cultural offensives : an introduction

[unamablebuiler]

techniques for cultral offenseive
seeing as there has been people with problems dealing with ais colonising near their cities or desireable city sites i have prepared this introduction to cultural offensives to deal with isolated cities as a means to aquire or disband cities without diplomatic penalty. Not sure on abandoning cities but it appears to have no drawback

this method is useful for when the Ai has built a new city near an existing city or has built a new city near in an area you wan colonise. this assumes you have other cities nearby which can supply units/workers unless it is island landmass

build cities close to AI city 3-4 sq from ai city
for islands you will need to bring 1 worker 2 defense units also
worker start buliding cotages/mines/farms
build missionaries and convert to as many religions as possible in city
build order
obelisk (if available)
temple +1
monastry +2(is available)
theatre+3
library +2
university +3
catherderals +50%
broadcast towers +50%

civics
the 2 most potent for cultral offensives are Free speech +100%
and Free religion +1 culture per religion


free religion
this civic gices your city 1 point per religion pressent minimising the religions in their city will help too
comerce settings
20 percent (1 culture per 5 comerce) is what i normaly use but any rate will do

specalists
artists
any great artists that you get can either be used as a culture bomb or great specalist they are both effective though culture bom is more so

wonders
if you can get sistine chapel this will help imensely +2 culture per specialist
not advised to build broadway rocknroll or hollywood wonders in new cities the risk of failure is too high imo

creative if you are creative it will be easier but it will also be harder if your opponent is creative

the free speech bonus applies to all culture points what ever the source as do all bomuses from buildings or wonders
to illustrate sucessfull application of these techniques i have included 2 screen shots.

it may take a while to get a city to flip but you know it will be close at the first revolt. not sure what it uses to calculate when if it will flip.






Happy culture mongering

[axisworks]

I tend to start my cultural building with library, theater, and university. The library provides a production boost, and the +2 culture from the get-go seems a bit more beneficial than the +1 from temples and such. I usually build those right after the university (or if that's not available, after the theater). I usually chop the library, since it takes a bit to build at first.

[The keeper]

Theaters are cheaper than librarys and give more culture.

Build theaters first if trying to get culture.

[unamablebuiler]

... come to think of it i do that too damm forgot
my method is still a long way from optimal

the main thing though is to keep building culture buildings in those cities in particular

i know i broke that rule in the top screenshot but i had the 20 percent culture rate for happines in other areas
the second one my cities were built later than the english ones and the ai tried to keep up. the screen shost show what it is capable of sooner or later those engilsh cities would fall.

a few more thoughts

20 % culture is very powerful as it forces the ai to play catch up and you are ahead from the start. Wouldn't do it unless i had other reasons such as big city happiness

2 monastires if you can buuld them is cheaper than the uni but they give 4 culture and 20% bounus to science if i have 2 religions in the city the monastries get built before the uni , otherwise it is the uni

hope we can get the best method for this though there really no best method. but the more ideas the better

[raguas]

I'm not sold on the idea of going 20% culture on the slider, especially if the objective is just to get a few AI cities to switch.

Even more so if, as on the screenshot, I've yet to discover medicine and the AI has already launched the Spaceship.

This is not meant as a criticism. I just want to indicate that my own priorities would be gaining/keeping the tech lead and/or establishing my military dominance.

If I had the money (and at these relative points in the game, I usually do), as you had in the screenshot, I would simply switch to Universal Suffrage, and buy a cultural building each turn in the targetted cities. (Whether or not I'm going for a cultural switch, I tend to buy these buildings in new cities anyway.) Doing this, I can still keep my Science rate as high as I'd want, since I'd only be splitting the slider between money and science -- keeping culture at zero.

[couerdelion]

Originally posted by raguas
I'm not sold on the idea of going 20% culture on the slider, especially if the objective is just to get a few AI cities to switch.

The slider is a really inefficient tool for this since it will be forcing culture on other cities that don't need it. It would be a lot cheaper just to take the city in a war.

Buying the culture improvements every other turn should be effective enough with +100% culture from civics. Aren't part-built improvements cheaper to rush-buy than completely new ones?

[chiqss]

Originally posted by couerdelion
Aren't part-built improvements cheaper to rush-buy than completely new ones?

Wait one turn and it will be about half cheaper in cities producting 15-20 hammers

[unamablebuiler]

umm if you have really big cities and are at war then you will probably need some culture/happiness to prevent them from starving even with mt rushmore +jails as you will have some war weariness. i have had something like +14 war whatis if good for and was still able to keep all the suckers at work.

the ai is running free speech ussually at this time so you would need every point you can get. getting past anewly minted city is relativeley easy even with a moderately developed city it gets much much harder and is a much longer process. Enveloping a new city with barely any culture can take less than 500 points and it will probably flip quite quickly

at this pont my GNP is higher by 150 % that of the highest rival or sometimes evem more even running at 50 % i was picking up a tech every 5-10 turns on epic speed

it is inefficent but if it is needed for any other reason(happiness)then the side effect is useful.
as a city grows its comerce increase a one city under freespeech without religion will grow its cultral value by 2 per turn and that is before religion and buildings every 5 additional comerce adds +2 culture to the rate of growth in adition to the rate it pust the ai behind from the start and increasingly further behind as time goes on till it flips.
the cities in the second screenshot were generating something like 60 culture per turn and they were built around 1770.
hope all this is correct.

My one caveat is if you don't need the happiness there are probably better ways to go about it and univsufferage will probably be better then.

i know its strange but i am ussally running representation Free speech emancipation Free market and free religion
my larger citites 25 + have between 4-6 scientists and an engineer yielding between 27 and 34 beakers before bonuses. for financial civs each town yields around 9 comerce that translates to 5 towns = 22.5 beakers before bonus(50 percent sci). this would change depending on sci. as far as i know it works out as about even whatever means you use for 20+ size cities.

it might work out being better unsing universal sufferage to buy gold but you must have the gold to spend how does shields equate into gold?
Its also good to shore up culture in border cities this way as it does all of your cities.

in the second game at that point cyrus won but if there was no space victory there would be more fighting than exhibited through the game they were fighting as it was.
that game was lost around 500 AD anyways however it was a closer loss than i had ever managed previously (8 turns from completeing apollo) i included it to illustrate what could be done. I was catching them at this point anyways. the leadtime detween units was shrinking
I was building a military finally but it was no size to do more than a quick strike. However most of them didn't have oil i found something like 7 oil on my continent only 2 appeared to have oil and they were caning every one

hope i have explained the use of the culture slider properly

[raguas]

Originally posted by unamablebuiler
umm if you have really big cities and are at war then you will probably need some culture/happiness to prevent them from starving even with mt rushmore +jails as you will have some war weariness. i have had something like +14 war whatis if good for and was still able to keep all the suckers at work.

I'm a little confused now... if you have such high war weariness, why bother trying to get these cities to culture flip? Just take them militarily then.

I understood your initial post as saying you wanted to take these cities without incurring any diplomatic penalty (like war), hence the attempt at culture-flipping.

The point I was making is that if you want to take them culturally, it's far better in my experience and analysis to just rush buy buildings in the neighboring cities rather than adjusting the culture slider (as that is not targetted and effectively "lowers" the money and research the entire empire is generating).

If you need to increase the culture slider because you're at war and your people are unhappy, then just take over the cities you want, then sue for peace.

[Nacht]

They might be cities of another civ than the one he is at war with...

[PaganPaulwhisky]

I don't see why anyone would expend so much energy to take a couple of crappy AI cities. Culturally absorbing weak AI cities is pretty pointless in my opinion. If I want the city that bad I will just take it in one turn with a war rather than spending tons and tons of resources to build massive culture in border cities where it is not needed. Of course, if you have a weak military than this is a problem. I would just culture bomb next to it in that case.

[raguas]

Originally posted by Nacht
They might be cities of another civ than the one he is at war with...

In which case, I believe the empire would best be served by maximizing money and research rather than culture (via sider), and that it should be churning out units and deploying them effectively rather than worying about culture flipping fringe cities of a neutral AI.

[unamablebuiler]

i needed the happines anyways so there wasn't any extra culture perse being spent.

it is the friends i have that semm to want to put cities right where i am planning on expanding into i would reall noy want a war with them. fighting 2 front wars is awful and you will probably loose anyways. i have never had a 1 turn war i have ussually needed to reckon their army, their cities that it is impossible to wage war for only one turn then they bring allies so you can easily endup being dogpiled.

though my military isn't the biggest it is the most modern being mostly tanks, infantry, bombers, marines, 10 tanks versus 30 cavarly = 30 less cavarly. i have found the ai keeps all of its obsolete units so altough my mill is smaller it will keep them out and even capture a few cities in the top example i was fighting the japanese in the lower i was fighting the spanish, the greeks and from time to time the chinese.

i have noticed that the ai likes to pump thier border cities full of units and i have other means of generating research ie specalists those size 1 cities had only 1 source of culture in the top screen shot and it was the cultral slider that citiy was captured about 20 turns later then the chinese one. Also fhose foot holds allow them to land troops unmolested and then invade so instead of facing half dead toops you are facing fullstrength ones.

research ussually isn't a problem keeping the other civs at bay is.

also if you are incvading and capturing cities the culture slider really help in ramping up their cities and building units over there

[enderw]

You build a theater first and plop down a few artists. This is also effective when conquering a section of AI territory and trying to get the newly conquered cities radii to fill out the former Ai territory. It also converts citizens to your nationality faster. Don't forget if running mercantilism or Stat of Lib to make the free specialist an artist.

Sometimes I will do this if there is say, iron just over my boarder. Go on a serious culture offensive to get the iron square then fortify the square and go to war when you have iron and he doesn't instead ofi the other way around.