The culture of neighbours

[vegardhv]

Me and a friend are playing a hotseat scenario (world map) game on level emperor. The french is (or was) quite a threat against me on a cultural level, because they had built a forbidden palace inside one of their cities inside the border of my empire (just north of the black sea). When I lost one of my cities close to this "second" capital I started panicking, and therefore invaded them. After taking 6-7 cities including Paris (at its correct location) I decided to stop the killing and let them have 4-5 cities lying in Spain and 5-6 lying in the U.K. Of course I stopped the war just because of the war weariness that was destroying my empire, if it wasn't for that I would have continued and taken as much as possible.

How stupid that was of me, because just after conquering Paris I discovered there was no culture in the city, I was kind of prepared for that, but not prepared for the fact that the 4-5 wonders in Paris was not going to produce culture for me every turn. The result was I lost Paris 7-8 turns after I had taken it. I had managed to rush 3-4 cultural improvements in the city just to get it up producing culture, but lost the city anyway.

What kind of strategy would you guys (experts or the like) suggest for avoiding this kind of cultural threat? Is it possible to hold the city if I put 10-20 military units in it? or would I need to eliminate all french culture just to be on the safe side? It's a problem since all of the french cities have very much culture... So whenever I take a city which lies close to another french city I would need to continue the invasion until I don't have any neighbouring french cities with high culture, just to eliminate that threat.

I hope I'm not repeating something someone else have asked for before.

Vegard

[Solomwi]

Destroy the snivelling French.

Seriously, I've run into the same problem and the best remedy I've found for it is bankrupting myself with the luxury slider for a couple of turns if I can go ahead and wipe out the civ. If I can't get to them all in the next few turns, or whatever's feasible based on my treasury, etc., prioritize the cities you want to keep and garrison them strongly. Leave two or three units outside the others in case they flip. You don't want to re-open the war if you don't have to, but with units outside those cities, they can be retaken if they flip.

Another tactic is to raze every city without a wonder, and have settlers in your stack to repopulate with. This can get you a bunch of free workers, too (half the city size, IIRC), but has its obvious drawbacks. In your case, this would have freed up more troops to garrison Paris, since you'd only need a defense garrison in the other cities.

The tried and true method is to wipe out the civ, though.

[ChrisiusMaximus]

Starve the population down so there are no French citizens left by turning them all into entertainers. When you regrow the city the pop will be your nationality and far less likely to want to flip, but youll still need to rush some culture builds.

[Lord_Davinator]

ya starving is generally the best option... especially if they are outlying cities with no shield production... also stacking a lot of units works fine... I've never had a city flip while I've had an army in it... but then again it could still happen I guess

[bongo]

IIRC you need two units per citizen to prevent a CF so starving will work just fine while you prepare another war to wipe them out(which should be the final solution)

CF's are less likely to happen if your overall culture is stronger than your opponents. Too late to think of that in your current game but it's something to remember in your next game.

[Vince278]

Originally posted by ChrisiusMaximus
Starve the population down so there are no French citizens left by turning them all into entertainers. When you regrow the city the pop will be your nationality and far less likely to want to flip, but youll still need to rush some culture builds.

That works great for me too.

[vegardhv]

Is that a fact? 2 units per citizen? So if I have 24 units in a city of size 12 it can _never_ join the crazy french ?

That's nice to know, it's okay sometimes to negotiate a "cease fire" to get the empire up and running again, and then after some turns do a "blitzkrieg" to finish off the unwanted foreign cities.

If I can ask about something else in this post:

It says in the manual that if you build more than 32 cities (on a huge map I think) more corruption will be experienced. Will there only be increased corruption in city nr 33, 34, etc, or will all cities get increased corruption? I think I'm playing on a 180x180 map now, and this is slightly larger than a huge map (160x160), does this mean the amount of cities you can optimally have is above 32?

In the last civ (or the one before that, can't remember) I used to build cities everywhere just to exploit every square on every surface, but I don't know if that will pay off nowadays..

[GhengisFarb™]

You can also place units on the city radius tiles to help prevent culture flips and encourage them in your favor.

[Skeeve]

I don't think 2 units per citizen is enough to prevent culture flipping.

There was this long and complicated formula derived in an old thread which takes into account the distance from your captial vs. the distance from the enemy capital and also looks at the culture ratio of enemy civ/your civ plus a bunch of other variables.
Lastly, units are taken into consideration and under certain extremes it could take over 100 units to prevent a culture flip.

I'll look for that thread, but it's quite old by now.

- Skeeve

[bongo]

I remember that thread, I believe the formula were changed in the latest patch, making units more effective(but still weak) in preventing a flip.

The two strongest factor were number of city tiles(of the 21 workable squares) under foreign cultural influence and foreign citizens.

Other factors were, foreign culture in city compared to your culture. your total culture compared to the enemy.

[Last Conformist]

I'm not certain what patches it's true for, but here's the formula I've seen:

P=[(F+T)*Cc*H*(Cte/Cty) - G]/D

where:
P = probability that it will flip this turn
F = # foreignors, with resistors counting double
T = # working tiles under foreign control (out of the max of 21, no matter what the cultural boundaries are atm)
Cc = 2 if foreign civ has more local culture than you, 1 otherwise
H = .5 for WLTKD, 2 for disorder, 1 otherwise
Cte = Total culture of the foreign civ
Cty = Total culture of your civ
G = # garrison units
D = factor based on relative distance to capitals

Now reorganizing this gives the required garrison as:
G = (F+T)*Cc*H*(Cte/Cty)

That says, in effect, that for roughly equal total culture values, you need about two military units for each foreign national, two extra for each resister and two extra for each tile within the city radius under foreign control in order to completely eliminate the risk of a flip.

[Panag]

hi ,

only a couple things to prevent flipping , a courthouse , policestation , and lux , wheter it comes from the slider or not , .....

dont waste units on the prevention of flipping , only on a city is good , the rest should do what you pay the for , " fighting " , .....

have a nice day