culture strategy question

[amin ghazzaoui]

hi,
I have played both civ2 and 3 years back and i dont remember culture beeing that important to influence a take over of a city without a fight as i experienced om my second day with civ4.Beeing the case what is the best strategy and how do i spy on everyone else to see how high up they have reached?If you are not at war with a neighbor how do you know when he might pull a nice one on one of my cities?
amin

 

[mystikmind2005]

Civ2 has no culture.
civ 3 has culture but it is mainly to expand a cities number of worked tiles far beyond what is possible in civ2 or civ4. I forget what adds culture in civ3, but it could just simply be age and nothing else?

 

[Kesshi]

Civ2 has no culture.

mystikmind2005,

This is not entirely true. Civ 2 did have culture, but it wasn't the cut and dry "X culture per turn" the way that Civ 4 does it. (I never played Civ3, so I cannot compare it.)

It was very very rare, but you could get cities to convert to your civilization via culture in Civ 2. This is from long ago, so I'm sure I'm going to get the quote wrong, but it would say somithng like this "The people of CITY_X are impressed by the luxurious life of CITY_Y." If CITY_Y kept up it's luxurious lifestyle, (and CITY_X didn't change to a more luxurious lifestile) the owner of CITY_Y would absorb CITY_X. I've only had this happen a handful of times (and I played Civ2 up until about 4 or 5 years ago) so it doesn't surprise me that you thought culture didn't exst in Civ2. Also, you really need to set your specialists to entertainers to even have a chance of seeing this happen; most of us set just enough entertainers to keep our citizens content, and no more.

 

[gdgrimm]

Uh, there was no culture in Civ2. There was a random event by which some city that was in unrest might flip to some other civilization. But it wasn't something that could be controlled or prevented (well, other than preventing your cities from going into unrest to prevent them from flipping).

Anyway, back to the OP's question....

When you hover the mouse over a tile, you'll see if it's currently "owned" by a civ, as well as the percentage of the culture on that tile that belongs to that civ. If the tile belongs to you, and after a few turns it's fallen from 60% to 55% (as an example), then you know you're losing the culture war against another civ.

To flip a city, an opposing civ must be applying cultural pressure (i.e. adding culture points to the city each turn square) AND you must have less than 50% of your own culture on that square. Then there will be revolt (if you're looking at the city screen, hover over the "culture" bar and you'll see the %culture for each civ and any revolt chance) -- the revolt chance will be modified by the number of troops in the city (more troops, less revolt chance). The city will flip on the 2nd revolt.

Some game options can affect when and to whom a city might flip.

For more details, see http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=225927 .

As for strategy, build more culture buildings.

 

[Yxklyx]

Revolt chance is displayed too? I didn't notice that but I'm playing vanilla.

 

[amin ghazzaoui]

thanks valuable info,having played it to the end i now understand the differences with past editions,i would like to add that civ4 is by far more advanced than previous editions in my opinion.
amin

 

[Tibur753]

The city will flip on the 2nd revolt.

I played a game as Russia on Earth 1000 AD with Warlords. I had an Arabian city revolting every five turns! But it didn't flip after at least 10 revolts. Was there a patch that fixed this or was it just a bug?

 

[Kesshi]

As promised, pictures:

Spoiler :

This picture shows the glorious French Empire consisting of many other civ's old capital cities.

Spoiler :

Here is what the French empire looks like in the mid 1800s. Rome and Madrid will fall to the glorious French culture in less than 100 years time.

Culture can be an amazing way to capture a city because everything remains in tact. The biggest issue I have with this setup is that it favors a marathon game over a quick game, because the chance to revolt is a percentage per turn. Naturally you take more turns on Marathon than on Quick. I consider this a bug.

Spoiler :

Rome shows this very well. With a 5.45% chance to revolt, it could take about 20 turns on average to revolt. With Quick, that's 5 years per turns, or about 100 years for one revolt. Where as if this was marathon, we'd be around 1 year per turn at this point, so it'd be about 20 years, on average, per revolt.

In this game I had some cities completely surrounded with French culture before they revolted back to me. I played the same game on Marathon (same setup and everything) and ended up flipping many of the same cities hundreds of years earlier, and they came to me as a much larger size, because they weren't starved due to having no workable tiles.

 

[amin ghazzaoui]

apreciate deep explanation,its also realistic given recent events and subsequent human behaviour in various parts of the globe.

 

[Mad Professor]

Revolt chance is displayed too? I didn't notice that but I'm playing vanilla.

Revolt chance is displayed in vanilla too. You hover the mouse over the culture bar in the city screen. If there is no revolt chance displayed, then there is no chance of revolt.