Ghandi is a backstabbin' *****!

[Anath]

Peaceful my ass !

But by the time I realised he was too powerful to conquer.

What happened was, I was attacking Persia and their def pact kicked in. So I fended of his ally, the english, untill I had evened Persia to the ground. I then turned my attention to the english - marched in and kicked their ass. Only problem was that Gandhi was so cultural that once I had capped the cities it took a maximum of 5 turns before he had taken no less than three cities from me. I was furious but what could I do, my military had just chewed through two civs and was weak.


Later that game.. For undisclosed reason I had an urge to wipe the Incan out of the game so I unloaded some nukes and sent a few airplanes their way and then just walked right in and capped their cities. This time I thought, lets hold on to them. So I placed alot of military units in the cities and tried to upper my cultural income. My attempts were futile and Gandhi took another two cities from me. At this point I was considering to make Gandhi pay for it, but the third Civ on top and also the strongest one in military power had a def pact with Gandhi. So, I couldn't engage a war with the two biggest civs alone. And unfortunatly, I had wiped out alot of civs and the rest never liked me anyway.

I did eventually win the game by time victory (my second game ever won, yay!) but I guess my question is; how do I make sure my cities aren't swiped away from cultural influence?

Cheers!


PS. Gandhi also took two cities from me in another way, I had pounded the guys inside but just not enough for a 1-turn victory and he just swooped in and grabbed them. Damn Gandhi..Damn him ti whatever hell he believes in!


EDIT: Wasn't aware that pr'i'ck was a swearword.

EDIT 2: Think I fixed the Gandhi spelling issue :P

[Blake]

Gandhi must have had a lot of repressed anger about his name being spelt wrong.

[Anath]

lol!

Sorry about that xD. Gonna edit it right away

[Diadem]

You can't do much about cities flipping culturally. You can't even blame Gandhi for it, it's a game mechanic, he can't even stop it if he wanted to

Only solution is to get more culture in those cities, and get it fast. Culture-bombing can be useful. Personally I almost always start with a theatre as my first build in newly captured cities, sometimes rushbuying it. That's usually enough to save your city, unless there's a very strong culture very close by.

Imho there should be a method to 'capture' culture military. It should be possible to put a military unit on a tile of a civ you are at war with, and give him the order to 'repress hostile culture'. That tile then becomes yours, as long as the military unit is there - and 5% of the hostile culture dies each turn. Something like that. Perhaps to make it unexploitable it should only be allowed to be done on tiles where you already have some cultural influence, and that border tiles that are already yours (but you can chain them).

[Snotty]

check how your culture compares to Gandhis with the f9 screen. As culture accumulates throughout the game you will probably have to had concentrated on your culture a long time ago to keep up with him into the modern age.

Im not sure about building culture in your new cities, I assumed this would only give them more culture radius that would contest with Gandhis and so increase the chances of a flip, but Im probably wrong there. Theres a great guide to the nuts and bolts of culture in the strategy forum somewhere

[trumbo]

A theater? I always start with putting all hammers into culture... it a good sized city that will propduce tons more culture than a piddly arsed little old theater. I can usually get a conquerer city to 100 culture in just a few turns once the revolution is over.

[Blake]

Originally posted by trumbo
A theater? I always start with putting all hammers into culture... it a good sized city that will propduce tons more culture than a piddly arsed little old theater. I can usually get a conquerer city to 100 culture in just a few turns once the revolution is over.

Indeed build culture is extremely powerful, the borders will usually insta-pop on the turn the city comes out of revolt. Just a pity you need to get music for build culture.

[Diadem]

Well I build culture if the city is in danger of insta-flipping. Otherwise (rush)-building a theatre and then building culture makes more sense

[Blake]

Not really... it's worth whipping something if the city is unhappy or workers are on crap, but otherwise the insta-culture tends to beat culture per turn, at least to claim a decent number of tiles for workage. Once the tiles are claimed, then you want to set up some culture/pt to maintain it.

[trev]

Raze more cities is the only solution

[Diadem]

Well obviously you whip, don't you? Theatres are very cheap to whip. And cities that are in danger of flipping are almost always starving as well - and they usually have major happiness problems due to 'we long to join our motherland'. So whipping something is always a good idea in newly captured cities.

[Blake]

With warlords (only) it always makes sense to spend the first or second turn out of revolt on build culture - unless the 2nd ring contains no useful tiles. Unless you are some combination of Caste/Sistines/Merchantalism.

Furthermore it's worth putting more turns into build culture if doing so will push back enroaching culture in a reasonable time frame - if it's going to take more than about 20 turns then a Theatre will obviously end up pushing the culture back faster. But in general it's best to use build culture to get the borders where you want them, then get culture improvements to hold them in place, it's a lot quicker than relying on the trickle of culture to push the borders back in the first place.

This isn't applicable to CIVanilla 1.61, there the build culture is a lot weaker. In Warlords a captured city with a forge can easily put out 20cpt which is a freaking huge amount of culture. In 1.61 it'd only be producing 8cpt which is piddly (only twice as much as a theatre).

[Diadem]

ehm, why is build culture a lot stronger in warlords then? Did I miss a change?

[Blake]

It's doubled in base strength (1:1 instead of 1:0.5) and benefits from production multipliers in place of cultural multipliers. It's slightly weaker for purposes of cultural victory but is much stronger in young cities.

[SirIlya]

Originally posted by Diadem
You can't do much about cities flipping culturally. You can't even blame Gandhi for it, it's a game mechanic, he can't even stop it if he wanted to

You can garrison the city to prevent flipping.

Inside the city view you will see a "Chance of Revolt" %. Keep putting troops in until this goes away. Rush some culture buildings and eventually this will go down and you can take some troops out. If the cultural pressure is very high or the city is very newly captured this garrison can be really big.

Obviously this is expensive to do in alot of cities (so raze weak border cities that are not longterm viable or strategic) but if it is a city with a direct border on an enemy AI you probably have to garrison it some anyway.