -- and this example takes place in the BCs). And suddenly, ACROSS my empire, on my northeast border, I have TWO English cities there, and almost every time this sort of thing happens those 2 cities have an absolute horde of units -- the last time, 5 horsemen. Now, I understand that the English might have had a settler out there -- but my line of cities spanned the "neck" of the continent that separated where the English were and where the two cities appeared. I would have seen them passing my cities. Also, given that they had 6 gold and only 2 cities and few improvements at that point... you get the point. This is ludicrous, how the game works unrealistically against the player. If I obliterate a culture early in the game and wipe out their cities, it should go away -- the game should not cheat this blatantly.

I would like to hear Firaxis explanation for this ludicrous state of affairs, as I am at present contemplating putting Civ3 away (civ2 despite its flaws remained on my hard drive until literally the day I bought Civ3) and moving on to other games. I enjoy the game, but the periods of utter and annoying cheating are sapping that enjoyment and adding only to my frustration.

 

[Rushton]

Nice to have some real info about this.

1) I have pusued an aggressive border policy of putting cities down to deny the AI space/resources etc and often been able to encircle cities. It is normally these cities that flip, particularly just after they are encircled.

2) So this must be the killer strategy for keeping a city taken by force.

a) Make worker after worker to get down the foreign population

b) Add your own nationals in via worker or settler addition

c) Temple, library as fast as possible to get up it´s culture radius

d) If necessary build a second city close to it to expand your influence in the area.

Paul :jump: