With battle the next thing happens: When the city gains the next culture level it still puts equal amount of culture into the allowed rings without RCS or only into some of the tiles with RCS but previously the battle victories put some culture into every tile next to the city so it still claims the whole ring although RCS says it should not do that.
The culture is already there in those rings due to the small amount from the battle. So even though RCS is saying only some of those plots may get culture from the city right now, the fact that they already have a little qualifies them, since they are still technically within the range of city claiming, to be labeled as yours because all the plot needs is to either:
a) have been previously claimed by you and still have any of your culture there and no greater competing culture of another's
OR
b) have any amount of your culture in the tile AND be within claim range.
And yes, it is because the battle spread that culture a lot farther than just the tile it was on and thus added a little of your culture to those tiles during the battle that when it came to the point where your cultural claim range spread out there was culture there, unlike on RCS where a virgin uncultured tile would still not be claimed, even if within claim range, because you don't yet have any of your cultural influence in that tile.
the phenomenon is still problematic
I'm not sure why this is problematic, tbh. There's a logical cause for this influence and it is a bonus for militarily dominating the region. Think of it like this - there are still humans living in that area because the previous landowners had enough cultural spread to have them move out that far and still consider themselves a part of the city community. When you conquered the city they didn't think of themselves as part of your nation for a while, more like refugees continuing to live where they had personally settled. But as your city stabilized and grew to accept your rule, they came back around to considering themselves a part of the city again.
However, in the case of a normal settlement growing up in a completely wild environment and taming the land as it goes, there just aren't any people that have moved out to that region until it is culturally claimed. NO human settlements at all on those unclaimed plots. Not yet.
Hard to understand why you would discard the whole option and use the normal core behavior just because a rare PART of the game would
appear to look as if it is working more like that core behavior on the basis of not liking the original core behavior. ??? huh ???
So the solution would be to align the two systems. For example if the RCS option is on the culture gained from battle should spread by RCS rules the same way the culture spreads from the cities. Also if I gain so much extra culture from the battles that it still fills a whole ring or almost a whole ring around the city and spread into the next ring the city should get enough culture from the battle victories that it starts on a higher culture level allowing it to claim tiles from multiple rings thus creating irregular borders.
Much easier said than done since they figure themselves out in very different ways and the way RCS works is completely organic whereas the claim range is absolutely static to game rule and has nothing to do with any plot evaluations, purely the distance from the city and the culture level of the city are all that it looks at. I can think of a way but I'm not sure I could pull it off depending on how the exact syntax is programmed right now - this is the kind of thing that could create an unusually long turn processing time delay for a very small return in game value.
.
