Captured cities don't eventually get radius back

[wysiwygbill]

I've been playing a game where three civs have cities in the same area and all have large cultural values. I capture a city and it immediately loses both it's radius and cultural border. The city is immediately up against a neutral civs cultural borders even though not near enough to any other city to be worked. When the city normalizes (no longer in resist mode) I don't even get back it's original city radius.

So, I capture a city and some neutral civ immediately claims the surrounding land and short of going to war I can't do anything about it.

Is this supposed to happen? Is there any way to prevent this from happening? I've even had isolated single tiles of land belonging to a neutral right next to my city.

What happens if you give away a city or someone else gives you a city? Does the land being worked by the city go with it or do you only get part of it?

[Hurin]

You don't benefit from the cultural borders built up in a city prior to the city's capture. You need to immediately build a theater or other culture-producing building to start building your own culture in the city so that its borders begin expanding again with *your* culture.

You might also consider a "culture bomb" via Great Artist.

H

[shennessy]

You don't benefit from the cultural borders built up in a city prior to the city's capture. You need to immediately build a theater or other culture-producing building to start building your own culture in the city so that its borders begin expanding again with *your* culture.

This is the part of CIV 4 that I find out of wack with what I would expect.

To me this encourages razing cities because the other cities around your newly clamied city will smother it. May as well just raze em until you have no other cities around to gobble up the land.

I understand the 10 turns of resistance, but once that resistance is done you should get the full(or maybe half?) of the old border that the city use to have. I just dont see how after you take over a city the borders of your enemy from the nearby city take up all the slack. To me cultural boarders = national borders, and if you take a city you push your nations boarders to encompase that city and its surrounding area.

Anybody have a real life historical viewpoint that backs up how Civ IV is playing? (I know gameplay trumps history, but this just seems a but out of wack to me).

[duodecimal]

I think this is big, meaty bone thrown to the builder players.

I like Egypt: start with two worker actions, no anarchy, and... +2 culture per turn for all cities.

When some jerk aggressor picks on me, and I manage to take one of his cities... I don't have to give any effort to expand the culture boundary.

Side note: Have a missionary ready, one for each conquered city that doesn't have your state religion. IIRC, you get culture in cities that share your state religion depending on your civic.

[shennessy]

Originally posted by duodecimal
Side note: Have a missionary ready, one for each conquered city that doesn't have your state religion. IIRC, you get culture in cities that share your state religion depending on your civic.

Plenty of ways to get culture back into a city... but late in the game a newly conqured culture 10 city right next to a culture 10000 city.... is useless for pushing your borders. I hate to think you have to save a great artist for every city you want to keep during a war. So far I raze any city(even ones with wonders!) unless it has no borders around it. I will back fill later with my own settlers if I want.

Strange example...
The US takes over the only city in the country of Iraq. Does Iran get to take over the rest of the country because it has all the culture in the area? Dont make any sense.

[Celerity]

This is yet to be seen...

[Ansaga]

Originally posted by shennessy


Plenty of ways to get culture back into a city... but late in the game a newly conqured culture 10 city right next to a culture 10000 city.... is useless for pushing your borders. I hate to think you have to save a great artist for every city you want to keep during a war. So far I raze any city(even ones with wonders!) unless it has no borders around it. I will back fill later with my own settlers if I want.

Strange example...
The US takes over the only city in the country of Iraq. Does Iran get to take over the rest of the country because it has all the culture in the area? Dont make any sense.

Ummm... Wouldn't the neutral nation push against the city you just founded anyways...?

[wysiwygbill]

Shouldn't the city have at least a one square radius cultural border when it settles?

The only solution I've found is to keep going until I get to the next city and raze it.

As an aside, I made peace with a civ when I still had units inside its territory. A stack of 8 modern armor units was shoved inside a single unclaimed square at the intersection of two of the former enemy's cities (the closes "free" square" and couldn't go anywhere.


Does a "culture bomb" cause nearby unworked tiles to flip from one civ to another?

Originally posted by Hurin
You don't benefit from the cultural borders built up in a city prior to the city's capture. You need to immediately build a theater or other culture-producing building to start building your own culture in the city so that its borders begin expanding again with *your* culture.

You might also consider a "culture bomb" via Great Artist.

H

[shennessy]

Originally posted by Ansaga


Ummm... Wouldn't the neutral nation push against the city you just founded anyways...?

There are no neutral nations when I go to war!

But seriously if any nation has an established city close to the one I just captured, I raze it and move on. Only if there is a no culture area or my current borders take the area do I even mess with making a new city.

[Arkalius]

Civ 4 may be based loosely on history but it doesn't have to do everything perfectly realistically. Even a culture bomb in these situations don't solve the problem immediately. It takes time for the city's culture to filter out into the nearby tiles and push back the borders. In one game I played, I had captured a Chinese city and had low culture. A mongol (friedly) city was nearby. Once the chinese were destroyed by me, all the chinese culture built up in the tiles around the city disappeared, and the mongol city's borders jumped out and bumped right up against this former chinese city I owned. It eventually flipped over to the mongols, but I really didn't mind. It wasn't a critical city or anything.

[TheArsenal]

I lost a city I captured from Japan in the late game to Arabia due to cultural flip. The Arabian cultural boundaries completed engulfed the city on all four sides, and I couldn’t move units in or out because Arabia closed its borders. It was only a matter of time. Not losing units in the culture flip in Civ IV, made it far easier to stomach however.

[BotD]

Last night I had a neutral civilization culture flip a city I had just taken, and all four riflemen I had on it. This was with a creative civ too. I really dislike the ease that newly conquered civs culture flip, especially to a civilization to which it didn't originally belong.

[LzPrst]

nerf culture! theres a problem with culture, and this is it, culture is meant as a counter to aggressive conquest civs. but culture has no counter itself... you cant keep borders by military force. you cant keep cities by military force cause you dont have enough units to hold the city and continue the war and theres no other way to expand your borders.

how can cities specialize when they HAVE to build culture just to cling on to their resources? culture lacks a balance.

once again, this they should have worked out from civ3.
rocks-paper-scissors system is the greatest way to balance game concepts. as it is now its paper-rock(scissors) cause if you overculture your foe they lose their land. but they can build large armies and crush you, but it will require gold, which means less culture rating. which means the cities will expand their borders even slower. gains will be minimal since you spend so many resources building armies and claiming back the original land of the city.

now this is good for builder civs, but since theres no third option and most AI seem to go for builder style, and so do most players, it makes for a rather static game. which is why many people have already started saying that the game gets boring fast...

[wysiwygbill]

I tried a test with the city I captured that only got half it's tiles back. I went into the world builder and created 4 great artists and maxed out the buildings in the city.

The city's borders "expanded" according to the messages I saw but the culture border stayed unchanged. I had about 14,000 culture to the other city's 950. About 5 turns later all of the area surrounding the city flipped TO THE OTHER CIV with all of my units inside. The city subsequently starved for lack of food. It started out with a population of 13 or so.

The nearest city I didn't own was 8 tiles away so something isn't working right.

[Ansaga]

Cultures broken? Its possible. Everyone get out their detective hats for this one!