What To Do About Culture Flipping

[Solver]

Jimmy, come on, stop whining. You are a very remarkable gamer, so just remember the old times .

[Capt Dizle]

I am not either remarkable. But I will never ever stop talking about Civ3.

About how bad it is. About the disgraceful way it was produced. I suppose the only reason that I have not been banned is because MarkG has more integrity than Firaxis/Infolessgames. If dissenting voices are cut off there will be no more hope.

[Solver]

Jim, you're not talking about Civ 3. You're just whining over and over about the same thing, the fact that cities actually flip due to culture. This does look like trolling.

[wrylachlan]

Originally posted by VetteroX
On many things, I think opinions should be respected, but I dont see how any rational person can think culture flipping is ok. First, as Uber siad, no time in history has a city flipped to another because of culture. Also, its idiotic how it works. I mostly play on monach, and most often ill have high, if not the highest culture. I'll have a captured city that has been under my rule for many turns, and now even has more of my peoples race in it then the old race. Then suddenly: "terrible news, sire. City X has deposed are govener and gone to country X" its insane. I would really, really have loved to have heard the conversation when they were making Civ 3 when someone said: "I have a great idea. Lets do culture flipping, where the player can have 15 tanks in a a city, and then, EVEN IF that players country has high culture, the captured city can still flip back to the original country, AND all thoes 15 tanks can just dissappear! doesnt that sound fun?"

It drives me crazy that I have the most culture points, my dumb adviser says "people X are impressed by our culture" I have 10 units in the city, and then bam! it flips. I mean who thought this up?

Its just complete stupidity. Where do these units go? they just vanish into thin air? I think the best change would be either Ubers idea of immigration or unhappiness, or if we absolutely must live with stupid culture flipping, AT LEAST dont make my units dissappear, they could be pushed out of the cities boarders, and be injured so you couldnt take it back with the same units next turn. So the messege would be "Terrible news, sir. The citizens of City X rose up and took our armies by surprise! they have pushed them out of City X and deposed our govener!" Also, culture flip should be impossible if a) your culture is the same or better, no matter how far the city is from your capital and b) if you have more of your own people in the city then theirs.

I consider myself a rational person, and though I have some problems with the implementation of culture flipping, I do like it, and here's why:

I don't get hung up on the reality of it.

Civ3 is a game, like chess, and the rules are there to add strategic value to the gameplay, forcing you to make strategic choices of balancing your attacks (between culture and military, etc.)

Now in chess, you wouldn't complain that it doesn't make sense for a knight to be able to jump over another knight. Even though this is totally unrealistic, it is part of the game-play mechanics. If you changed the game mechanics so that knights couldn't jump over other pieces, the play would become less interesting since the number of viable strategies would decrease.

My point is that culture flipping is a game mechanic designed to make culture an important part of the game. As such it does it very well. Those who neglect their culture get stung.

And again please note I don't by any stretch of the imagination think that the implementation is perfect, but to say that no rational person could possibly think that the basic idea is "OK" is a little short-sighted. It's a game, not a simulation.

Sorry for bristling, but I had to get that out of my system... Alright, and on to the suggestions for improving the system.

1. As I've said before and numerous other people have also said, some way to gauge how much "cultural pressure" is being exerted on a city, is a must. If people knew the city was slipping away before it actually happened, they could do something about it, with entertainers, or building happiness structures, or garrisoning unit. If people felt like they were in control of their own destiny about culture-flipping I think they would accept it much more easily.

2. Something ought to be done to de-link culture from the border. Would it confuse the map too much to have a political border AND a cultural border? I'm just thinking out loud here so bear with me. Once your cultural border expands to the point that it touches another civ's border, that common border becomes your "political border" which can only be changed by war or trade. This is the border that counts in terms of tresspassing into enemy territory as a diplomatic faux-pas. Additionally, military units create one tile of culture for the tile they are on, so if later on, your "cultural border" increases into neighboring territory, your neighbor can counteract this by positioning military units along its borders with no diplomatic ramifications.

Again, I'm just tossing ideas around, but what I like about that one is it gets military involved in the border. And it creates something new to be traded.

[Capt Dizle]

The purpose is not to troll. The purpose is to keep the topic hot to increase the chance that Firaxis may change it, at least to the point of giving a toggle switch to turn flipping off.

Do not tell me this cannot work. It might. I was a big fan of SFC and when the developer of that game made a change I became the poster child for repealing it. I posted on the issue to the extent that I was the reciepent of incredible abuse, but I persisted. As the campaign unfolded more and more people agreed with my position, people that would have kept silent unless someone kept the issue in the limelight.

In the end the developer changed it back in the next patch.

I want the cultural flipping eliminated because I hold out the hope of playing Civ3 PBEM. No one is going to PBEM and see a whole game ruined because of this silly, lame, moronic flipping.

Fans sites do not exist to stoke the ego of the developers. It exists to provide information to games and to provide feedback to the developer.

The information and feedback that I am providing is clear, a change needs to be made.

I am not trolling.

[Arrian]

Culture in CivIII, including flipping, isn't perfect. However, it certainly is manageable. I play on Monarch. I play as a warmonger, and I amost always keep captured cities. I honestly cannot remember the last time a city flipped against me. Seriously. It's been a while, and 1.21 has made it even easier on me. Accordingly, I am not enraged by the culture model in CivIII. Some other posters, on the other hand, have lost large stacks of tanks or whatever, and are pissed about it.

I can see that leading the world in culture would be more difficult on Diety, where losses of large numbers of troops is even more frustrating. Then again, isn't Diety supposed to be really hard? That difficulty is trying to balance culture and military while operating at a huge disadvantage in production and research.

The basic idea was to create a game where building nothing but troops and ignoring all else was poor strategy. And it is poor strategy in CivIII. It's a bit simplistic, and sometimes results in wierd situations, but by and large I think it works just fine.

Upset that the AI's library took your oil? Either send in your army, or recognize that building your own library earlier on would have prevented it. Does it make sense that a library can be the key to securing a source of oil for your civilization? Only in the most abstract way, but the whole damn game is abstract.

The game still ends up being tilted toward warmongering, more so the higher the level you play on.

-Arrian

[JohnE]

Originally posted by cyclotron7


Uber, you can't possibly tell me that gaining or losing a few pop points would even slightly alter your strategy... let alone convince you to build up a dominant culture. That's what I mean by a weak system... If you don't use flipping, you need another way to make culture important.

The problem is that the existing system actually encourages MORE war and associated idiocy. Consider the following:

1. One of the most effective ways to keep a newly-captured city from flipping is to fill it up with military units.

2. Clearing any of the squares it could cultivate of foreign cultural influence can help prevent flipping.

3. Eliminating the city's original culture is a sure way to prevent flipping.

4. The primary solution to having just lost a city to "culture" ( besides cheating ) is to take it again by force, burning it down if need be.

5. Burning down cities or "abandoning" them is the preferred method of dealing with cities in certain circumstances, in part because "culture" will make them too expensive to keep.

( As a side note, abandonment is just razing without the slavery, moral dilemmas, and reputation hit. )

War is no less important now. In fact, I find war more important, and in part because of culture. Sometimes culture damages my civilization despite my best efforts and the most efficient response is military, even if it means burning down a city with 15 people.

[Capt Dizle]

Originally posted by Arrian

The basic idea was to create a game where building nothing but troops and ignoring all else was poor strategy. And it is poor strategy in CivIII. It's a bit simplistic, and sometimes results in wierd situations, but by and large I think it works just fine.

The game still ends up being tilted toward warmongering, more so the higher the level you play on.

-Arrian

Respectfully I disagree. Flipping leads to conquerors just burning cities to the ground. Culture was adequately implemented in Civ2 and SMAC through the happiness system and the research benefits of building libraries and universities.

If you want to balance the military option then you can do it in other ways.

[Harovan]

Despite the fact, that I also would like to see the emigration/immigration element pop-point-wise and not city-wise, I have no problem with culture flipping in peace time. I can't even remember when this happened the last time to me. Cities flip rather to me than the other way, but even this occurs only in every 3rd or 4th game. Flipping during wartime happens rarely, and if it happens, the city gets one (1) usually lame defender and I take it back the next turn, usually to raze/rebuild it this time. I just finished an egyptian tournament game on regent, where I captured my entire continent and "liberated" another, took lots of cities and not even one flipped. They resisted, then were 2-3 turns unhappy, then content to happy. No flip. The same evening, I had a tiny quickie on deity - one wartime flip. Lost a wounded swordsman in a size-6 town, had to defeat a pathetic regular spearman next turn and the city was back. Where's the problem?

Well, that's on SP. MP is of course another question, and not only the flipping as is, but the whole gameplay needs to be remade. I'm optimistic that it will be done in time, and won't rant while there's no reason. Firaxis hasn't to hurry this time, and they have the results of half a year intensive beta testing now , so I think MP in PTW will be great.

[Cyclotron]

Originally posted by JohnE
1. One of the most effective ways to keep a newly-captured city from flipping is to fill it up with military units.

Actually, I find garrisoning captured cities to be quite risky. I usually find a higher national culture to be the best way of preventing flipping.

4. The primary solution to having just lost a city to "culture" ( besides cheating ) is to take it again by force, burning it down if need be.

I never do that unless it is a wartime flip. I have no interest in starting a long-term, annoying war over one border city. Besides, I concentrate on culture, so I rarely have non-wartime flips. I never raze cities unless they are placed horrendously; there's no point.

5. Burning down cities or "abandoning" them is the preferred method of dealing with cities in certain circumstances, in part because "culture" will make them too expensive to keep.

I don't agree. By the way, I don't like Firaxis' addition of the abandon city feature... it seems like just an exploit to me.

War is no less important now. In fact, I find war more important, and in part because of culture. Sometimes culture damages my civilization despite my best efforts and the most efficient response is military, even if it means burning down a city with 15 people.

Culture, when it does damage me, is something I do not solve with military might. There's no need. I can take the loss of a city without any hit to my ego. It's unimportant, and I appreciate the power of culture. I agree with you that war has been made more important... but I don't think that has a lot to do with culture, and if anything the solution to that is to make culture stronger, not weaken it by substituting unimportant and inconsequential cultural effects instead.

[Coracle]

Originally posted by jimmytrick


Respectfully I disagree. Flipping leads to conquerors just burning cities to the ground. Culture was adequately implemented in Civ2 and SMAC through the happiness system and the research benefits of building libraries and universities.

If you want to balance the military option then you can do it in other ways.

I agree completely.

Culture Flipping cities and borders (over improved tiles) is entirely non-historical and a big crock.

What we should see in fact is a city/town flipping when a massive enemy army is approaching it. The city basically surrenders and begs for mercy. This is very historical and examples of it are very easy to find, be it with Alexander, the Mongols, Assyrians, and others. The ONLY reason one should raze a town is to INTIMIDATE other towns/cities into surrendering.

BTW, razing a CITY is ludicrous. Nothing with a population over '6' should be razed - in otherwords made to vanish into thin air. It would be impossible to do this in reality, even with many military units.

It is such a sick irony that we get all this Culture crapola - but one supposed remedy for it is the instant mass extermination of a huge population.

[Coracle]

This refers to a comment about Culture Flipping in another one of Jimmytrick's closed threads. . .

Someone sugested the Soviet Union collapsed due to Culture. DEAD WRONG.

The SU broke apart primarily due to ECONOMIC failure and general bankruptcy.

This brings up an interesting problem. The AI civs often have a bare minimum of gold available, even later in the game. I have dealt with some having zero or almost nothing in their treasuries, and these were not one city civs. I meanwhile had a thousand.

Should not the total economic superiority of one civ to another, gold and trade both, effect game play in some way? In the game all that hapens is if you drop below zero you have to sell something.

[Zachriel]

Originally posted by Coracle

What we should see in fact is a city/town flipping when a massive enemy army is approaching it. The city basically surrenders and begs for mercy. This is very historical and examples of it are very easy to find, be it with Alexander, the Mongols, Assyrians, and others. The ONLY reason one should raze a town is to INTIMIDATE other towns/cities into surrendering.

Remembering that Civ is just a game, just an arbitrary abstraction, I would really like to see something like that implemented. That would put razing in context. Do you raze the city to end the war sooner, so saving lives in the long run?

And conquering border towns would be much easier, and holding them, too, in the presence of a military stack. This would be historical. The loyalty of the provinces was only as sure as the army was near.

[Thrawn05]

I purposed an entirely new system, perhaps for Civ4.

The system as it stands now is the same in any game until a nation (any nation), researches Nationality. This is were the fun begins.

There is no culture flipping at this point. Cities continue to increase culture points, but no longer expand (no cities are the exception, they will expand once). You may at this point do a few things to increase your boarders.


Land Purchase

Here, you start a diplo screen with the civ in question. Here, you ask to purchase land. You'll be taken back to the map, and select the tiles you want. Price varies depending on a number of factors such as any available resources, land type, distance from cities and the distance from your own boarders. This means any and all territory can be bought. To permanently have it costs a lot (I suspect about at least 500 to 1000 gold/per tile). However, you have a 20 turn loan for half the price.

When you buy or lease land, you have total control over it. Do what ever you want. Go to town, hell, build a town while your at it. You can use land as a bargaining tool to get what you want.

Military Occupation

Here, you see a piece of land that is not under any control. To get a boarder around it, you need to one of two things.

1: Build a fort. Building a fort will place a boarder the same size of a standard city. You need at least 4 or 6 troops there in order to claim it. However, boarders from cities take priority when a boarder from a fort and a boarder from a city overlap (hey, they were there first). Forts do no have boarders until Nationalism, so no boarder hogs in the early game. Also, any forts made prior to Nationalism, will have boarders.

2: Capture a fort. Capturing an enemy fort will give you the same ability as #1.

[Cyclotron]

Originally posted by Coracle
Culture Flipping cities and borders (over improved tiles) is entirely non-historical and a big crock.

And of course, you're missing the point of the argument. You like to dodge around gameplay issues with phrases like "non-historical"... and don't address gameplay in the slightest. A big crock? Gosh, you're running out of insults...

What we should see in fact is a city/town flipping when a massive enemy army is approaching it. The city basically surrenders and begs for mercy. This is very historical and examples of it are very easy to find, be it with Alexander, the Mongols, Assyrians, and others. The ONLY reason one should raze a town is to INTIMIDATE other towns/cities into surrendering.

There is already a surrender option... it's called, "I demand this city for a peace treaty." Your suggestion is not culture related at all, it is just another way to make Civ3 an even greater war game.

BTW, razing a CITY is ludicrous. Nothing with a population over '6' should be razed - in otherwords made to vanish into thin air. It would be impossible to do this in reality, even with many military units.

Stay on topic, and stop repeating your old, tired arguments word for word.

[nato]

Some cool ideas Thrawn, but like you say it might be too ambitious a change for Civ3.

Nationalism would be a great trigger for things to change somehow.

It would be very cool to be able to purchase land. However, I doubt anyone would be willing to sell. I'm almost certain none of us civ players would have sold the Louisianna purchase or Alaska to the US. Along these lines, if the AI was as paranoid about land sales as it is about giving cities, it would never happen.

I sure would love if forts gave some cultural control! Would give more reason to build them. However, it would be tough to balance them. If cities have priority over them, then they would be no more valuable than colonies. Maybe if they gave culture control over the square they are on, as long as they are connected to a culuture border of one of your cities.

[Thrawn05]

Originally posted by nato
Some cool ideas Thrawn, but like you say it might be too ambitious a change for Civ3.

Nationalism would be a great trigger for things to change somehow.

It would be very cool to be able to purchase land. However, I doubt anyone would be willing to sell. I'm almost certain none of us civ players would have sold the Louisianna purchase or Alaska to the US. Along these lines, if the AI was as paranoid about land sales as it is about giving cities, it would never happen.

I sure would love if forts gave some cultural control! Would give more reason to build them. However, it would be tough to balance them. If cities have priority over them, then they would be no more valuable than colonies. Maybe if they gave culture control over the square they are on, as long as they are connected to a culuture border of one of your cities.

I agree. Civ4 material. For now, I suggets they use that Uber had originaly posted. It's a lot easier to insert I believe.

[wrylachlan]

Great idea Thrawn

I would add to the military occupation -

3. Military occupation of land under another civ's control.
Any tile a military unit is on is automatically considered part of your border. So that oil that is one tile over your border becomes yours simply by moving a military unit onto it. If that unit is killed, the tile reverts back.

[star mouse]

One way I would do the "culture flip" thing would be to generalise it as a rebellion of some kind. The rebellion is a military uprising, and works like this:

A number of offensive military units equal to half the population of the city are created. These units are the strongest offensive unit the civilisation can produce. They then attack the garrison. The battle contunes until all units on one side are destroyed, and the winner gets the city. The city loses population points equal to half the number of offensive units killed, rounded up.