Culture Flipping: Solutions Only

[Harlan]

Cyclotron7,
I think people are agreeing here invisible nation flagged Guerillas are best. Sounds fine to me.

I thought I'd already made this next point clear, but I'll repeat it again: think of flipping as a two step process. First, does the city want to flip or no. In the first step, military units don't matter, just culture and percent of foreign citizens. The second step is essentially a military check. If too much military, the resistance takes to the hills in a Guerilla uprising. If not large enough garrison, the city flips, and perhaps some of the units in the city are able to escape.

Dr. Blackclove and you both say basically the same thing in recent posts, so I guess we're just all agreeing here. Could this be happening at the Apolyton forums? Where are the flame wars?

As for workers rebelling in the field, I think that's a little too far. Nobody would ever use foreign workers... there would be no point. Besides, I don't know how slaves 1000s of miles from their country building railroads somwhere are going to come up with weapons...

First off, again, your complaint depends entirely on the frequency of such an event happening. It could be set extremely low, just like the chance of a meltdown in a Nuclear Plant in the game. It could also be limited to, I don't know the technical term here, but extremely pissed off foreign workers. You know how Workers carry the happiness of the citizen they were taken from. So, if the latter, again it would prevent you from making Workers in troublesome cities, not from using foreign Workers period, no matter how paranoid one would be of a rebellion.

As for slaves 1000s of miles away revolting - keep in mind there are always foreign powers who are looking for disaffected segments of the population. You would be at war with the Greeks, so the Greeks would probably be looking to fund rebellion in your country if there was a good opportunity.

But hey, I'm not wedded to that idea, I'm just throwing it out there as a possible extra twist.

[Harlan]

genocidal actions ought to greatly increase the probability of an attempted flip

Dr. Blackclove, I second the notion that this is a very good idea.

Another interesting Guerilla idea is, should they have the invisible flag? Another thing I haven't really messed around with, but I assume it means you can't see them unless you bump into them or have special units that can see them. Only problem is, I hear the invisible flag doesn't work too well now (for instance civs demand you to withdraw your troops when your only unit in their territory is a supposedly unseen Sub). So it seems like its only invisible to the human - I hope I'm wrong.

If it did work, would it make them too powerful?

while successful flips creates them INSIDE the city..."

I also agree that in the case of a successful flip, you don't need Guerillas per se. You presumably had units in that city before it flipped - where did they go? Why not have (at least some of) them live, but switch sides? Then you can get mad at your traitors and go after them!

Very realistic - in many cases soldiers just go work for whomever is paying them the most and do all kinds of treasonable things.

---

All this agreeing is too good to be true. I keep half-expecting someone to sweep in, take over the thread, and accuse everyone on the thread of being brownnosing racists or something .

Wouldn't it be cool if someone from Firaxis was not only reading this but actually joined in in a give and take of ideas? "Idea X sounds good, but you haven't convinced me on idea Y", that kind of thing.

[dexters]

Hello. Here are my ideas.

First things first. For the Regular Civ 3, a patch should be made available to fix the following

MUST FIX: Sudden "absorbtion" of your city into a rival Civilization with NO prior warning.

Solution: There could be a warning box, but I think you run into the problem of "HOW early does it warn you? people will complain about the system warning them too late, or too early, creating potential FALSE ALARMS"

My suggestion: Implement the pop-up warning system as a final warning 1 or 2 turns away before the city finally revolts and is thus abosorbed into a rival civilization. The second segment here is what has been suggested before. In the city screen, where you see your citizens, border cities of civilizations with weaker cultures will accumulate some citizens with the nationality of the other civ! In most cases, this should stop at 1 or 2 citizens, or even none, if your culture is sufficiently strong. However, for cities in danger, the citizens taking the nationality of the rival civ will increase, and once it reaches a certain proportion, say 50%, the chance of a "flip" rises dramatically, and players must now be on the look-out for this, rush culture buildings to head it off, or create entertainers and the like. This not only gives players sufficient warning, but rewards the players who actually manage their cities.

Also, as has been said. The garrisoned units should be returned to the player. either on a 1 to 1 rate or some fraction, where only a % of all garrisoned units will be returned.

[Cyclotron]

Kryten:

Colorless stacking does matter. Since guerillas are colorless, I can attack my enemy with them while still bing at peace. If I move a regular unit in, will my enemy be unable to attack my stacked guerillas because they would have to attack my unit first? It seems like it would be a pretty big exploit to force your enemy to be the agressor by protecting your own guerillas with regualr units.

I won't argue history, because all my points thus far have been about gameplay, and I think I'll stick to that.

As for the stats of guerillas, I would make them 6/6/2. Although alpine seems appropriate, the ability to retreat seems more important especially for guerillas. As for support, I could go either way.

Harlan:

Keep in mind that the chance of a flip is very low, but many people still view it as the worst part of the game. If something happens, people don't care about the frequesncy, because they are screwed in the present. We need to consider such game-altering things as worker rebellion without simply justifying it with low probability.

As for how the city actually rebels, assuming your system uses both percentages (to see if it rebels) and raw numbers (to see how it rebels), I'm fine with it.

I think that the conversion of units in a city if the revolt is "successful" is the best way to do it. Perhaps 50%, rounded down, of the units could escape to the nearest friendly city with the loss of a few hit points.

dexters:

I don't want a warning system. The buildup of foreign population is quite good enough for me. Armed revolts generally don't broadcast the fact that they are about to have an armed revolt.

Again, the garrisoned units will convert or be expelled in a successful rebellion, and will be unaffected in an unsuccessful one.

[Kryten]

To Cyclotron7:-

I just did a quick experiment. I gave Warriors the 'hidden nationality' ability gave both these and Spearmen a move of 2 (just to speed things up a bit), stacked a couple of these units together, then marched around looking for trouble. Everyone I met I was at peace with, and although Warriors on their own were attacked (but not always for some reason), if the Warrior was stacked with a Spearman nobody attacked the stack. This means that Guerrilla units WOULD be immune from attack if stacked with regular troops and you are at peace.
On the other hand, every time a mixed stack entered some elses territory I was told quite rightly to "get my troops out!"(meaning the Spearman). Move the Spearman, and they were happy with just Warriors on their soil, which they then attacked, and no war was started.

So I had two choices: either let the Warriors go off on their own and get killed, OR, tie them to the Spearmen when I enter someones territory and be called the aggressor for not leaving when they asked. This sounds good but there is a problem.

The exploit is this: because I gave both units a move of 2, I could use the Warrior to move and plunder, then quickly move a Spearman onto his position so that he couldn't be attacked. After two turns of this the Spearman was asked to leave "or else!".

The only solution I can think of is to give Guerrilla's 'hidden nationality' and a move of ONE, so they can move OR plunder, not both, and can only get away with a single turn of plunder before their bodyguard is asked to leave (a move of one does at least keep them near the region in which they were created and not zooming around the map).

Does anyone else have any ideas?

(Later Edit: I've been thinking....it gets worse. If you had a ROP, you could have Guerrillas and regular troops stacked together plundering their way right across an AI's empire.
Of course, you could always remove the 'pillage' ability from the Guerrillas.....but then what use are they? They could still capture workers, but is that enough?)

[Cyclotron]

Kryten, this is exactly the problem I feared in making colorless guerillas. It works alright without an ROP: The flipper's forces are supporting the insurrection, but evertually when the flipee confronts the flipper he has to make a choice: Withdraw his support, or declare war. That's fine.

A ceasefire would be more tricky. The system works (basically) with privateers because there are no improvements at sea and privateers can't bombard. I'm still debating in my head whether the ROP/guerilla thing is an exploit or not... it certainly is a different strategy.

I don't think that having 2 moves makes a difference: You can move the guerilla, folowed by your units, and pillage on the next turn. 2 moves just makes the pillaging faster.

[Kryten]

There is a possible solution to the 'Guerrilla Bodyguard' problem, but it would require a coding change. The idea is this:-

At the moment, when a wandering unit encounters another nation's stack, it 'seems' to go though the following procedure:

*Am I at war with that nation?
If the answer is NO, then carry on moving.
If the answer is YES, then attack the unit with the highest defence and advance if the tile is empty.

Would it be possible for Firaxis to change this to a two step proccess:

step 1) Is there a unit in the stack with 'hidden nationality'?
If the answer is NO, then go to step 2.
If the answer is YES, then attack that unit and advance if the tile is empty.
step 2) Am I at war with that nation?
If the answer is NO, then carry on moving.
If the answer is YES, then attack the unit with the highest defence and advance if the tile is empty.

I call this the 'Guerrillas On Top Solution'; it's as if the guerrilla unit was at the top of the stack and so is always the first thing to be attacked, or think of the guerrilla unit as standing IN FRONT of the regular troops.

Any thoughts?

[wrylachlan]

Originally posted by Harlan
Cyclotron7,
I think people are agreeing here invisible nation flagged Guerillas are best. Sounds fine to me.

I think you'll have a problem with this and MP. Will culture-flipping not exist between allies? If so, no problem, but if you want culture flipping between allies, then this system won't work, the human player will simply not attack with the guerilla's.

An alternative is to make them barbarians and once the city is taken, all the barbarians involved switch to the "flipper's" civ.

I'm not saying I'm for or against flipping between allies, I'd play it either way, but if you want it, this issue has to be addressed.

And in response to cyclotron's issues about making the military too powerful in dealing with flipping, here's my suggestion.

Once a city gets a certain percentage of foreign nationals, too many military units SPEEDS UP the flip, to represent the public's resentment of martial law. I'm not talking a drastic amount, but say a 1% increase in flipping chance per military unit. With this mechanism in place, instead of warmongering your way out of a culture flip, you would have to build your way out by building happiness improvements and culture improvements. And if you don't hard-code the percentage, you could change it up or down to make the game more war-like or more builderly. (Man - my english is terrible today!)

And another idea - instead of making code specific to culture flips for the military units, how about a general "desertion percentage (DP)". A chance that a military unit will desert. In the culture flip scenario, a units DP goes up the more foreign nationals there are in a city. The advantage of this is that the same mechanism can be used for a number of different strategic effects. Send a lone unit up against a stack of 50 MA and there is a good chance they say to hell with this and turn tail. Tell a unit to raze a city that contains citizens of your culture, and they desert.

[Kryten]

Originally posted by wrylachlan
An alternative is to make them barbarians and once the city is taken, all the barbarians involved switch to the "flipper's" civ.

I think that this is a very good idea, but with just a very slight alteration; make the barabarian controlled Guerrillas disappear if the city/region successfully 'flips' (so that no player will ever have 'hidden nationality' units under their direct control). Now wrylachlan's suggestion may fix several potential problems in one stroke:

*The actions of Guerrillas against 'allies' in MP games is beyond your control,
*The 'Guerrilla Bodyguard' immunity problem,
*And helps keep Guerrillas in the region where they were created (but there is a chance that they may end up attacking/pillaging the wrong nation . I don't know....what does everyone else think?).

Good thinking though

[playshogi]

A simple way to reduce the chance of a city flipping is to increase the denominator in the formula. Right now that denominator is simply the relative distances of the 2 capitals. Perhaps, the denominator should increase each turn the city fails to flip.

[wrylachlan]

Originally posted by Kryten


I think that this is a very good idea, but with just a very slight alteration; make the barabarian controlled Guerrillas disappear if the city/region successfully 'flips' (so that no player will ever have 'hidden nationality' units under their direct control).

They wouldn't have to disappear if they were normal units, say infantry for example. The city spawns barbarian (Rebel) infantry who attack the city. If they win, they become infantry units belonging to the "flipper" civ, but since when they were doing the attack they were "barbarians" they don't trigger a war. No hidden nationality flag necessary.

Now wrylachlan's suggestion may fix several potential problems in one stroke:

*The actions of Guerrillas against 'allies' in MP games is beyond your control,
*The 'Guerrilla Bodyguard' immunity problem,
*And helps keep Guerrillas in the region where they were created (but there is a chance that they may end up attacking/pillaging the wrong nation . I don't know....what does everyone else think?).

Good thinking though

I'm assuming that making the Guerrillas attack the city that spawned them would be a not too difficult AI tweak.

Here's another idea - what if having a neighboring city about to flip increases the odds of a city flipping. I'm not sure how exactly you would work out the equation, but make it so that every so often, if your culture is low and there is a logical grouping of cities on the outskirts of your empire (maybe 4 cities on a small island) they flip together, and the guerrillas spawned can use coordinated attacks.

And while we're at it, what about break-away nations. You have a low culture in your cities bordering the ocean since you don't really have to worry about another nation flipping them, but wait! All of a sudden you start seeing foreign nationals in your sea-side cities, foreign nationals from a nation that doesn't exist yet. If they successfully flip a new nation is formed.

Essentially I just love the idea of using the same basic game mechanism to achieve mulptiple different strategic situations.

[Cyclotron]

I think the best solution is to generate barbarian guerillas. As Kryten said, that will solve all the problems with hidden nationality. The AI already seems to have some idea when a city is weak enought to be attacked, so perhaps the guerillas would fortify in defensible areas around the city until it judged the city is weak enough that the guerillas might have a chance. Then, it would attack the ciyt all in one turn. Of course, the guerillas would pillage a few squares too...

If the guerillas take the city, the city generates a random amount of infantry (to avoid more coding), not in excess of the foreign nationals in the city. The city is then turned over to the flipee.

[dr. blackclove]

I realized this morning that a better solution than barbarian guerillas might be to just fix the "hidden nationality" flag. Stacking with regular units is an exploit even with privateers in the regular game. So don't allow a player to stack hidden nationality units with non-hidden-nationality units.

It would be easy enough to code this. Just prevent you from moving regulars onto guerillas and vice-versa. Add the "check" in the routine that looks for impassable terrain. Make an exception for moving into your own cities.

It makes sense. After all, if a unit is "hidden" and then doesn't get into a fight with your regulars, well... I don't think it's very hidden anymore! You don't see Pakistani regulars fighting alongside Kashmir guerillas, after all.

[dr. blackclove]

I admit this doesn't fix the problem with MP, but it seems a more elegant solution in other ways.

[Cyclotron]

If you can't stack them, how would you build colorless units in any city that was garrisoned?