Next turn after capture culture flip problem

[Creosote]

I keep getting the same thing happening and its driving me nuts!

In the BC era when I go on an initial rampage with a stack of offensive units, capture a city, then the very next go, or the one after it flips back to the original Civ as the "admire xyz culture".

There isn't time to get a temple or other built. I need garrison units to quell the resistors, then the city flips and I lose the units. If I dont garrison then either it flips or I get the resistors.

I presume this is prolly happening as I have almost no improvements in my cities, very few temples, no libraries etc so my civilisation culture must be low compared to the Civ I am conquering. But I don't know how to assess what I would need to do to stop this immediatte flip.

Any ideas or suggestions please?

 

[Tomoyo]

Keep some units one tille next to city to recapture it.

 

[tR1cKy]

There's a precise formula to determine the garrisoned units necessary to be sure to avoid a revolt. Too bad it sometimes screw up with insane results, such as 100 or more units for a metropolis or 20 units for a size 3 town. Counting on garrisoned troops to hold control of a conquered city may turn into your doom.

An option would be to raze the city and resettle the unclaimed land with national settlers. The razing will produce some fine slaves useful to improve your territory.

If you don't want to raze it, you can starve the city to size 1 then send troops to hold it. Or produce workers (slaves) until size 1. But you must be ready to face a flip. This means: minimal defenses and troops stationed outside the city, ready to recapture it.

You can lower the flip chances by building some culture in your empire. One of the factors in the formula is [enemy culture]/[your culture].

EDIT: @Tomoyo: sorry, cross post. You already stated the "troops outside" stuff.

 

[denyd]

A couple more things to consider. If you happen to be a little farther into the game you might consider pillaging the connecting roads, as when the city does flip it gets the best available defender and if no iron or SP is connected that would be a spearmen, otherwise it would be either a Pike or Musket depending on what techs they knew.

What I normally do is put a wounded (non-elite) unit in the city to heal and serve as a resistor killer. That way if the city flips I don't lose that much. If you really don't want the city to flip, check out Dianthus' CRP Map Stat, one of the pages shows the flip risk and the number of troops required to prevent flipping. I should point out that if it's a big city, far from your capital, it might take 30-40 units to prevent a flip and for that big a garrison, you're better off leaving a single city and 2-3 attackers to wait for the flip.

One other thing you can do is travel with a couple of settlers/workers and join them to the city. The lower the percentage of foreign citizens, the less the chance of flipping.

 

[rysingsun]

I presume this is prolly happening as I have almost no improvements in my cities, very few temples, no libraries etc so my civilisation culture must be low compared to the Civ I am conquering. But I don't know how to assess what I would need to do to stop this immediatte flip.
Any ideas or suggestions please?

when a player's culture is very low it is both difficult to prevent the flip and difficult to even get rid of the resisters. the only real solutions to these two problems short of building more culture are raizing and simply not garrisoning the cities until the entire ai power is conquered, after which you can fight off the resisters with ease. in a game where the player has dominant culture the resistance can be eliminated very quickly and pretty safely as well. in short culture matters. but culture is also expensive so it must be weighed against the alternatives. its difficult to be both warlike and a great builder early in the game if you are playing at a difficulty level that is truly a challenge to yourself.

late in the game wars tend to be very quick. early in the game they may take a lot more turns. hence early in the game if i dont have good culture my inclination would probably be to raize. late in the game i just wait out the war which usually lasts less than 10 turns and i fight off the resistance at that time, before which i only garrison the front line cities.

 

[BasketCase]

I keep getting the same thing happening and its driving me nuts!

Since I haven't been having this flipping-back problem on the scale you seem to be suffering (in most of my games, the flips go my way), I have to assume your empire is lacking in culture. If the enemy civ has three times as much culture as you, every single city that's next to that civ is going to be at increased risk of flipping--and if the city was originally owned by that civ and has resistance in it, the odds against you become terrifying.

If you absolutely, positively refuse to put more effort into building up your culture, there's still a way to solve the problem: keep your invasion moving, and conquer other cities in the opponent civ. When a city is conquered, its culture value drops to zero; even if the original owner captures the city back, all those culture points are gone forever. You can effectively hose a high-culture enemy this way.

 

[FenrysWulf]

Something else that no one has mentioned yet is you can turn off the cultural conversions on the beginning screen where you select your civ and the difficulty level and so on. This way you don't get other civilizations' cities flipping to you, but you don't lose yours to them either, which is a good tradeoff if you are militaristic.

 

[DBear]

Basketcase, I don't think that's true. If you take their city and take it back, they won't be producing any culture, as all culture buildings will have been destroyed, but the city's original culture value remains.

I most recently saw this in GotM39, where the Romans had taken Zimbabwe. I, playing the Germans, declared war on the Romans and moved in. Just before I got there, Zimbabwe flipped back to the Zulus with their original culture boundaries, whereupon I proceeded to raze it, as I was also at war with the Zulus.