Culture-wartime : My need to vent

[Ralf]

If you have a stronger culture then the conquered Civ, and they belongs to the same type of culture as you, it comes a whole lot easier. Not easy, but manageable. If you DONT have enough culture, and on top of that; hes belonging to a different culture-type - then their is only one method to deal effectively with this problem, if you still want to keep the city intact:

1: First of all: convert as many troubled citizens as possible to entertainers - regardless if it mean massive starvation by 1 pop starved/moved out per turn. In a huge city with stronger culture, you MUST reduce the population as fast as possible, no matter what.

2: As soon as the city starts producing shields again; build workers and/or settlers, in order to relocate a few more pops to your own founded cities (there they will be a minority), or to colonies (no happiness-problems), or just to general terrain-improvement work all over your empire. Just get these trouble-makers out of their original cities.

3: Once the pop-figures have been reduced to manageable figures, you can quickly boost the population again by letting your own founded cities build settlers, in order to merge them with these conquered cities. Pop-relocation is the key to success.

In order to smooth out above process even further, it can help if your Gov-type is communism and/or you allocate more money to luxurys in the domestic advisor-screen.

[smellymummy]

Originally posted by Sevorak
I don't recall the details, but there was some post Soren made, and it dealt with a concept involving capturing cities, and I made a note of it...something about 3 units being the max effect to do (something) when capturing a city and preventing it from defecting back. I was pretty sure it was just "suppress population", but I could be wrong. I'll go hunt for the post.
-Sev

You can see the exact quote in the "apolyton reviews", a personal review done by the mod markosg. it's split in 5 days (each review really short so no lenghty reading unlike the entire soren chat transcript) - anyway according to soren it was "a rule of thumb is one unit per citizen"

something like that.

[docken]

I agree that currently culture is a little too powerful when conquering. Often there is no point in keeping the cities you conquer because you know they are basically going to fall straight back into the enemies hands- and take your precious units/armies with it.

Quite simply, population supression should be more effective- I don't buy that "outnumber population" provision, as I have seen countless cities go down the drain, even when I outnumbered the city pop by double and even triple on occasion. I admit that the AI had a marginally higher culture rating, but I still felt cheated, and I think that runs against the spirit of the game- no one should feel that way at any time during a game- that argument alone is enough to dispel any debate to the contrary. It is bad enough that the AI gets production (and other) bonuses, but I think this culture "shock tactic" goes too far.

They should do two things, first tweak the culture rating of the AI when dealing with newly captured cities, and secondly (and perhaps more importantly) give us some indication- ANY indication- that the city is in danger of falling, and perhaps show us how effective our military units are when in the city.

[jgflg]

Originally posted by smellymummy
yes maybe not realisticly, but it's a game. They obviously did this because in past civ like games conquering was too easy. In fact, it was the civ fan community that asked for conquest to be harder.

Back to realistic examples, I'm no history buff, but I'm certain populations have overthrown large forces.

The french revolution. the mob stormed the kings palace right? Where the 3 musketeers able to stop them, no way. Why? Because the overall pressure of the mob, and the pressure of the popular belief probably drove the morale of the defending troops down to nothing. Sure the defenders were probably related to those in the mob, but hey it's an example.

This is just one example, and I do hope someone else can give us some more "realistic examples".

This example is one of internal revolt, not overthrowing an external force. I don't think the two are comparable. There's a big difference between supressing a conquered people and putting down your own countrymen. I think you'd be hard pressed to find many examples of civilians rising up unsupported and overthrowing the conquering hords. If they had been capable of that, the army wouldn't be there in the first place.

I don't disagree that it should be challenging to hold a conquered city, but it's really annoying, and completely unrealistic to lose a city uncontested one turn after you take it. I think a more viable sollution would have been for resisters to chip away at your military, maybe killing a certain amount of units every turn until the resistance ends or your army is destroyed completely.

[Wrong_shui]

Ive ranted about this before too.

Only thing I can do to stop it is to blitz the civ, kill it less than 3 turns so its got no one to revolt too.

Its easy when the civ is on an island but they build cities everywhere otherwise.

[Gromit]

Gromit, what do you mean by respawn?

It might part of the game or something as it only happens before 1000AD I'll try to explain.

I'll use Earth as an example.

I start at Rome, AI starts at Paris. We both do a little expanding and eventually they place a city in a place that really irritates me. I declare war, within four or five turns they are 'destroyed' . However, they are still on my diplomacy screen, I can still talk to them, and it turns out, (either by exploration or through contact with someone else) that within eight turns, not only are they in South East Asia, but they have TWO cities of at least pop 4, two or three spearmen in each one AND retain thier tech... this gets tedious as it damages your reputation for centuries. Is there a way to stop this? Does anyone else experience this? Am I losing my mind???

[Libertarian]

It usually means they have settlers out on the high seas somewhere.

[Wrong_shui]

They respawn, like they did in civ2 if he didnt choose dont restart eliminated players.

Happens to you too.

[Moraelin]

1) Yep, they respawn all right. Look at the replay at the end of the game. When I destroy the last city of the Romans... mysteriously enough one Roman city appears on a far away island, in the exact same turn.

2) I do find the whole culture and deffection thing a bit strange, too, even though so far it's worked in my favour mostly. (I'm one of those who rush-buy cathedrals and universities on the borders, so the AI's cities will deffect to my side.) And it's not just a matter of realism, it's that even in game terms, there should have been a fight if a dozen military units disappeared.

[Venger]

Are you sure there was no settler on a ship? I've seen the AI do this. Unless the entire planet is used up, they will send settlers to sea and found a new city if you take their last one...

Venger

[Sevorak]

Easy way to find out if it's a respawn.

Save. Kill them, note the location of the new city. Reload, and don't kill them, and see if a city gets founded there. If it does, they had a settler. If it doesn't, it was a respawn.

-Sev

[Auren]

Killed civs do respawn early in game.

They seem to get new city, 100 gold and worker after they get destroyed.

What I do is of course ask peace agreement giving me all their tech, worker, 100 gold and 2-3 gold/turn. They always agree.

[Libertarian]

Originally posted by Venger
Are you sure there was no settler on a ship? I've seen the AI do this. Unless the entire planet is used up, they will send settlers to sea and found a new city if you take their last one...

Venger

Who are you, sir? And what have you done with our Venger?

[Sze]

I find this aspect of the game extremely frustrating as well. An easy fix would be to disallow cultural revolts from one civ to another if the two are at war. 'Culture war' can only take place between civs at peace. Attribute it to the fact that a city's population will never be admirers of the culture of a nation they're at war with; usually just the opposite occurs.

[Cyrai]

I've only really had this problem once, but I've only been in one super-major war where I was not completely dominating in culture. It made the war COMPLETELY unwinnable without razing every single city I captured.

I was Russia at war with the Zulus. I was on a different island than theirs, and they had a definite culture advantage. The Zulus were at war on a different front than I was going to invade on. My only hope was that their forces wouldn't be in position to stop me until I had conquered a little bit.
I landed 2-3 waves, many years apart, with 30-40 cossacks each. I captured about 4 cities, and then most of my army was stationed roughly evenly in the cities. That would leave about 8-10 Cossacks in any city.

Unfortunately, this never happened. After the cities were starved down to less than 4 people, they always revolted, and ALL of my units joined their side. Needless to say, my hope of capturing cities while their army was away was demolished, as a "new" army of 8 Cossacks suddenly appeared right next to me. Those Cossacks, along with a few stragglers of their REAL army, wounded my cities until another revolted.

By that time, half of my invading army had joined their side. They quickly kicked me off their island, and every other attack on them was repulsed by my armies. It made the war completely unwinnable, and I foreswore all wars in that game. After that, I never let my culture sink AT ALL. Stupid culture revolutions!