Nationality and Culture

[Garth Vader]

Is there a way you can speed up the conversion of a city to your nationality?

I seem to be losing tiles to another Civ's culture even though my border cities have more culture than theirs. But it seems to be because mine are conquered cities of theirs and they are still only 30-40% my nationality.

I tried whipping with the hope that new populations would be more mine, but that doesn't seem to have done anything. Is there anything else (aside from conquering their remaining cities)?

[Jaybe]

If you plop a settler onto the site of a razed city, it will be of the razed city's culture.

What I normally do is follow the city governors lead and utilize artist specialists and build culture buildings (or increase culture rate).

[sjm]

Increase your cultural output - simple as that.
The culture accumulated by a city is not lost until that civ is eliminated. You can see this if you zoom out and enable the culture overlay.

So, in order to surpass 50%, you need to have produced more culture on the city tile than anyone else. Note that overlapping cultural boundaries from multiple cities are cumulative. So you can also boost your nationals by pumping out culture in nearby cities whose borders overlap the city you are worried about.

Basically, the nationals in a city are nothing more than a representation of the cultural value of the city tile by civ. So if you have 1,000 culture on the city tile, Elizabeth has 1,000 and Monty has 2,000, the city will be:
25% your nationality
25% English
50% Aztec

make sense?

So speeding the conversion up means:
Raising the culture slider
Building culture producing buildings
Being creative (not much you can do about that mid-game of course)

So if you are going to pop rush, rush theatres etc. that give you a good cultural return on your investment.

It's not like in Civ 3 where each new citizen born in a city automatically has your civs nationality!

[Garth Vader]

Ok, I got it. I am having problems with Mecca because it produced a lot of Culture for the Arabs before I took it, that's why it hasn't switched as fast as the other cities I took.

Thanks!

[Quillan]

Each square accumulates culture each turn it is within the area of influence of a civilization. The borders are determined by which civilization has the greatest culture in each square, but the square has to be within the current area of influence of a city of that civilization to fall within its borders. The squares adjacent to a city have the greatest accumulation. One square away collects culture more slowly, and each square farther out it reduces more. It is quite possible to take a city away from a civ, hold the city for an extended period of time, have the original owner plop down a new city nearby and suddenly lose great amounts of territory, simply because those squares still have greater culture of their civ than of your own.

The only way I know to tell for certain is to use a cheat. Once you've activated cheats, holding your mouse pointer above a square on the map and holding down a shift key will pop up a lot of text on the left side of the screen. In all that text it shows the accumulated culture of the square.

[Garth Vader]

How do you activate cheats?

(this will cause me trouble, I already look at the world builder too often during a game!)

[Quillan]

I'm at work, and running from memory here, so I can't say for certain. There's a line in one of the .ini files, you change it to read something like

cheatcode=chipotle

or some such, but I can't recall precisely which file or the exact wording of the line. I'm certain about the chipotle part; I have no idea where that came from.

[kiky]

the cheatcode is in CivilizationIV.ini, in your Civ folder.

[couerdelion]

There is another simple solution

1) If your city is suffering cultural pressure on the tiles that it works (or even is at risk of revolt) then capture those rival cities that are still exerting cultural pressure on it

2) If the citizens are really unhappy about their Mother Country then destroy their mother country.

When it comes to cultural wars in former cities of rivals, the best way of combat them is not to fight back with culture but with steel

[Six Thousand Year Old Man]

Burn down cities that look like they'll be culturally untenable. I'll sometimes create a cordon of razed cities between the ones I keep and the remaining unconquered AI cities.

[Quillan]

I do the same thing, however it always happens that at some point within 10-30 turns the original owner plops down a new city in the gap between my lands and his, and very quickly steals away a swath of territory. It's not too hard in the early game to maintain borders against an enemy culture when taking cities from them, it's a bit difficult in the mid game and very hard in the end game. In the late game, I'm thinking it may be better to instead take a band of cities around the one you wish to keep and then gift them to another AI. Eventually the city is likely to revolt back to the original owner, but it will probably take longer.

[Garth Vader]

This is probably a stupid question, but how do you enter the cheatcode?

[Quillan]

You edit the .ini file in question. It's someplace under your My Documents folder, and there are separate ones for Civ IV and Warlords. In it, you find a pair of lines that read roughly this (again, this is from memory but I looked at it last night):

;Move Along
cheatcode = 0

Simply change the 0 to "chipotle" without the quotations, save the file and close it, then start the game.

[Nacht]

Or you just go to Game Details and check 'Allow debug tools'.

[Garth Vader]

Oh, Ok. Thanks again!