Culture Flipping: Solutions Only

[Harlan]

Howabout these ideas.

1. Guerillas generated in the flipping process are barbarians, unless the flipper civ is actively at war with the flippees, in which case they are of the flipper civ.

2. In any case, a general rule should be that Guerillas in the same square as non-Guerilla units lose their hidden nationality status. If a Guerilla is in such a situation and tries pillaging, it wouldn't be a hidden act. This should work equally for Privateers and any other unit with this flag.

3. Once such a unit is "outed", it stays outed (so a unit couldn't attack and then run for protection by the end of the turn). Its cover has been blown.

Either that, or Blackclove's solution, with the caveat that hidden nationality units obviously don't have that status while in a city.

[Harlan]

Blackclove's solution is probably simpler and easier to code.

By the way, does anyone know Firaxian Jeff's email, so I can point this thread out to him?

[Cyclotron]

Originally posted by Harlan
Howabout these ideas.
2. In any case, a general rule should be that Guerillas in the same square as non-Guerilla units lose their hidden nationality status. If a Guerilla is in such a situation and tries pillaging, it wouldn't be a hidden act. This should work equally for Privateers and any other unit with this flag.

That's a pretty good idea, and it will fix the privateer exploit. Perhaps with this modification we will be able to keep colorless guerillas controlled by the flipper instead of barbarians.

[Willem]

Re: Culture Flipping: Solutions Only

Originally posted by Harlan

Here my ideas. First off, don't have culture flipping come out of the blue. Right now, its all or nothing. How much cooler culture as a feature would be if INDIVIDUAL citizens in your city flipped!

Let's say you're Persian and have a city next to the Bablyonians - slowly more and more of your citizens are becoming Bablyonian. If you take steps to boost the culture of that city and your civ generally, some Bablyonian citizens become Persian instead. Even in neighboring Bablyonian cities, there are citizens in them that become Persian.

That doesn't make any sense at all. Here in Canada we have a culture that is very much the same as that of the US. But we're all still Canadian, none of us are hanging the stars and stripes on our front lawns. There's no basis for what you're suggesting at any time in history. Immigration certainly, which is represented by having captured Workers join a city, but not someone converting to a different nationality just off hand.

[Willem]

Originally posted by Harlan
Blackclove's solution is probably simpler and easier to code.

By the way, does anyone know Firaxian Jeff's email, so I can point this thread out to him?

I wouldn't worry about it, I'm sure he does read the boards.

[heidlejohn]

My culture flipping proposal is:

1) Increased unhappiness in the affected city including a pop up window saying that those citizens admire another culture a lot.

2) After N turns, more unhappiness with another pop up window. This will usually result in population loss when entertainers are created to keep the population happy.

3) After N turns, one citizen leaves the city and becomes a new unit - a colonist - and appears next to the closest culturally better city. That colonist can either join that or another city or start a colony, BUT it can not be a slave worker. This would be something along the lines of immigrants leaving to go to the 'new world' and create a better life for themselves in a different country.

4) N turns can be affected by existing cultural improvements, population size, etc. I do not know enough about culture flipping to guestimate a formula.

5) The process could be continued endlessly until the last colonist leaves the city and turns off the lights. The city would cease to exist.

6) The garrison in conquered cities would be a different calculation along the lines of enemy rebellion in Europa Universalis. After that wears off, the colonists leaving takes effect.

[wrylachlan]

Originally posted by Harlan
Howabout these ideas.

3. Once such a unit is "outed", it stays outed (so a unit couldn't attack and then run for protection by the end of the turn). Its cover has been blown.

This should be the way all hidden nationality works. There should be certain things you can do which will "out" you, like pillaging while stacked with out units. And maybe a small chance every time you attack that your nationality will be figured out, a chance which goes down with Espionage (or something new). Then if you are "outed" you must get out of all foreign units line of sight for a full turn after which point you regain the "hidden nationality". That way your guerrillas who get found out in enemy territory can return home, reapply the camo and sneak back across the border.

[Willem]

Originally posted by heidlejohn

3) After N turns, one citizen leaves the city and becomes a new unit - a colonist - and appears next to the closest culturally better city. That colonist can either join that or another city or start a colony, BUT it can not be a slave worker. This would be something along the lines of immigrants leaving to go to the 'new world' and create a better life for themselves in a different country.

That would be a much better way to do it. And in the city itself, you get more and more people becoming Resistors until they reach a point that they stage a revolt.

[dr. blackclove]

Good ideas, all.

Harlan is right that a colorless unit in a city must at least temporarily hold the color of the city -- otherwise, you could attack a neighbor's cities that are garrisoned only with guerillas WITHOUT STARTING A WAR. That would not be good!

If you have to give it "color" for that turn, why not create other situations when your hidden nationality status disappears? Wrylachlan has some good suggestions along those lines.

Aiming again for a simple system, an alternative to the "no stacking colored and uncolored except in cities" would be something like the following. Whenever a "colorless" unit is stacked with a "colored" unit, (whether in a city or not) it takes on the color of that stack. To regain its colorlessness, it must move to a location that is not in visual range of any other civ's units. It cannot "go colorless" if it's in a city or stacked with your own units.

Another feature of this system would be that you'd probably want to keep some of your own "colored" units handy for your guerillas to escape under after they do some nefarious things

[Kryten]

Good ideas dr. blackclove, but how would I, the player, know which of my guerrillas has been 'revealed'? Would the unit have a different colour, a different shape, or some sort of icon next to the unit? It's all becoming a little bit complicated. I think that the "guerrilla bodyguard" problem would best be solved by the "guerrillas-on-top" solution that I posted earlier in this thread (....well, I would wouldn't I! ), i.e. hidden nationality units are always 'on top' of their stack and so are the first things to be attacked. After all, the simpler the suggestion the more chance we have of persuading Firaxis to make the change .

One more thing that everybody seems to have overlooked; I assume that we want these rebellious units to appear all they way through the game and not just in the Industrial or Modern Ages. If so, then there is another problem....what stats do you give them? Because at the moment, although units CAN change appearance depending which period they are in (such as workers and Armies looking different in various ages), there is NO way their attack/defence values can change. Stats of say 3-3-2 would be fine for the Ancient period, but would be useless in the later Ages. And 6-6-2 would be too devastating in the earlier periods.

Perhaps we need FOUR 'insurgent' type units, one for each Age (the following names/stats are for example only):-

Brigand (Ancient), 2-2-2
Rebellious Peasant (Medieval) 3-3-2
Guerrilla (Industrial) 5-5-2
Paramilitary (Modern) 6-6-2

Has anyone else had any thoughts on this?

[The diplomat]

I have never found culture flipping to be a problem for me. The only time I lost a city to flipping was when I caused to happen on purpose because I want to see what happened. If you take care of your culture, it is never a problem. In fact, culture flipping gives the player a new edge over the AI. The computer expands too fast. As a result, the AI usually loses cities to me through culture flipping.

In terms of alternate ways to implement culture flipping, I would suggest doing it through pop migration:

the comp would compare culture of 2 neighboring cities. If the difference between the 2 is too great, then there would be a certain probability that 1 pop would move from the lower culture city to the higher one. In order to avoid the problem of teaching the comp how to move the pop unit from city to city (we don't want "refugee" units just aimlessly wandering the map, now do we?), I would have just have the comp imediately transfer the pop from the city to the other. One city would gain 1 pop, the other would lose 1. And the both civs would get a message telling them what has happened.

This should happen between any 2 cities, even 2 of the same civ. That way, you would have pop migration from culture inside your civ as well, as between 2 different civs. The reason would be that people yearn for cities with highest culture.

The advantage of implementing it with pop migration is that it would be slow. They would only lose 1 pop one turn, maybe 1 another pop 3 turns later. It would be gradual and more logical. The player would no longer lose an entire city all of a sudden which is the problem with current culture flipping.

[Coracle]

Actually, the Diplomat is correct. It does NOT happen very often. But when it does it screws up an entire game with its lack of realism and logic. Thank god for autosave; and if it flips to me I give it back. Problem solved.

[Kryten]

Originally posted by Coracle
Actually, the Diplomat is correct. It does NOT happen very often. But when it does it screws up an entire game with its lack of realism and logic. Thank god for autosave; and if it flips to me I give it back. Problem solved.

Ah, but this thread is all about IMPROVING flips within the game Coracle.

So where are your suggestions?.....

[The diplomat]

who thinks that pop migration, similar to what I suggested, would be a better way to implement culture flipping?

[dr. blackclove]

You may be right, Kryten. My thought had been that guerillas would change color when discovered, but now I see that my hidden nationality units are not colored white for me -- they are colored "my color".

OPTION A: You could probably handle it through color switching by leaving your own colorless units white most of the time and turning them your color when they're outed. However, then it becomes confusing even for you which units are yours and which are not. Personally I prefer...

OPTION B: A better way would be to add an animation for "being hidden" for each colorless unit, just as workers get special animations for digging and so on. Maybe have it ducked low or something. You can also write (hidden nationality) in parentheses after the name the way they write (building road) after workers. I don't think it would be THAT hard to implement, though obviously it takes more effort than some of the other suggestions here. Or, we could go with the Kryten idea because...

OPTION C: Putting them on the top of the stack may do it, too. The rule would need to change in your own cities, though, otherwise AI civs could attack your cities if they house guerillas without starting wars.

Finally, I agree that we need different units for different eras. I don't have a proposal for that yet though Yours looks OK, though paramilitaries look like they won't last long against most modern army units, while the ancient and medieval units look pretty tough.