The "spread culture" spy mission

[Nares]

Spread Culture in a city so that you can gain bonuses for Future Spy missions in that city... because Spy Missions Don't use plot culture for cost, they use city culture.

It doesn't exactly seem an efficient way to bring down the cost of the mission.

I know the cost of the mission itself is cheap, but risking those spies seems much costlier, especially given that it's already on the lower end of success rates for espionage missions.

 

[civzombie]

Bump - anyone willing to re-evaluate the usefulness of this option given that the 3.19 patch has fixed this option, e.g. from the patch notes "Fixed bug where culture obtained through espionage was 100 times lower than intended"

I don't have many specific comments because I haven't learned the intracies of culture flipping very well. I would be very interested in reading an analysis from someone who has because I really enjoy using spies and flipping cities!

 

[TheMeInTeam]

If it went back to 3.13 rules, it should be possible with like 50 of these missions or so (depending on target culture) to have the city turn legendary after you capture it .

 

[UWHabs]

Hmm - that would be a fun rpc - try an espionage game where you just spread culture like crazy to cause a city to go legendary right when you capture it to get a culture victory?

 

[Jaroth]

Interesting Thread. Sorry if this has been discussed, but I didn't think it was.

What about using this mission on a city of yours recently captured by an enemy, either militarily or culturally and you have a good overlap from your other cities.

Could this be enough to flip it back, (assuming your game settings allow it)?

I may be wrong, but I think you would need the option, "City Flipping After Conquest", enabled when creating the game.

Otherwise, cities cannot flip back to the previous owner if it was captured under default rules.

(Personally, I started playing with the option enabled; I like it.)


Also, this is an interesting thread and I learned a little bit from it...

 

[Bushface]

I now have 3.19 and have done a test on spreading culture.
AI city with 20% cultural defence, making 3 culture per turn. Planted a city of my own, as close as possible (2 tiles apart); gave it 512 culture but no culture growth. AI city then showed 92% their culture, 7% mine. Made a save.
Phase 1 - did nothing for 5 turns. After that time, the AI city showed 84% their culture, 15% mine.
Phase 2 - reloaded and filled the AI city with my spies. Performed a series of 36 "spread culture" missions over the 5 turns, during which period the cost of a mission rose from 11 to 22 EPs and the success chance from 79% to 80% except for the last mission, which for some reason had 95% success chance. 7 missions failed, two other spies were lost but their missions succeeded. After all this, after the 5 turns the AI city showed 84% their culture, 15% mine - exactly the same as without this intensive spreading.
The amount of my culture spread rose from 5 to 15 per mission, and a fat lot of good it did. Had the opposition been stronger, no doubt the cost would have been higher and the results even less.
My opinion remains unaltered: this is a broken mission, and not to be undertaken.

 

[UWHabs]

Can you take the save, and then go capture the city, see if you can get it to go legendary when you capture it?

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Can you take the save, and then go capture the city, see if you can get it to go legendary when you capture it?

Exactly. Don't confuse city culture with tile culture in this test...although it's perfectly understandable that they'd get confused. Spread culture spreads city culture...and that will only impact nearby tiles if the person owns the city.

Try capturing the city in both cases and wait for it to come out of revolt. I bet you'll see something interesting.

 

[PieceOfMind]

I don't agree with your analysis, Bushface. In your experiment you used a very culturally immature enemy city. Considering the cost of the spy and the fact you will lose a spy sometimes, using spread culture is only going to be worth it when the enemy city has a large established culture already.

For example, if you see an enemy city that has 30k culture, you do not have to use any more than about 20 spies to bring it to Legendary for when you capture it. If used properly the Spread Culture mission is not only extremely powerful, it's bordering on broken.

The only downside is that there's a bit of luck involved in whether you will see an AI with such a massive cultural investment while you have a city close enough to get at least 1 culture onto their tile in the first place. But this is where strategy comes in - our intelligence should fill in the gaps.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I don't agree with your analysis, Bushface. In your experiment you used a very culturally immature enemy city. Considering the cost of the spy and the fact you will lose a spy sometimes, using spread culture is only going to be worth it when the enemy city has a large established culture already.

For example, if you see an enemy city that has 30k culture, you do not have to use any more than about 20 spies to bring it to Legendary for when you capture it. If used properly the Spread Culture mission is not only extremely powerful, it's bordering on broken.

The only downside is that there's a bit of luck involved in whether you will see an AI with such a massive cultural investment while you have a city close enough to get at least 1 culture onto their tile in the first place. But this is where strategy comes in - our intelligence should fill in the gaps.

Even without a carefully planned strategy it could be used to "flip" those annoying culture AIs back on themselves and use THEIR cities for OUR culture win...especially if those cities are pressing us culturally.

 

[PieceOfMind]

By the way,

I believe this thread is one most people here would be looking for. Now that the spread culture mission is fixed, the strategy discussions therein is relevant again.

 

[UWHabs]

Well, it definitely works. I played a quick game as France on Earth 18, where I built the GW, then spammed a bunch of spies. I can definitely prove that it affects plot culture, since I plopped a spy in and saw tiles flip to me. Plus, when London and Berlin culturally revolted to me, they both started out with about 1000 culture. Continuing on, my next test with the game is now that they've both flipped to me (London pretty early, Berlin in about 1100 AD), Berlin's culture stretches barely to Germany's next city, so my next goal is to spam the spies there, see what I can get from it.

Unfortunately, on Earth 18, the cities are a bit too close together, so they flipped too early to have them pop up with too much culture in them, but I could definitely see some cases where opponents' capitals are just barely in reach, and you can pump enough EP to really spread culture quite heavily.