How can I keep Rome? Effects of culture bomb

[dorkynorky]

In a current game I've just taken Rome. Actually I'm fighting Churchill who had attacked Augustus, who in the first few turns of war asked to become my voluntary vassal. I've got riflemen and Churchill is fighting with knights so I said,

"what the heck"

and jumped in to save Augustus.

Initially I was figuring to return all of Augustus's cities cause I'm working on refining my space race tactics. However, when I took Rome, I found that it had the M of M, Hanging Gardens and 7 settled great people (6 generals and 1 priest).

Well, I just can't seem to resist the temptation to keep a hold of it since I'm Toku. All of my gunpowder units start with three promos and I can't wait to see what I can get from a city with all those great generals. In addition, the extra health will help my plan to make use of shale plants to provide power.

Problem, it will take quite a few garrison troops to reduce the chance of revolt to a manageable number.

Question: I've got a GA. If I culture bomb will it immediately significantly reduce the chance of revolt and lessen the need for garrison troops?

 

[Sian]

aren't there something about that you'll naturally gets the whole BFC if its a vassal that chokes you?

just give it enough Garrison troops to do the deal

 

[carl corey]

I think you're probably better off settling the GA, but I'm not a specialist in this kind of things. Otherwise just bring some useless units in it, like musketmen (if you don't have grens yet) or grenadiers. Just produce those in a normal production city, as they don't need any promotions, they'll just sit there and look dumb.

 

[carl corey]

aren't there something about that you'll naturally gets the whole BFC if its a vassal that chokes you?

just give it enough Garrison troops to do the deal

Yeap, but he has a GA and wants to reduce the number of garrison troops. I think a culture bomb will add culture to the city but won't help you get rid of the revolt chances, whereas a settled GA will be like any other culture producing building/specialist, reducing those revolt odds in the long run.

 

[Joshua368]

Culture bomb doesn't do much to fight off oppressive culture, it's mostly good for grabbing a large swath of unclaimed (or recently de-cultured ) land or bringing a city out of revolt immediately. For long standing culture benefits, settle. You get gold as well! And science if running Representation.

 

[carl corey]

Nope, culture bombs don't make you come out of revolt anymore. At least that was the case in BtS, I don't know if the recent patches changed anything.

 

[Skallagrimson]

Artists never really get the job done quite like soldiers.

 

[dorkynorky]

Looks like maybe I'll settle the GA. I've got a GE cooking and am planning to use him to snag Creative Constructions to both help with ship production as well as fighting off incursions by others cultural borders.

 

[Skallagrimson]

Corporations, I still don't get what's useful about them. If you expand the way you need to, you sacrifice State Property to run them, so most of your economy benefits are eaten from city mx. And if you're small enough to where it makes sense to run free market, chances are you don't have the resources to make corps worth while. Catch-22 against, from where I'm seeing it here.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Corporations, I still don't get what's useful about them. If you expand the way you need to, you sacrifice State Property to run them, so most of your economy benefits are eaten from city mx. And if you're small enough to where it makes sense to run free market, chances are you don't have the resources to make corps worth while. Catch-22 against, from where I'm seeing it here.

I'm a SP guy (in civ anyway), but don't underestimate corps. They can actually make money with the wallstreet/free market setup, and more importantly the city yields they provide with the correct resources can be staggering.

 

[dorkynorky]

I'm no expert in corporations, and certainly with gigantic empires it makes sense to go State Property. However, for your small empire I look at corporations as providing flexibility. You can inject a little culture here (to protect your borders or shave some turns off a cultural vic), or inject a little science there (to crank out your space techs just a little bit faster) and if you found them in the right city they can even run at a profit too. Given the right circumstances, as TMIT suggests, the amount of culture, hammers, food or science you can get from a Corp can be pretty large.

In this game I'm trying a new Space Race tech path that goes on a beeline for Rocketry right after Rifling (and a detour to pick up Steam Power). If you're lucky enough to have coal and a GS then you found Aluminum INC. This allows one to start building Apollo in some relatively poor production city while you backfill the production techs and get your big hammer powerhouses developed. This can shave the time you spend waiting for Apollo to finish before you can build parts. Besides that, spread Aluminum INC to your top science cities and boost your teching rate.

As far as resources go, I agree that you can be sparse on those, but by the nature of the maps you're likely to have duplicates. While you hopefully can trade those with others to get different happiness or health resources I often find that isn't the case and I'm relegated to accepting a few pitiful gpt. Alternatively I can often trade my duplicate resource for corporate resource.

I'm sure there are those that know how to turn corporations into gigantic money making machines, but I'm not quite there yet.

 

[Skallagrimson]

Come to think of it, I suppose if there's an annoying small AI that's too high-tech for me to reasonably take out militarily, and isn't running SP because he's small, apart from the usual espionage approach, a few corporation bombs to give him city maintenance nukes for resources he doesn't have, might be a good adjunct to a late-game strategy, especially those pesky overseas culture-vic threats like Gandhi.

For my own benefit, though, I don't see it either way.

 

[DMOC]

Nope, culture bombs don't make you come out of revolt anymore. At least that was the case in BtS, I don't know if the recent patches changed anything.

I remember having a Great Artist make a city of mine come out of revolt once (BTS).

 

[Joshua368]

Alrighty, time for me to clear up some things about corporations again.

Big misunderstanding here: Corporations do not save you money, they do not make you money, if you want to make money switch to State Property because that's the cheap way out. If you are trying to make money with corporations, you are doing it wrong and will fall flat on your face.

Okay there are technically ways to get money from corporations... if you have a sad little tiny empire with few resources you will run a profit, but as someone else said there the corps do so little you might as well not bother with them at all. Also you can spread them to AIs (I'd recommend only doing so to vassals unless everyone is U.N.-voted into Environmentalism, as AIs love State Property) and while this helps it'll will rarely cover the costs on your domestic corps. Also there's Civilized Jewelers but that really isn't very helpful unless you're going for a late culture win.

The costs are big, not only are you trading away gold from the cheap maitenance of SP, but increased corp maitenance costs, initial expansion funds, hammers from executives, and of course the great person to found the corp.

The idea is that you're basically trading away that gold for hammers, food, culture, etc. The transfer rate is much, much stronger than any other gold conversion in the game, such as rush-buying with US. Plus this is the only way in the game to transfer anything into food, you can't transfer gold into food any other way, and it's extremely powerful.

It doesn't matter if you have a massive global empire, no actual catch-22 here. You run tons of rep-boosted specialists on a global scale and your research rate will sky rocket and you should still have plenty of money on hand. The only reason where corporations won't help your empire is when you're close to winning a military victory and don't need to divert hammers from troops. If your cities can avoid to build execs, they are a long-term investment that will easily pay off.

Spoiler :

Here's a picture I have on hand... crappy little ice city with domestic trade routes, but its a decent size and look at its science/culture/production outputs.

 

[JammerUno]

Corporation effects scale with empire size as well, and at some point in the game hammers>gpt. State property doesn't come close to matching corps in hammer output. MiningInc. can easily give +10 hammers/turn on a standard map, and SidsSushi/Cereal corp will offset the amount of food you're not getting from watermills/workshops. The only reasons I ever run SP are; A. I have a big empire but not enough resources, or B. not founding one.

Founding the corps in your wallstreet city means you'll be getting 12 gpt from every city it's in anyway, so the nominal costs are relatively small. On top of which; corps give the bonus regardless of city size. In SP, a 10 pop tundra city is still worth nothing but the resources it claims. With MiningInc. and 10 additional hammers per turn, it's a decent city all of a sudden.

PS. Use the culture bomb, it's far more effective than settling it because of the mechanics of cultural influence on a tile.

 

[Skallagrimson]

Culture on ice. If you were gunning for culture vic you could have just stayed relatively smaller and geared the military for pure defense.

It's like abducting Carmen Electra just to give her ice cream.

 

[Ai Shizuka]

Culture is just the icing on the cake. Or are you saying that 8 specialists at 13 pop in that horrible site is useless?

 

[Skallagrimson]

At that city mx cost you'd better hope you're philo or have a non-obsolete parth.

In the late game most of those GPPs just go off into space. GPPs and $2 get ya a gallon of petrol.

 

[JTMacc99]

Question: I've got a GA. If I culture bomb will it immediately significantly reduce the chance of revolt and lessen the need for garrison troops?

I tried this. I think I actually tried it with Rome, interestingly enough. The damn city came immediately out of revolt (BtS 3.17) and then went right back into it. It wasn't until I captured the Roman cities on either side of it did the culture bomb have any positive effects.

 

[Joshua368]

At that city mx cost you'd better hope you're philo or have a non-obsolete parth.

In the late game most of those GPPs just go off into space. GPPs and $2 get ya a gallon of petrol.

All my cities cost around that much, those are corporation costs more than distance and size. The great part is that even though my slider drops to 60%, I'm earning 4000+ beakers per turn.

I'm running representation. All of those specialists are for beakers (and a few for hammers).

Also "culture on ice" is very helpful for reaching the domination threshold. Get those border pops fast and strong. With Sid's Sushi you sure aren't going to have any trouble reaching the population threshold! And what the heck makes you think I was going for a culture victory with that city? It was captured like only two dozen turns ago.

Also this city can churn out the best units in just two or three turns. Not that I needed more units at this point (probably just end up building wealth instead after infrastructure is up) but if I did they would be a non-issue.

The main thing to keep in mind is that with corps this is the bottom rung of the ladder. Every single city in my empire is at least as powerful as this city, if not much more due to a decent location. Tons of cities approaching size 30... running dozens of rep-specialists, producing everything in just two or three turns... a state property civilization wouldn't stand a chance. And thanks to all those specialists in so many cities, I'll be churning out great people from various spots across my empire, not that they matter too much at this point in the game.