Do you ever ' flip' cities to your control?

[GT_OKEZ]

Basically , do you ever use overwhelming culture on your border cities ( perhaps with some spy assistance) to flip enemy border cities to your control?

I find this a very successful tactic with my new favorite leader , Pericles ( Cre/Phi) . Don't get me wrong , a lot of conquest domination still requires war which I am more than ready for but you can also get a good amount of cities by culture flipping .



AI and I have a few bordering cities . I do the following .

- Make missionaries to convert the cities to my state relig for better flipping success .
- Caste system , have at least one , maybe two , of my cities concentrate on artists specialists to increase the chances of a GA . Having the PHI trait is nice for this too along with GP boosting buildings and Pacificsm .
- Be the first to music for a free GA .
- I usually have a couple , sometimes more GAs by the time I'm ready to start flipping .
- I go to my border cities and drop culture bombs with teh GA . Basically this culturally ' chokes' the enemy border cities making them more pissed at their AI ruler for not being able to grow because lack of a decent ' fat cross'
- Basically when I go over the plot the enemy city is on with my mouse , and see its like 88% Greek( me) and 12% Arabian ( AI) I know its almost flipping time.
- Prior to the flipping , I up the amount of espianage ( sometimes I'll generate a Great Spy and send him on a mission too , though this is later in the game).
- Train a few spies , just incase the initial mission fails .
- I instigate a revolt .
- The city ends up flipping to my control , I immediatly up its culture out put to maximize space availabe in the fat cross . Sometimes I'll even have a GA again and culture bomb it if neccessary .
- Repeat process , I end up ' engulfing' like a growing cultural blob a few cities .

Once I did this to Catherine , I even flipped her second largest city ( ST petersburg) and ended up getting the Great Wall and Colossus for my troubles .
I did it without sending one single troop ( aside from the spy) .

Lots of times I don't even need spies , especially if they are weaker cities .

 

[RedRalph]

Dosent seem to happen for me in BtS. I once flipped 5 viking cities in Warlords

 

[Diamondeye]

I usually flip a couple of enemy cities, sometimes non-conciously, although it's getting rarer in BtS.

 

[GT_OKEZ]

I usually flip a couple of enemy cities, sometimes non-conciously, although it's getting rarer in BtS.

I've been having pretty steady flipping success . I even flipped St. Petersberg , a PP 10 city with a couple wonders to boot . Of course it took some time sooping up my border city to exceed St Petersberg's culture . It seems to work pretty well on noble but also keep in mind that I'm playing a Cre/Phi leader with special focus on GAs and ' culture choking' i.e. ' culture bombs.'

I imagine on higher difficulties its more rare . Its also damn near impossible to flip a city with a forbidden palace or versalles .
Sending in spies to spread your culture for revolts is pretty helpful .

 

[thomson_2001]

on my last game i was culture nut! running 50% culture at times, everything culturally directed...and only flipped one size 3 city in the entire game! unless you use spies it seems like a very random thing to occur needs to be tweaked as cutlure on the whole is not that usefull if not going for cultural victory or trying to get hold of extra tiles on border with foes.

 

[offworld]

Flipped a capital once. It was one of those weird starts where the nearest enemy founded his capital 4 or 5 tiles from mine. In addition my site was much better than his and became loaded with wonders. On the other hand I wasn't consciously trying to flip the Inca capital since I had assumed this wasn't possible. I think it went somewhere in the renaissance or maybe early industrial.

 

[thomson_2001]

!!! A CAPITAL!!! wow

 

[KMadCandy]

if you have the AP, there's a new option. target city has to be a voting member (easy to demote a full member with spies, particularly if you're spiritual). hold the vote to assign a city from voting to full member. if it passes, done. if he defies it, he's hurting. i had somebody defy it twice then give in, another guy give in the first time.

 

[Bandobras Took]

I did it to Brennus as Roosevelt with a nearby Hermitage and a few spies injecting their culture.

 

[thomson_2001]

confused! voting member and flipping to your control....link?

 

[KMadCandy]

link to a forum post really explaining it ... heck if i know this early in the morning, sorry. screenies from the not-very-helpful pedia to at least define full/voting member:

Spoiler :

from BtS concepts / AP and UN topic:

in addition:
- you're automatically a full member if you control the city the AP was built in.
- you're demoted from full to voting member temporarily if you defy a resolution; then you get full member status back when you for yes on a resolution that passes.

the resolution i'm referring to is the last one here:

 

[Navarre]

I flipped Istambul with Pyramids, Halicarnass thingie and two or three other world wonders recently, thanks to the amazing power of the sushi and some +10 world wonders.

Commercial corporations were producing +78 culture in my cities at the end of the game. FEAR THE SUSHI !

Generally, I just ask to the leaders to "free" their cities, and they give it to me. If it doesn't work, the AP does the trick.

 

[SpiderMinky]

I like flipping them when possible but it can be quite a challenge as a decent city garison will drop the flip percentage to 0. However that being said the easiest way to get the city garison down to size and still be a nice peacfull person is to bribe the target to go to war against someone else.

Then they tend to grab all the troops they can and ship them out.

I also like the assign city x to civ x feature of the AP although it is easy enough for them to choose defy this resolution, I certainly know I have done that.

 

[thomson_2001]

sorry when i wrote link i meant the where is the link between culturally flippin a city into your control and the AP rules. ive never owned the AP

 

[GT_OKEZ]

Actually I never used the AP approach but thats a nice idea to . My method works but I will , in addition , attempt flipping with the AP also .

 

[KMadCandy]

sorry when i wrote link i meant the where is the link between culturally flippin a city into your control and the AP rules. ive never owned the AP

that's the very bottom of the 2nd screenshot. it's a proposal the AP resident (you, hopefully, so you're in charge of picking proposals) can put up for a vote, if you are a full member, if the city has more of your culture than theirs, and if the city belongs to a voting member. voting member means they have at least one city with the AP religion, but the AP religion isn't their state religion.

if the city belongs to a full member (or non-member) then you don't get the option to vote on that. at least twice, i've changed my own religion to a non-AP one (or free religion) and then used spies to change the city's current owner from a full member into a voting member. if you own the city where the AP is, that automatically makes you a full member. so this is much easier if you're AP resident and you own the AP city, so that you don't have to change back to the AP religion right away after using the spies.

 

[KMadCandy]

I imagine on higher difficulties its more rare . Its also damn near impossible to flip a city with a forbidden palace or versalles .
Sending in spies to spread your culture for revolts is pretty helpful .

it's rarer on higher difficulties since the more units there are in a city, the less likely it is to flip. it's possible for them to put enough units in the city for there to be zero chance to revolt even if the city is 99% yours and 1% theirs. the higher the level, the higher their bonus to production (for units and for culture buildings too).

it seems to me that the biggest thing affecting how easy/hard it is to flip cities is game speed. on longer game speeds you have many more turns that the RNG might roll in your favor when there is a chance to flip.