territory?

[Admiral]

This has probably already been discussed, but is there going to be teritory in civ 3. One of the more annoying things in civ 2 was when your ally started building cities in the midst of my empire.
Also territory related, if we have territory, will it be as variable as in SMAC/X? That got extremely annoying when Ihad been working for 10 turns developing an area when the AI starts a city in the vicinity and I suddenly find that the developed are is not in my territory.

[Roman]

Firaxis has stated that there will indeed be borders and that they will be better than in SMAC. Beyond that we know nothing specific, except that the borders are going to be affected by culture.

[Roman]

BTW: Culture will be able to expand your borders, but we have no clue as to the exact mechanism of how this will work.

[SerapisIV]

I wonder if the culture mechanism for expanding borders etc. is based on some predefined values, like the end-game titles were based on a specific score. Such that a culture of 100 and you get 1 tile away from city radius for borders, 300 culture, you get 2 tiles up to a final value like 8 tiles max. Thats one possible idea.

Also the border/culture interaction could be based on total world culture and your percentage of it. Every civ gets a minimum 3 tile expansion past city borders then an extra tile based on how much percentage they have of the world total to divide up a fixed amount of remaining tiles. So lets say an extra 10 tiles are up for grabs, every world culture percentage of 10% gets you an extra tile.

Another idea is that the border/culture interaction is also tied to social technology or culutural improvements. Such that the building of your first colliseum gets you a tile. The discovery of the medicine gets you a tile.

I personally like the second option of world cultural percentage because it allows a civ that conquers a high culture civ to not benefit as much from their culture because most of the improvements which give the culture are destroyed in conquest. So war is rewarded less and world culture becomes a more dynamic entity with your cultural strength always changing in comparison to the rest of the world

[raingoon]

Here's a thought.

Could it be that when they say culture helps to expand your borders they mean "by making it easier to assimilate conquered cities?" I hope there's more to it than that, since rate of population assimilation is as old as the original Mater of Orion. But it's easy to read it that way...

[Ilkuul]

I must say I had simply assumed what Raingoon suggests. Having culture magically expand your physical borders seems highly artificial to me! I can understand cities of major and minor civs wanting to join your empire spontaneously if you have a high culture rating - but IMO they must be actual cities, not just a magical inflation of your borders.

[SerapisIV]

In SMAC, you were given territory surrounding your civ even though you didn't have cities there. Tying in how much territory to you culture sounds reasonable to me. First and foremost the presence of cities controls borders, but for the open space outside of the city, how much land you get should have some association to your culture. A more worldly civ (hi culture) would be known further away then a low culture civ.

I never played MOO, how does it work in that game?
[This message has been edited by SerapisIV (edited April 15, 2001).]

[raingoon]

In MOO, if I remember correctly, there was some variance as to how easily a conquered planet's population could be assimilated to your empire. Depending on certain advancements, etc., you could quicken the time it takes.

The question here concerning Culture in Civ 3 is an interesting one, because it boils down to this -- Does your civ now have its own cultural identity? Do your units show this cultural identity? Is it shown in your city population? When two forces of different culture come into contact, does the stronger one convert the weaker to its own culture?

Or is this simply the old game feature in MOO presented as something new again?