What is enough to prevent city defections?

[uh Clem]

Building Workers and/or Settlers in the captured city and then adding them back immediately will get rid of a few people of the AI nationality and replace them with your own. You don't necessarily need to do this with everybody in the city, but you can change the ratio of theirs to yours.

[Romulus]

uH Clem, Excellent idea! I will start doing that with aquired cites if I suspect they are likely candidtes for defection.

Osprey, WLTKD is "We Love the King Day". This is supposed to provide the city with a production bonus, and a reduction in waste (not corruption). The manual states that WLTKD is triggered when:
Your city population is six or above and....
There are no unhappy citizens in the city and....
There must be at least as many happy citzens as content citizens
I hope this helps.

[Surgeon]

Got warriors still around somewhere? got a city that could revolt? You now have a use for all those outdated units. A spearman is just as good at whacking dissedents as a tank and you wont care much if you lose them to a revolt.

[Fistleaf]

To keep your original cities from defecting, I believe your entire empire must produce enough culture to match the AI's. I had a size 16 original city with all cultural improvements defect before. Probably due to the fact that I have only 8 cities compared to the many cities the AI have.

[jack_frost]

Its really hard to hold these cities.

At this point I raze constantly, but I'm concerned about the diplomatic effects of burning cities. It doesn't say anything about it anywhere. But I really wouldn't be suprised.

I've actually seen the computer burn down cities, bring in workers and resettle. I can only imagine its to fix this exact problem.

If I intend to hold it. I use the following guidelines:

1 unit per foreign national. (yep, it hurts. But it'll give you some security.. it can even dip into a 1 turn riot when war warryness increments and it'll stay yours)

Hurry a temple for culture. Then a market. This should get you big smiles (if your going to war without a really good set of luxuries, you deserve to have your cities defect :P ). Lib -> cathedral, what ever.

Once your people start popping up, I feel it cancels the effect of a foreign national. I don't know the exact #'s but 1 for 1 seems to work well in my experiances. 5 french(them)/2 german (you) = only 3 units to garrison.

[Dragon]

I had a city near my capital defect to the English when they had been reduced to a single population-5 city on a remote island. I think there may be a small chance of a random defection no matter what.

On the other hand, since my strategy involves selling small cities in desert or jungle inside my territory to the AI, I gain ten times more cities by defection than I lose. On occasion I have sold the same worthless desert city to the same AI civ three times.

[RadiationVibe]

I've tried to see what I could do to save a defecting city by reload a prior save. I didn't have much luck in changing the outcome. Finally, I gave up and decided to cut my losses by selling all the improvements in the city and moving all the military units out. Much to my surprise the city didn't defect. So far, I've done this 3 times and everytime I have kept the city from defecting. It doesn't make sense. My government was Monarchy at the time.

[MarshalN]

I have captured a Russian city that's closer to my territory than theirs, and only with a population of 3. I put two swordsmen in there.... 3 turns later, they defected. My culture is superior (they are impressed, my people are dismissive), and it's a city that's surrounded by mine (all original French cities, not captured). What's worst is that the message says they defected because of superior culture of the Russians, which is clearly not superior to mine...

I think Firaxis tellins us what's included in the factors will be very nice indeed.

[Blaupanzer]

Originally posted by uh Clem
Building Workers and/or Settlers in the captured city and then adding them back immediately will get rid of a few people of the AI nationality and replace them with your own. You don't necessarily need to do this with everybody in the city, but you can change the ratio of theirs to yours.

I don't think this works. If you build settlers/workers in a city that is another nationality, you get those units as their original nationality. When adding these units to a city, the still retain their nationality (as do captured units). I have swapped citizens from captured cities with citizens of mine in hopes of preventing defection. We'll see if that works.

[Osprey]

Originally posted by Romulus
uH Clem, Excellent idea! I will start doing that with aquired cites if I suspect they are likely candidtes for defection.

Osprey, WLTKD is "We Love the King Day". This is supposed to provide the city with a production bonus, and a reduction in waste (not corruption). The manual states that WLTKD is triggered when:
Your city population is six or above and....
There are no unhappy citizens in the city and....
There must be at least as many happy citzens as content citizens
I hope this helps.

Thanks Romulus, of course that's what it means! hehe....damn acronyms..

[art_vandelai]

I don't know?

In a recent game, I as Egypt conquered all of the Aztecs cities, except one with a population of 1 on an island. I had taken over Tenochitlan, which had built Sun Tsu's from the Aztecs. Suddenly, Tenochitlan defects back to the Aztecs, despite being completely surrounded by other cities I had taken over/founded and several of my units fortified there.

It would be nice to at least know what factors are considered in deciding whethre or not a city defects.

[IronSpam]

Yeah, really. If you were the leader of a collection of city-states, wouldn’t you have some inkling that a cultural revolution is happening in one of your provinces? Or is the supposition in Civ III that the leadership is out of touch with the people it governs? Or is top management only aware when it’s too late and there’s blood in the streets?

At least in the Modern Age there would be television coverage of the event to give you some kind of warning. Even the Communists in East Germany must have realized that there was a rising tide under their noses before the wall came down.

Perhaps there should be some kind of opinion poll available in each city. A question might go something like “Do you consider yourself a German?” If the answer is “Yes,” then fine – the higher the percentage the better. If the answer is “No” or “Undecided,” then list the other nationality. Alternatively the question could go, “What nationality do you lean most closely to?”

Basically, it’s a cultural census. The worse it goes against your civilization, the greater the likelihood of a city defection. Obviously such a poll probably would not happen in an ancient Roman province. However, there should be some similar indication of a turn in cultural alignment before the fact.

[The Mad Viking]

MaSs ConFusSioN:

if you plan to take some enemy city, make a settler and some extra workers. as soon as you capture the city, raze it. then take your settler and build one of YOUR cities right on that spot and put those extra workers that you built in the city too, to increase the population quickly.

Remarkably, this was standard practice by many Sumerian age Kings!

[Felan]

In my most recent game which I finally finished, Monarch-Huge-Maximum number of civs, I had huge problems holding onto Russian cities.

Happiness may factor in somewhat but I lost 4 cities back to the Russians before I got too irritated with them and captured all of their cities.

The cities that deposed their governors were small (size 3) and large (size high teens). All the cities were done resisting and was all the population was happy due extremely high amounts . I had experienced a similiar problem with an earlier American city in the same vacinity, so I had thought to combat it with blowing my treasury on culture building improvements. My Forbidden Palace was only one to three cities away from any of the problem cities, but their palace was just as close.

The Russians were one of the top civs and one of the nearby cities had a wonder in it.

One of the cities around pop 10 had two armies, 6 to 8 tanks, 4 to 6 infantry. Just lost all the units when the city converted.

Here is what I think is the cause. Whenever you take over a city its culture gets reset to 0. Building scads of culture generating improvements helps but isn't enough to insure their staying in your society, especially if they are next to an enemy with high culture (especially one with a wonder nearby).

[sachmo71]

So all that we have figured out is that there seems to be no rhyme or reason to defection. I too had a couple of cities deep in the heart of my enemies defect, so I reloaded and moved ALL of my units out, and it did not defect, until about 20 turns later. Reading everyone elses experiences, I can't find a pattern, but I can find something to directly contradict what happened to me. What will be interesting is when the patch comes out (!) and they "tone corruption down a bit" and see what effect the added culture has on captured cities. As far as I have seen, NO ONE has had a city revert that what celebrating WLTKD.