When I heard about the loyalty system, I was very happy. I loved how culture worked in civ4, beeing able to flip cities, needing to defend against it. It was fun, but they removed it in civ5.
Loyalty sounded that it was going to do just that. But in my experience, not only did it fail, but it failed in both oposite ways.
You're looking at it in the wrong way, but understandably since it looks very similar to Civ IV flipping and Firaxis didn't do a very good job of explaining the intended game function.
Loyalty sits in an odd spot where it's a replacement for something you wouldn't immediately associate it with: corruption/city maintenance. In other words, its game function is primarily to force you to plan and pace expansion. This is so widely misunderstood that most of the complaints about it boil down to some variant of "it makes it difficult to expand indefinitely" - which is the entire point.
It's inspired that they took a fun but essentially cosmetic mechanic from Civ IV - city-flipping - and used it to add an expansion constraint missing in Civ VI's base form, but it's not a natural association to draw.
I'd then waited until I was able to build shakas special unit to start attacking. I captured a frontier city. It was closer to their cities than mines, but not by much, all my cities were pretty close. As soon as I captured it it told me that it would flip because of loyalty. So I:
- Put a governor on it
- Adopted the civic that gives loyalty with garrisoned units
- Put the governor with the loyalty bonus to friendly nearby cities on a city nearby
With all this, the city still said it was going to flip. Ok, IMO, 1 or 2 of this steps should have been more than enough, I was quite surprised that even the 3 actions didnt fix the loyalty problem on a frontier city (not another continent, not far inside their territory, not far from my cities... nothing, just the obvious first city to capture)
I think there's a conquest malus to loyalty - you start at 50 rather than 100 with a conquered city, which makes it prone to flipping. Step 1 is fine but is only +8, while you'll often see a newly-conquered city with a -13 or more modifier. The civic only gives +2. The governor has to arrive to use her loyalty boost (other than the standard +8 for having a governor), which takes 5 turns, so that may not have come into play.
You also usually need to have the amenity bonus (+3 or +6), but the most important thing is population pressure and this is dictated largely by which age you're in compared with the nearest civ. Expanding militarily in a Dark Age is practically impossible whatever buffs you have. This is deliberate to showcase the era system.
So I did one more thing, I captured the closest enemy city quick. And still, 3 turns after that, the city still flipped.
Ok, here I stopped playing. It's not hard, its just a bullfeathers feature.
While you'll get some reinforcement from nearby conquests, you're usually better off just razing any cities close enough to exert pressure on your new city.
So, I did 4 (FOUR!) things to stop a captured city from flipping. A city that was almost as close to my cities than to the enemy ones. And that was still not enough?? So what the hell else was tehre to do?
Ensure you're in a Golden Age when you attack and that your opponent isn't - and preferably is in a Dark Age.
I think it would be a great improvement if CULTURE and RELIGION played a part in the loyalty system.
They evidently want loyalty to work differently from culture-flipping in Civ IV. It would be welcome for religion to play a role - it would be easy to incorporate and would increase the presently marginal relevance of religion in most games. Unfortunately it would probably be overly tedious in practice due to the need to constantly reconvert your cities following AI apostle spam.
I agree I am not a fan of the Free City mechanic, as they effectively just function as glorified barbarians. Definitely room for improvement there.
I'm happy enough having barbarian cities in the landscape but I agree the implementation of the free city system isn't great.
