Rivals' encroaching borders

[Broken Hawk]

Isabella was annoying me to no end (surprise). I decided to take her out. After a lot of effort and casualties, I captured Cordoba.

Much to my dismay, the Chinese promptly moved their border right up to Cordoba's city gates grabbing tiles full of valuable resources and development. As a consequence, the city starved and the population has been reduced to 1.

Is there a way to thwart or, at least, minimize this type of action? I have Open Borders with Chinese. Or is this just a quirk of the game you have to live with?

Thanks.

[ulyanov]

Each tile seems to have a culture value for each civ. The one with the highest total wins. You took Isabella out of the running, so the chinese were left with the highest total for those squares.


Your only choices are to use a Great Artist to culture bomb the city, or build culrute improvements and wait a very long time...

[cal_01]

There's no way to avoid this effect, especially if it's a border town.

If you can, try to take out their core cities instead of their border towns. That way, you'll eventually create a "void" in the culture and the towns can grow normally.

[Kc7mxo]

i think a captured city should at least retain its usable squares, if it had them already. its pretty silly that a nuetral party benefits so obviously from a neighbors defeat. you didn't see switzerland grabbing chunks of france during ww2 after all.

[vmxa1]

Do not capture if you want to get tiles. The time to pacify the town means no borders expand.

I like to smash down towns till their culture borders recede. I move settlers to as many palces as makes sense in the time before the neighbors borders fill the space.

Create my towns, rush in some culture structures and set them to culture for a few turns. You can get some tiles in this manner.

[Broken Hawk]

I think it is harder to win by military conquest in CivIV than it is in CivII (I have never played CivIII). This tile grabbing by a third civ is just one example why.