Having Cities absorbed by other Civs

[rhombit]

What is the best strategy for avoiding having one of your cities absorbed by another Civilization? I have one city that I absorbed from another Civ, but before I could build up it's culture, it was reabsorbed back into the original Civ. Any thoughts would be appreciated...

[Footie Mad]

Quell all resisters, starve the natives and then build cultural improvements ASAP.

[Kc7mxo]

Well, I don't know.

The problem is that we don't have enough information, nobody knows what the formulaes are for this game. We don't have a clue what courthouses do for example. It seems like one of firaxis's goals was to keep us all in the dark so we couldn't compalin.

Didn't work though.

[Dark Hawk]

I have yet to absorb a city. Everything I have read suggests its easy to do but it doesn't seem to work for me.

Capital city with pyramids, greatwall, art of war, temple, colleseum, cathedral (basically a ton of improvements) couldn't absorb a city that the AI plopped in a "cultural hole" of my territory.

Don't know how it works...

[DK36]

*flexes* 8 English cities absorbed. Not even going for a cultural win.

[Phideas]

I absorbed a bunch too in my last game.. But that was in retalitation of the Greeks, who filled in some gaps after I cleared out the Egyptians.. didn't want to continue the war effort, needed to keep on top of building my country, so I resorted to a "cultural" war. Keep your people happy, and give them cultural bonuses like temples etc. Once you get a culture level or two, you're pretty safe from being absorbed.

[cybernev02]

I think if you build a city in an enimy territory, the ideal thing to do is to build a temple.

This is the scenario in my most recent game:

I obtained the rights of passage priveledge... along with having Republic as the government type.

Next, I took a settler and a spearsman to the enimy territory... built a city in the noman's land... i fortified the spearsman in that city so that i had some type of a defence incase of an attack.

Next was to built a temple... the temple was to take 30 turns to complete... in about 5 turns, i hurried the production at the loss of ~150 gold...

in about 10 more turns, I had absorbed the enimy's city - and at this point, i repeated the same step again.

In my previous game, I had built 2 cities juxtopositioned so that I was simultaneiously affecting the culture of the 3rd city, which was of enimies. Imagine a tiangle, my 2 cities on the bottom, enimy city on the top. The enimy city uproached size 11 and at that point, my 2 cities, size 13 and 18 swallowed that city due to cultural expantion.

I think swallowing enimy cities is possible...

to avoid your enimy swalowing your cities... 1st and formost immediate thing to do is to build a temple, followed by a cathedral, marketplace, maybe a wonder ---

best thing to do on an offshore/furthest city is to see if you can build the 'forbidden castle' - this acts as a 2ndary capitol city - which reduces the curruption rate, increases your cultural influence, etc.

[Bugg]

Culture

I am playing a game and I have absorbed about 14 cities so far. this occured because I am being an isolationist and they pop their cities near me. The takeover occurs when the culture box in your city goes to 10, 100, 1000, 10,000 pts etc. At this point the culture spreads and then a determination is made on whether the other city converts or not. I believe one military unit keeps a citizen from trying to revolt to the other civ. So if they are loaded with troops it could be a reason why they are not being converted.