Spies and 'buying' cities

[kailhun]

I'm having a little trouble in getting this to work effectively.
My problem is that almost every time I use propaganda the city fails to defect.
The situation is as follows: Chieftain level, high culture (60-70.000), best military (infantry, artilley, cavalry, destroyers vs. pikemen, horsemen, impi, hoplites), lotsa cash, a lot of We love the etc. days.
The cities I try to buy are close to my borders, hemmed in by my cultural borders (squeezed in some cases), yet they won't come over.
What factors affect defection?
- type of government?
- size of city?
- distance to capital/forbidden palace?
- development of land around city?
- cultural borders of city?
- improvements in city?
- units stationed in city?
- roads/railroads?
- If propaganda fails, does it affect another attempt in the next turn? More/less likely.
- relations between empires: will a city defect quicker if relations are better/worse?

I'm having a little trouble getting the way this concept works in civ III.

help.

Robert

[sachmo71]

Well, the manual says that cities in disorder are much more likely to revolt than happy ones. Best advice would be to just let you culture take them over naturally. Since you have them hemmed in, it should just be a matter of time.

[Zealot]

Originally posted by sachmo71
Best advice would be to just let you culture take them over naturally.

Uau, what a great advice! Why not ask Firaxis to remove the propaganda option then?

You know, sometimes cities don't defect so easily. In my game today I had a size 3-4 Roman city surrounded by my culture 2 tiles in every direction, and it took over 30 turns to defect to me! And was completely surrounded!

kailhun, I'm with you on this one. I want to know that too. But I'm suspicious that propaganda is broken too.

[Nemo]

well, it depends on the government of them and you. each govt as different percent of defecting. also i noticed that the size of the city has a major factor. if you really want a city you have to propagandize the city each turn for many turns (i've done it for about 6 turns in a row or so, i was democracy, they were monarchy, the city was size 3 or 4, so it costed me like 300-400 per turn). sometimes, each turn teh price of propaganda goes up, but eventually they crack...the bigger the city the longer it takes. it also has to do with your culture % compared to their culture %

i have since upgraded the "in awe of" percent chance of converting by 15%, but have not tested it out yet.

[kailhun]

Originally posted by Nemo
well, it depends on the government of them and you. each govt as different percent of defecting. also i noticed that the size of the city has a major factor. if you really want a city you have to propagandize the city each turn for many turns (i've done it for about 6 turns in a row or so, i was democracy, they were monarchy, the city was size 3 or 4, so it costed me like 300-400 per turn). sometimes, each turn teh price of propaganda goes up, but eventually they crack...the bigger the city the longer it takes. it also has to do with your culture % compared to their culture %

i have since upgraded the "in awe of" percent chance of converting by 15%, but have not tested it out yet.

So, you can have a campaign of propaganda? Trying every turn increases your chances? I can find hardly anything about propaganda in the manual/civilopedia. As I said, I'm trying to find out how this works. How it was programmed into the game. So far it just seems a random chance with the higher price meaning a lesser chance.

Robert

[sachmo71]

Originally posted by Zealot


Uau, what a great advice! Why not ask Firaxis to remove the propaganda option then?

You know, sometimes cities don't defect so easily. In my game today I had a size 3-4 Roman city surrounded by my culture 2 tiles in every direction, and it took over 30 turns to defect to me! And was completely surrounded!

kailhun, I'm with you on this one. I want to know that too. But I'm suspicious that propaganda is broken too.

Of course I know that cities don't defect easily...in fact it takes a long time. Since as you yourself said, it seems like propaganda is broken, the advice was given to try and save the guy some money and frusteration. Why should he have to go thru what others have already experienced?

[Nemo]

Originally posted by kailhun


So, you can have a campaign of propaganda? Trying every turn increases your chances? I can find hardly anything about propaganda in the manual/civilopedia. As I said, I'm trying to find out how this works. How it was programmed into the game. So far it just seems a random chance with the higher price meaning a lesser chance.

Robert

in my experience, yes, but i only had enough money to do this on 3 occasions...but they all worked

also, to get a better understanding look (you dont have to change anything, just look ) in the editor under 'culture' and 'government' ...there are popaganda modifiers there that will help you determine your percentage of success/failure under different circumstances