how the heck do i fight ideological pressure?

[tommytoxen]

my current approval rating is 38%, it keeps dipping below 34%. i've already lost one puppet to revolt. my empire is in serious decline and it's because of ideological pressure.

i went with autocracy but it seems freedom is the in-fashion ideology in my world. but i refuse to change. I REFUSE.

i'm building culture & happiness buildings like crazy but it doesn't seem to be doing anything, nor the public works.

i'm thinking of just going to war with the civs applying the biggest pressure but that could be tricky as the biggest by far is china, she has an entire continent to herself, and the last war i was in with her she sunk my entire navy in one turn. i had the second biggest navy in the world, now i have the smallest lol! seriously my navy was huge, or at least i thought it was, until i got to the coast of china. HOLY. SO. MANY. SHIPS! and with her frigging 30 or so stealth bombers OUCH.

slowly rebuilding it but with the unhappiness my production and strength is just.. blah.

i. will. not. change.

 

[tommytoxen]

i'm thinking of just going to war with the civs applying the biggest pressure

okay this worked, sort-of. at first. the three civs applying the biggest ideological pressure is china, egypt, france (in that order). took chatres & marseille from france in a war that was longer, more exhausting and drawn out than i'd have liked. and alexandria from egypt which was actually surprisingly easy, his army was even weaker than mine. my approval rating rose to 51% and ideological pressure/unhappiness dropped. egypt is practically falling apart and i don't think will ever recover, a few turns after peace his city of memphis revolted and became an autonomous city state lol! never actually seen that happen before (modmod? i have so many i can't tell what's vanilla or not anymore lol)

for about 30 turns things were looking good, happiness was up and i was building culture/happiness buildings in almost reasonable times.

then............ china. now i'm slugging it out with china which is currently a stalemate (she DOW me -_-). she just has so. many. fricking. bombers. and probably more ships than every other civ combined twice over. i can't get anywhere near her coast to even think about taking cities from her yet. though my long term plan is to eventually liberate carthage which will give me a vassal that'll switch to my ideology, and carthage has been part of china since 2,000BC so liberating carthage's 5 cities (which account for a large chunk of her 12 world wonders btw) should really cripple china and finally end this ideological pressure nightmare i've been suffering for the past 2 days

but with my unhappiness my production is sooo slow and gets slower every turn. she's churning out like 8 ships in the time it takes me to build one lol! but even with my smaller navy and unhappiness crippling my production times to replace losses i'm holding her back from my coast which at this point i consider a victory. she can't get to my coast but i can't get to hers. we've been in this back & forth stalemate for HOURS in real-time now.

her eternal never-ending bomber spam every turn is devastating (seriously i have to sit here for like 10 minutes real time watching her bombers relentlessly spamming my ships, and they always focus on just one at a time too to ensure it sinks ugh, and it's taking me anywhere between 12-25 turns to replace each lost warship). i discovered her weakness though - her bomber fetish. she's stuffed all her cities with as many bombers as she can but actually has very few fighters. so i went the opposite, i scraped together as many fighters as i can but only had very few bombers. so over many turns her bombing spam became more sporadic and shorter as my fighters gradually thinned her numbers. meanwhile my own bombers were given free reign over her ships

anyway tl;dr it turned the tide of the war. she's finally starting to lose more ships while i'm beginning to lose less and it looks like if i had just 20-30 more turns i could finally break the stalemate and even start thinking about which coastal city would damage her influence the most to lose.

however by the time this was achieved my war weariness is 14.5%, approval rating dropped to 43% and ideological pressure is increasing FAST again!. at this point carrying on the war is counter-productive to my original goal and my empire physically cannot continue this war for even one more turn.

at this point i think the only way i can realistically break this stalemate and turn things in my favour is by dropping a nuke or two on her main cities. but an atomic bomb will take 68 turns and a nuclear missile over 120 turns and that's two cities i don't have producing anything else for 60-120 turns.

anyway long post sorry
tl;dr. found a way to fight this ideological pressure & the unhappiness that comes with it, but only if the one applying the pressure isn't a ridiculously OP global superpower with a ship & bomber spam fetish and only if their ideological pressure isn't already crippling your empire's happiness & production to the point you can't produce units fast enough to break through in time before war weariness makes it impossible to win. catch22 d'oh!

would just be easier to give in and change ideology huh