Dealing with foreign cultural pressure

[gavenkoa]

I am Roosevelt (blue) and Gandhi (pink) has stolen my cultural borders.

New York has +9 cul/turn, Atlanta +3. New York is my second city. It is relatively well developed before culture disaster. Turn 203.

It's my first Emperor play with K-mod. I know that K-mod alters culture calculation.

I wonder how can I prevent foreign culture spreading?

I conquered 2 Gandhi cities on border and there are no any significant culture shift (turn 216):

What is frustrating that I can't improve city culture with building as I don't have enough tiles for building cultural structures...

And overall pure on resource map prevents fast building.

 

[AcaMetis]

Not too familiar with the exact changes made by K-Mod, but Gandhi is pretty likely going for a Cultural Victory in this game (you can tell by the fact that he's got three religions spread to all his cities, and, you know, it's Gandhi), which is part of the problem. 3 Cathedrals in a city will really crank out culture like no one's business.

As for dealing with the problem, there's no way you're realistically going to fight back the culture of someone going for a Cultural Victory. So either write your cities off as losses, or whip up an army and remove the offending culture by taking/burning down cities. Alternatively you could try to convince the AI to peace vassal to you, since that'd make his culture bend to yours, but...yeah, war is really the only solution here.

 

[Windsor]

K-mod makes interior cities culture matter more instead of just frontier cities.

But in both K-mod and BTS fighting culture wars is not worth it. Especially not at this stage of the game.

The solution is as AcaMetis says war. Gandhi is always a juicy target.

 

[lymond]

Yep... don’t fight culture wars, fight real wars

 

[BornInCantaloup]

Those are cool screenshots. I agree that, in general, capturing a city is better than building the extra Theatre. Because you get that, a city, instead of a Theatre.
It's especially true when you are dealt a single direction for expansion, as in this case : if you want to get more land, you need to roll over Gandhi.

I've never played K-Mod but I did read the changelog. Ok, the actual culture output of a city has more influence over tile control.
Here : Gandhi peace-vassaled to Mansa Musa and, likely, immediately turned his culture slider up.
So, your cities produce 9 and 3 culture per turn, they're isolated on the frontline (backline cities don't help them protect their tiles). His 2 forward cities likely produce 50+ culture per turn, possibly 100+. Hence the disaster.

The point I'd like to make is that : you can fight culture wars but you didn't. 3 and 9 culture really isn't much. 9 culture is what ? 2 religions, and ancient library and a theatre. Not much of an investment. (Given that, your reaction to build maces and knights was correct !)
If you're going going to fight a culture war, you know it early : borders have been established and you don't intend to invade.
Therefore, you can invest early in cultural buildings, best of them being wonders and cathedrals for multipliers, then you have civics like Free Speech. You can also settle support cities 3 tiles behind to help push the borders.
Then you can have juicy stuff like :
- early on, the Sistine Chapel (does Gandhi have it ?). Suddenly, your Temple/Monastery combo gives you 13 culture per turn ;
- later on, corporations. Some corporations will easily give you in the 40 culture per turn.

In BTS, the core of the matter, is to settle cities so that they help each other. If you have a couple of cities producing culture on a tile, you're that much more likely to hold control. It gives you time, before an invasion, at a low cost (not hundreds of hammers spent on buildings).
This is from a culture war :

Spoiler :

I'm not saying : go found corporations. Rather, I'd point out that it's hard to get a high culture output from buildings alone. A Library maxes out at +4, it's not much.
Multipliers matter. And they matter the most if you or the AI are going to use the culture slider : in this screenshot, if I turn my culture slider to 50%, that's another 100 culture per turn in this city. How do you get 100 culture per turn from building Libraries ? You don't, you just can't.

It isn't advisable to toy with the culture slider, other than for culture victories, but it goes to show the relative importance of things, as far as the final output goes.
Note that this city doesn't even hold control over all of its tiles (!). (Sushi is new - it won me that war - but still.)

 

[drewisfat]

Welcome to the forums gavenkoa! Yeeeeeeah I had a big gripe about this when I encountered it. The revolt risk in newly conquered cities is truly crushing. Karadoc confirms this is WAD, but that doesn't mean it's uncontroversial. BiC is right that the culture war is more about output than BTS where you are relatively ok after popping borders a couple times. Neighboring cities also play a bigger role. Trade routes even give a bit of culture.

I would assume the design philosophy is that most players know most cultural buildings are a wasteful luxury (unless going for culture victory), so he made culture more important to buff them. That makes total sense, but the problem is, I at least believe this has backfired on Emperor+. The AI is building a lot more soldiers AND it's eager to dogpile. In BTS if your diplo game is on point you can generally afford to be weak whenever you're not about to attack. In KMOD temporary weakness can and will lead to getting DOWed, which can quickly snowball into a dogpile and a game over screen. This means you have to have a lot of production and you need enough commerce to cover the unit expenses and keep up in mil tech. This doesn't leave a lot of room to go on a culture building detour. In BTS you could justify a couple of niche culture buildings in border cities, because once you pop the borders twice that city will be in passable shape (and that's a worthwhile tradeoff). That's not enough in KMOD because that's not how culture works in KMOD. You might stay afloat if you really prioritize culture in the border cities ASAP, but this comes at a big opportunity cost -- and even then I doubt it's enough to stop something like this Gandhi quad-religion horror show you've got here. You kinda have to accept that your border cities are going to be garbage and the solution is to keep conquering so those border cities become core cities. Just realize that your newest border cities will also be garbage and try to minimize how many of these you're left with after a war. Part two of the culture shenanigans is newly conquered cities that are under culture pressure (most of them) will be utterly swamped with revolt risk, and there's no good answer to that. Building cultural buildings in the newly acquired Indian cities may be a mistake. A monastery will not fix those newly conquered cities, only conquering Delhi and Vijay will. And after you've conquered Delhi and Vijay the cultural bonus from the monastery is pointless.

I'll end on a positive note. In BTS typically pangaea and smaller maps are easier than larger maps or isolated starts. KMOD's design balances this back in the opposite direction, making map types more comparable in difficulty. Larger maps means a smaller percentage of your cities are culturepwned. Pangaea is hard, because if you spawn in the middle you might basically only have one good city (your capital) and Isolation is easier because you don't have to build any military units / cultural buildings. When you finally escape isolation you may find yourself fine tech-wise, because the AI has been fighting a bunch of total wars with medieval units which slowed down their tech rate. The advantage from not having to fight a war or build a deterrent force may outweigh the negative of poor trade routes / delayed tech trading.

 

[BornInCantaloup]

^ That's really interesting. Drewisfast. Once you start conquering, you've got no other choice but to keep on. Otherwise they'll flip back.
It's really hard to come back from a culture deficit. There's, indeed, no sense in building a monastery when the boys next door are slamming culture over 7 tiles.

On the other hand, if you plan soon enough, it should be easier to culture swamp a K-Mod map than a BTS one. I"ve always dreamt about culture conquest...