Dissidents

[kkapalk]

Hi guys. I need a little advice concerning ideologies. I know this has been covered before but I cannot find the thread. Basically I am playing against 5 other civs and am next door to America and Sweden. They both chose the freedom ideology, whereas I went Autocracy. I just seem to prefer this choice. The problem is I now have dissidents for the first time in playing the game. I am a little puzzled because America has more tourism than me but is not in any way overpowering. And I have not neglected my culture. I also do not have open borders with Washington, so I don't understand why I have dissidents. (10 people). I do have open borders with Sweden. Would it help to close the borders when the deal runs out? Should I change to freedom or soldier on? And is the best way to counter this pressure by gaining more culture or more tourism? Thanks for reading,
Kev.

 

[rawrtrav]

I believe it's worked out through tourism, so having open borders is a bad thing as it raises their tourism by 33%. All it means is that both Sweden and America combined are making more tourism than anyone else on the map with other ideologies. One way to check this is to hover over the 'Dissidents' bit in the tourism/culture overview, and it shows who is influencing you the most.

You counter this is always by gaining more culture, because tourism is always counteracted by culture. Although I'd also say a decent way of countering this would be to flatten America and Sweden

 

[CultureManiac]

Check your influence in the tourism menu. Most likely they have a greater influence over you than you do over them. This means that your people like the ideas of Freedom better than Autocracy. The greater their influence over you, the more unhappiness this causes. You can also see that in the tourism menu.There are ways of fixing this. Increase your tourism, so that you have more influence over them. Close your borders to them. Open their borders. Culture bomb if necessary. Increase your culture, to better balance the effect of their tourism points. Improve the happiness in your civ through buildings, luxes, etc, so that you can absorb the hit from increased unhappiness, or at least decrease it so it is manageable. As rawrtrav say, you can also strike back at America and Sweden - if that's militarily possible, I would target their high tourism cities first, since that's is what is causing you grief.

 

[phillipwyllie]

'Dissidents' is the first level of ideological unhappiness and is nothing to worry about. The other 2 are 'Civil Resistance' where barbarians spawn, and 'Revolutionary Wave' where you will revolt. The bad things happen if your over unhappiness reaches -20 or under.

Ideological pressure is the difference between you and another civ, these pressures add up from other civs. To combat this generate tourism and culture by assigning specialist in your Guilds and generating Great Writers/Artists/Musicians(GWAM ) to create Great Works of Writing/Art/Music. Never give open borers to a civ that is generating tourism but try to get open borders for a tourism boost yourself. Trading with a civ gives both civs a boost to tourism. Finishing the Aesthetics tree will double your theming bonuses and allow to rush buy GWAM with faith. Lastly if all else fails DOw and nick their art

 

[Melchizedek]

I also don't understand this very well, and there's nothing in the Civiliopedia about it. How is the amount of unhappiness calculated? I have been getting dissidents from civs that are barely exotic with me.

 

[kkapalk]

Thanks for the helpful replies guys. I didn't know that when two civs had the same ideology their total pressure was combined! I did keep buying and building culture buildings and generating as many writers, artists etc. And I bought a couple of hotels too. There was no change in the dissidents though. Maybe I needed to wait longer for the effect. The International Games were voted for and I put a good few cities into building this, and was once more shocked when America and Sweden got the gold and silver cups! This was another first for me, being beaten to the games when I put a good amount of production into them. As you will know, this shot America up with their tourism so I sadly decided to call it a day. I usually play on King, and did again here. The only difference was I chose more civs than usual and had a smaller map. Maybe this contributed to my downfall also. I am used to having tons of space. I am gonna start again, and will set out to get good tourism and culture from the start.
Thanks for the replies again.

 

[GoStu]

The formula for unhappiness is shown if you hover your cursor over the unhappiness number. In general it's the larger of 1 per X citizens or Y per city. I think the worst case is greater of 1 per 4 citizens OR 3 per city.

It's pretty hard to get out of this situation as it's hard to turn your culture around in.a hurry and you have to vastly out-culture their tourism. The math for doing this is slightly more complex. You have to get their tourism below 30% of your total culture produced.

Most effective but difficult solution is to go cut their throat: take away all their great works and add that culture to your own while depriving them of tourism. More practical peaceful solution is to try and build up your own culture and prevent it from.getting worse. Close your borders, avoid sharing a religion. Worst case you might have to change ideology, but that puts all your civ on hold for two turns and costs you any tenets you invested in.

 

[Melchizedek]

This thread covers it: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=500715

 

[EK834]

Worst case you might have to change ideology, but that puts all your civ on hold for two turns and costs you any tenets you invested in.

Not all tenets, only the early adopter ones (if it applies). The others you get to replace with the same amount of tenets from your new ideology.

It sure is much better to be careful and look at the global Influence picture before picking an ideology (delaying adoption if there are too strong cultural leaders), but the one or two times I had to change mine (to avoid chain denouncements) it wasn't so bad. Many early tenets have similar effects, so if it doesn't happen very late after you've made strategic moves (eg: reassigning TR to CS if you're freedom, or rushing factories for the 25% science bonus if you're Order, or if you're Venice going for Science and really, really must keep Freedom to buy spaceship parts etc.) changing Ideology isn't that bad a setback. The lost two turns suck, but normally two turns isn't the end of the world if you have a lead in the late game (not on Emperor anyway).