What is enough to prevent city defections?

[DeepO]

Talk about awakening the dead! 6 month old threads should stay burried, if only it was to prevent Coracle to get new ideas for whacky arguments, like using pre-patch examples to prove his point.

JNL, the "Soren rule" as you put it never was true, it is a guideline that works in general situations. It assumes things like your overal culture being bigger than the enemy, no disorder, and your original city defending instead of an enemy city you want to keep (in that case, the rule of thumb says there have to be twice the number of troops than there are foreign nationals and tiles in your city).

More information can be found in this thread , where I also posted some tactics to avoid flips (on page three). If you don't want to read it, fine, just one piece of advise: don't ever use troops to battle flipping, it is the worst tactic around.

DeepO

[Txurce]

I am playing my first game with v. 1.21. I conquered Rome, which had the Pyramids, built the FP in it, and kept it near size 12. Centuries later, I was at war with the Romans again, but had pushed them off the continent - they were down to three island cities, whereas I had about ten of theirs on the mainland. I was in monarchy, and had low culture, although higher than the Romans.

Rome defected. To a faraway little civ, centuries after I built the FP in it. Yes, it's outrageous. Now what would have prevented it? Garrisoning the joint. It was empty (but so were all my other Roman cities, including one almost as big as Rome). I tried it again with three units inside, and no defection.

Fortunately for me, my low-culture, high-military civ had a leader to spare, so I could retake Rome, rebuild the FP, and have a nice campfire story to tell that had a relatively happy ending.

[DeepO]

Okay, there are specific cases in which garrisoning help. It is the only way to totally negate the flipping chance. And once you have more culture in that city than the previous owner had it becomes doable (troops only half the number of foreign nationals).

It does sound like you were very unlucky, even if you had a totally undefended city. If the Roman capital was far farther away than yours, the chance would have been very small. But a very small chance is a chance; people still win the lotery.

DeepO