Culture bomb fizzled?

[SirOsis]

I've run into an interesting problem. My culture bomb did not work at all. I took Cuzco and used a great artist with the hope of flipping other cities without a war. But now it appears his low culture cities are going to take Cuzco.

I checked the culture in the world builder and Cuzco has over 4000, Vilcabamba has 30, and Ollantaytambo 101.

What is going on with my borders?

I messed around in the world builder a little and if you change the culture in that city you can get borders that I would expect. Some bug at work here.


Also, why can't I give a city more than 1000 culture in the world builder?



Attached is the save before the bomb.

[Tattila the Hun]

I'm thinking, there might be less of their culture, but it's older culture, harder to root out...

[Martinus]

I had a similar situation when I captured a city within the enemy territory and did not get a single square around it, despite dropping the culture bomb inside.

Would be cool if someone from Firaxis confirmed this is a WAD (i.e. old culture is harder to replace by new culture) and not a bug.

[xxFlukexx]

If your mouse was hovering over your city when you took that screenshot then you are in no danger of having your city flip. A city is only in danger of flipping if it has less than 50% of your population. And culture bombs take awhile to take effect, dunno what the exact formula is though. Also I believe cities you take by conquest cannot be flipped back to the original owner anyways

[sittingsparrow]

That Olla city is the capitol, impossible to cultureflip and it has "strong borders" no matter what. I don't know if there's a formula for this, but would like to know what dictates the borders for a strong cultured city vs a capital. One important factor is distance from your own capital.

In standard game a city cannot cultureflip if conquered, this can be turned on in a custom game however.

[Stuie]

Originally posted by sittingsparrow
That Olla city is the capitol, impossible to cultureflip and it has "strong borders" no matter what.

Yeah - this must be the case. Capital city culture borders must take precedence over other cities. What's weird is - you have that one yellow square in the ocean above Huayna Capa's territory... that must be where your borders would have extended if they weren't competing with a capital city. I guess. Maybe.

[Bhruic]

I had a similar experience myself. I was separated from the Greeks by a narrow straight. I sailed over and took their capital. I then hit it with a culture bomb, but didn't get any border expansion.

I did notice, however, that the percentage of my people in the city was quite low (and growing slowly). It only reached 31% the turn I decided to gift it back to the Greeks.

Considering that I took over their capital, however, it doesn't seem like the "capital city culture borders" would be in effect, unless they are instantaneous (at this point I don't recall where their capital moved to).

Bh

[Martinus]

Ah I think it is the answer, actually. When you mouse over any border land tile, you will see it has a breakdown of a percentage of competing cultures. If the city itself has less than 50% of your culture, I suspect it is not exerting pressure on the nearby borders, irrespective of the actual cultural value of the city after the bomb. (Effectively, if you have say 30% your culture, 70% enemy culture in your city and it has 4000 culture, it means it is exerting 70% of its cultural influence but for enemy culture). Probably you need to wait a few turns until your culture gains an advantage in the city and then it will start to exert its pressure for your culture.

[SirOsis]

Originally posted by Martinus
Would be cool if someone from Firaxis confirmed this is a WAD (i.e. old culture is harder to replace by new culture) and not a bug.

Yeah I would like this confirmed as well. It seems a bit odd to me. Even if the capitol borders cannot be pushed back, I would expect that Vilcabamba should have its borders altered. Cuzco was the capital and it moved to Olla after I took it. If this is WAD then my plan didn't work as expected.

It might be that the borders don't expand because it was the civs capital?