How can you decide where your next culture expansion will go?

[MxM]

The culture seems to go where it wants, which is mainly resources in the area around your city. I can understand how that is frustrating for us who are used to micromanaging our city screen. If we want to have optimal growth then we have to pay the gold at to expense of other gold using strategies

We were never given ANY kind of control on cultural expansion of the city. At least now you could buy the titles.

[yin26]

Buying hexes should be primarily for increasing the RATE of acquiring tiles. That's profoundly powerful and more than a good enough use of gold.

Cultural expansion before didn't pop tile by tile, correct? In any event, if we agree that the AI "mostly" gets it right anyway, then not just handing the decision over to the player (if he wants it) gains you nothing while removing an "interesting decision" from the player's control.

Frankly this doesn't bother me all that much, but I do think it was the wrong decision decision. Whenever possible, leave decisions in the player's hands but also have good AI options for people who don't want to be bothered.

[Krill]

The AI doesn't "mostly" get it right though. It always picks second ring tiles before third ring. And when the only food resource you get is in the third ring, you are forced to buy the tiles out to it because culture will never get their in time. IS this a problem with the culture mechanics or the start generator? Well, as the only fix is to force the game to place a food within 2 tiles of the start, which you can't always see because of FoW, you are effectively forcing a player to always settle in place, and settle blindly.

Buying tiles should be a choice, not a necessity, and currently it is a necessity a lot of the time...unless you can spend the gold on getting friends with maritime CS which give you more food (broken amounts of food from the ether at that). So in fact, there are two mechanics that are screwing with this problem. The idea of using gold for so many purposes is a good one, but those uses are not balanced against one another. And granaries/watermills are not as good as buying food from the maritime CS either...

OTOH, balance isn't the point in C5. Making money is.

Simple fix? Meh, I'll let the testers do their job

[Snotty]

Im sure Ive had my culture beeline to the third ring to get horses or cows.

[Krill]

Not what others are saying...and not what I've seen when I've had food in the third ring, and basic tiles between that and first ring culture. Specifically, I've also seen culture grab desert tiles before going for a unique happy resource in marble that was in the third ring.

[pdxsean]

Im sure Ive had my culture beeline to the third ring to get horses or cows.

+1 - This happens all the time with me. As in, every time there is a good unique resource, AI makes a solid effort to expand times to grab it. Maybe not the first two tiles it expands, but generally within 4 tiles.