Failure to whack culture

[OFogy]

Folks, I was finishing a Noble game as Darius, waiting for my fully equipped spaceship to land on Alpha Centauri.
Had pots of gold and noticed that the Maya were the only other civ with legendary cities.
So, decided to go for a cultural victory by destroying all the culture producing buildings in his legendary cities.
I did wipe out almost all of them before my spaceship landed, but his culture numbers didn't budge.

Why might this be?

OFogy

[tsubame]

culture is cumulative- you can't subtract culture from a city- just slow the rate of growth. Your other alternative is to capture/raze the city

[Cyrus The Mike]

Wouldn't you have gotten to Alpha Centauri before they won from culture?

[OFogy]

Thanks Tsubame.
Cyrus the Mike: Sure, I was just whiling away the time

OFogy

[Nugog]

Of course if you raze their cities - the culture disappears......

[Jaybe]

Originally posted by Nugog
Of course if you raze their cities - the culture disappears......

That is quite misleading. If you raze a city and plop your own settler there, it will still have the culture of the razed city. Overcoming the old culture could take quite some time, depending on how long the city had been there.

The culture's HEART may be the city, but the culture is imbued in the surrounding landscape.

[joncnunn]

Raze the next towns over before founding your replacement.
As long as none of the enemy culture is coming from a current existing town you should be able to work the tiles pretty quickly.

Originally posted by Jaybe

That is quite misleading. If you raze a city and plop your own settler there, it will still have the culture of the razed city. Overcoming the old culture could take quite some time, depending on how long the city had been there.

The culture's HEART may be the city, but the culture is imbued in the surrounding landscape.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Jaybe

That is quite misleading. If you raze a city and plop your own settler there, it will still have the culture of the razed city. Overcoming the old culture could take quite some time, depending on how long the city had been there.

The culture's HEART may be the city, but the culture is imbued in the surrounding landscape.

For the purpose of CV, it disappears.

[Nugog]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker
For the purpose of CV, it disappears.

[Tattila the Hun]

You know what I find annoying? If I take a city, then give it back in peace negotiations, or just from the goodnes of my heart, it gets back all the culture it had, when I captured it. No matter how long I've kept it, it seems. Had a city surrounded by culture of a vassal of my friend, so I figure I give it back, because it's useless to me. Ended up having two more cities surrounded...

[Quillan]

The way I've found it to work is this: every square around a city that is within the cultural borders accumulates culture points every turn, the amount depending on the cultural output of the city and the distance from the city. No matter who currently owns the square, if it's within the range of influence of a city it accumulates that civs culture, and it will never lose those culture points until that civilization doesn't exist anymore.

If you capture a city and raze all the others around it, you'll have some time to grown in peace. However, if the civ whose cities you razed comes and plops down a new city, everything that is within his new cultural borders still counts all his old culture points, and those squares will go right back to him. I've taken to -instead of razing those cities - giving them to another friendly civ to act as a buffer between me and my enemy. The buffer gets to deal with border encroachment while he and I are starting with a clean slate, culturally speaking.