I've been trying to work out how to hold onto conquered cities against the cultural influence of the original owner (other than using the razing or depopulate strategies). Here are some observations based on playing around with some saved games and the editor:
(1) It seems that "number of resistors in city" +1 garrison units will stop a city from immediately reverting back. Also, the editor allows you to control the number of resistors, and the duration of the resistance to your taste. Seems to work fine.
(2) If your conquered city has no culture or culture-generators at all, which I think may be the case with all conquered cities (?), then they seem very susceptible to reversion to the original culture almost immediately after the resistance has been broken. However, I found that once I had some culture in the city (in fact a temple for just one turn seems to work), then I could hold onto the city for a few turns. It seems that rush-buying a few other building works for a few more turns, but the chance of it reverting still seems very high some time within the first twenty or so turns of conquest no matter what you build (or do!).
Holding onto it in the longer term is, as I think the manual explains, a function of relative empire cultures and distance from the respective palaces. However, I think that no matter how much greater the conquered culture is over the conquerer, once resistance has been quelled, there should be military ways to hold onto the city, even if that means it becomes unproductive or a smoldering shell of its former self. Losing your garrison armies and having to reconquer it doesn't seem right to me. It's too all-or-nothing, and without warning. Also, because culture is a gradual and global thing, it is hard to address tactically to hold onto particular cities short of building city-specific cultural buildings which has limited effect I think.
(3) One thing I've tried to do in the editor is change the assimilation rate, i.e. make the captured nationality convert to the conquering one as quickly as possible to reduce the chance of reverting back to their original empire (I think that is a factor?). No matter what percentage I set this to it doesn't seem to make any difference. Anyone tried this?
I think making assimilation of conquered cities into productive members of your empire more difficult is a good change to the game, but I think the current design decisions seem a bit extreme. Perhaps I am missing something, and someone knows better strategies for dealing with this.
Hondo
(Editted because special characters meant a few key words were deleted)
