So how does culture flipping work?

[ZargonX]

I think that if you can cut off the owning empire from their city in resistance, it will flip to you during one of the revolts. I had a Greek city completely absorbed within my culture, and had a closed border with them so they could get to units to it. After one revolt, it flipped about 3 turns later.

[DrrD]

Originally posted by neliz
Well, the only way to get MORE great artists is either through your Leaders profile or by building buildings which increase the birth rate of great persons. There isn't some button you can push to pop them out.

Well, you can also add more artist specialists, and make sure you don't have the others. when a GP is generated, you get 1 randomly based on the distribution of specialists. so if you have 1 artist and 1 merchant, your GP has a 50/50 chance of being a great artist or a great merchant.

so if you want the artist, make sure all your specialists are artists, and none of the others. of course you can only have so many of each type of specialist, so you may have to choose between having say 1 priest and 2 artists, with more GP points but a 33% chance of a great prophet, vs. 2 artists with less GP points but 100% chance of a great artist when you do get your GP.

And you can also build more stuff or pick the right civics to let yourself get more artists.

The specialist system is MUCH more advanced and interesting than it was in Civ 3.

[ahsingjai]

Oh yeah, I totally forgot about those. Cities can have specialist.

[dconner]

It takes me a while getting used to the notion that specialists can be really useful and important relatively early on. With Civ3, my basic rule was always "Don't even bother thinking about specialists until all tiles are being worked," because even the crappiest tile tended to be better than what a specialist could provide.

[DrrD]

Yep, and the computer governor starts adding specialists well before all the tiles are full. Tells you something, doesn't it?

In Civ 3 a specialist gave you science, gold, or happy.

Now they give you that, PLUS culture, PLUS GP points.

Much more powerful.

[phybre]

I've noticed a related oddity also.

In border regions, tiles just outside my border will say something like "6% Spanish" (where obviously I'm some other culture). If it's right on my border, doesn't that mean it should have flipped over to me when it hit 49%? It's not outside the limit of my fat cross. There doesn't seem to be much correspondence between who controls a tile and what the percentage reads.

One time I even had a long line of tiles that started out as mine, reaching to the coast, sandwiched between two cities of the same rival, and the next turn I still controlled the tile on the coast, but all the ones between went to them. I had this lone tile on the coast with no city on it. So apparently there's no line-of-sight rule or anything like that. It was a little useless exclave.

[neliz]

IT doesn't flip at 49% it flips at something way lower than that.

cities don't flip at 0%, it takes some turns (a yet undefined number) at 0% before it revolts.
If the revolt is unsuccesful (the city gets stacked with military units) the percentage goes up to 30% or something, before dropping your way again.

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Yeah, I found this behavior a little odd too. I was playing a Terra map and the Romans founded a new city in the middle of my long-established new world colonies. The Roman city was 0% Roman from the time it was established to the end of the game (probably 50 or so turns) and controlled no territory after the second turn, but never flipped, or even revolted.

[ahsingjai]

The Indian city finally flipped. The Artists really helped boost the flipping.