How to avoid cultural flipping when taking over cities

[ProPain]

Originally posted by fittstim
Actually, having a lot of troops in the city will make it MORE LIKELY to flip. I don't know if this is a bug, a built-in cheat or what but it has been proven over and over by various people on this forum (including myself).

If you stick a lot of nice, valuable troops in a freshly captured city and it flips, reload the game, capture the city but leave the troops outside. Violá! No flip. Weird but true.

Originally posted by TacticalGrace
NOT TRUE! NOT TRUE!

This has been brought up on the boards before and you've miss understood something fundamental.

Even under the worst circumstances, the odds of a flip are still low (though it doesn't seem that way when it happens to you), say 1 in 10 or 1 in 20. So it you reload and do ANYTHING you are more likely NOT to have a flip.

Moving troops into a city does decrease the chance of a flip.

I think you both are partly right.
Putting more troops in a city decreases the chance of a flip but somehow having no troops at all seems to make the chance to flip the smallest. This has nothing to do with the random seed as some say, since I always play with preserved seed and have experienced flipping, reloaded and removed troops and... no flip. When I reload and fiddle around with the amount of troops (a little more, a little less) I still get a flip. I do think this is some no-troops bug and have seen more people report it. So if I want to capture instead of raze, I capture, move in lots of troops (1st turn you never get a flip) to end the revolt and move everybody out the next turn. Just station an offensive unit next to the city in case it flips anyway so you can recapture it.

The tactic where you try to move your opponents capital far away from his homeland works pretty ok also. I have seen people giving away one of their core cities next to their own capital to a powerfull island civ. Capture the other civs capital , other civs capital moves to the donated city. Once powerfull civ ends up totally corrupted and captured cities are less likely to flip because the capital is sooo far away. Take care though, you must be pretty sure the capital will move to the city you gave away otherwise you'll end up a production powerhouse less.

ProPain

[Iskandar Reza]

Why bother to go through all that length? Just station your troops outside the city after they've healed. Build only improvements not related to culture (cause if it flips it's gone). Keep on rolling till you've taken all the continental cities of the AI you're at war with.

However,it seems to help to be culturally stronger than your conquest, and to have enough luxury supplies. I don't know if this is really true or a string of very odd coincidences, but i noticed that happy cities (more happy citizens than unhappy) tend not to flip.

[ProPain]

Happy citizens help or rather unhappy citizen increase the chance of flipping. So luxuries do help. Pulling them all of their work making them entertainers whilst starving to death makes them happy too and thus helps. Strange but true.

ProPain

[TacticalGrace]

Originally posted by ProPain
Putting more troops in a city decreases the chance of a flip but somehow having no troops at all seems to make the chance to flip the smallest. This has nothing to do with the random seed as some say, since I always play with preserved seed and have experienced flipping, reloaded and removed troops and... no flip. When I reload and fiddle around with the amount of troops (a little more, a little less) I still get a flip. I do think this is some no-troops bug and have seen more people report it.

I think it is more likely that your moving of troops is somehow changing the random seed. All that you need to do is reload and do somehting that prompts one more or one less random number to be generated before the culture-flipping calculation is done and you'll get a different result, even with seed preservation on.

[ProPain]

Is random seed affected by just moving troops? I thought only attacks, popping goody huts and things like that 'use' a random number.

ProPain

[fittstim]

Originally posted by TacticalGrace

by mute do you mean it is silent...???

do you mean that it is a moot point?

Geez...there's nothing worse than a native speaker pointing out someone's spelling or grammatical mistake.

Don't want to join the ranks of Coracle, do we TG???

[TacticalGrace]

Originally posted by fittstim


Geez...there's nothing worse than a native speaker pointing out someone's spelling or grammatical mistake.

Don't want to join the ranks of Coracle, do we TG???

are you suggesting that ArmaGeddin isn't a native speaker?

and don't get me started on the fact that where ArmaGeddin resides there are two quite different meanings for a moot point...

[Cyclotron]

Moving troops out or into a city changes the random seed because the CF calculation must be re-done for the new amount of troops. Thus, people report a "more troops is bad" result because they re-set the random seed by moving troops out.

[Naiveplayer]

If you put the governor in control, and the whole populace is in resistance, the governor will automatically make them entertainers, starving them down. And it'll put back the city in production once the resistance fades.

[Coracle]

Originally posted by Theseus
Coracle, you crack me up.

Are you still playing (with CF turned off, obviously)?

Not playing unless CF can be turned off. Didn't buy PTW as I figured it would be a buggy beta hunk of junk - and I was right. I believe you can only turrn off CF with PTW.

So the answer is 'no'.

BTW, I never demanded a simple on/off toggle for CF. I wanted it FIXED and improved, and to MAKE SENSE. But that would be too much for Firaxis.

You think this garbage flip Alexman posted made sense? His strategy was destroyed owing to a ridiculous flip to a defeated tiny civ across the sea. I don't have hours of time to waste on nonsense like this, which makes no sense in game terms, historically as a simulation, and PROLONGS TEDIOUS WARS as we have to exterminate entire civs to prevent stupid flips.


http://apolyton.net/forums/showthrea...nally+Happened

[Propaganda]

If I'm correct in saying this, and correct me if I'm wrong if I'm not, but CF can be "fixed" by going into the Difficulty tab in the Editor(PTW one, that is), and bumping up the number of "citizens quelled by military." I think this might work.

[bongo]

A think CF is a nice touch, apart from one thing. Why do my troops disappear?? Lose some of them yes, have them relocated fine, beaten up ok, but dissappear?? All of them???

Remember slave revolts in CTP? That's a good starting point for how CF's should deal with troops in cities.

[theNiceOne]

Originally posted by bongo
A think CF is a nice touch, apart from one thing. Why do my troops disappear?? Lose some of them yes, have them relocated fine, beaten up ok, but dissappear?? All of them???

I don't even have a problem with the units disappearing. When the eastern Europe countries culture flipped from Soviet to Western Europe, their military units flipped with them.

[bongo]

Thats different, they flipped with them, they didn't disappear.

BTW It was more like an alliance breaking up than a culture flip.

[planetfall]

Originally posted by bongo
A think CF is a nice touch, apart from one thing. Why do my troops disappear?? Lose some of them yes, have them relocated fine, beaten up ok, but dissappear?? All of them???

Remember slave revolts in CTP? That's a good starting point for how CF's should deal with troops in cities.

I like CF but 2 aspects about it annoy me:

1. harder to get AI to flip than my cities flip

2. losing all troops when my city flips.

Improved method would be using something like turns of anchary. Lose first 2 units, then percentage of rest of losses is based on RNG.

== PF

[TacticalGrace]

How about the following effects of CF:
(1) smuggling of produce/funds to other nation (some lost corruption&waste turns up in an enemy city as useful shields and gold)

(2) Some of the population flips: An enemy settler is created next to the city (on their go so it can move immediately). Obviously this can be stopped by stationing troops around the city (berlin wall).

(3) defecting units. one or two units dissappear and turn up across the border as traitor units. These convert-class units could be marked as such and might have a chance of flipping back. If the converts are the only units in the city then the city culturally flips. veterans have a low chance of conversion. Elites have almost no change of flipping. Elite* units never flip.

(4) sabotage by enemy patriots causes damage to units (perhaps one or two points of damage). This could result in the destruction of a unit. If there are no units left then the city CFs.

(5) rioting citizens clash with occupation forces resulting in unit damage (as in 2) and loss of life (lose one pop point)

[ArmaGeddin]

Originally posted by TacticalGrace


are you suggesting that ArmaGeddin isn't a native speaker?

and don't get me started on the fact that where ArmaGeddin resides there are two quite different meanings for a moot point...

Actually i'm a native American, born in Kansas and not of Indian ancestry. I do know the difference between the two words, however I have a tendency to type fast and not watch what i'm typing. I rely on the fact that there is always some anal retentive individual ready and waiting to point out my mistakes.

[Jawa Jocky]

To avoid flips:

1) Have more culture. I had a 27 turn war while slowing taking the Vikings. Not a single city flipped back since my culture was better than theirs

2) Massive ROP violations. This only works once since it hurts your reputation. I used 77 MA, 4 Armies, 48 artillery, 28 Calvary, and 11 MI to take out the French in one turn last night. I was ready to live in peace with them but the bastards built the internet when I was 3 turns from finishing.

3) Leave units next to the city to recapture after the flip.

4) Raze.

[ArmaGeddin]

My culture is almost always better than other civs also. I always build Temples and Libraries in all my cities first thing along with a Courthouse if needed. My build queue for starting cities is almost always:

Temple
Library
Courthouse
Marketplace

This keeps my culture high and and most Monarch games I have to be quick getting to the space ship or killing the other civs to keep from getting a cultural victory.

[Cyclotron]

Originally posted by planetfall
1. harder to get AI to flip than my cities flip

This is false. You are probably seeing only the amount of AI cities that flip to you... which ignores all the flips that take place between the AI players. It is not harder to get an AI flip than your cities to flip.

[theNiceOne]

Originally posted by cyclotron7 This is false. You are probably seeing only the amount of AI cities that flip to you... which ignores all the flips that take place between the AI players. It is not harder to get an AI flip than your cities to flip.

Cyclotron/ is correct. CF works identically for human and AI players. Something which I actually has tested on a map consisting of two islands, each with one big, culture rich capital, and a small no-culture city belonging to the opponent. I did many tests with this map, and the small AI and human cities was the one to flip first abut half the time each.

One reason though, that many players lose more cities from CF than they gain, is that the human player normally is the one who steadily captures enemy cities. By doing this, the human player will get a lot of cities with foreign citizens, with a restricted number of squares inside your cultural borders, with less culture in that city than the former owner, and closer to the enemy capital.
All those factors greatly increase the chance of a CF, thus you will generally see more cities flipping away than to you, even with a superior culture.

Now, if you really want to be on the receiving end of CF, try expanding your empire as much as you can, build up as much culture as you can, and then let the enemy slowly take your cities during war. Now you will soon see several of your cities flipping back. You will still loose though

[bongo]

Good analysis!

CF is just another way of slowing down the strongest players. A bit like partisans in civ2. Like CF they were annoying, unlike CF they were also totally useless.

[Elowan]

Originally posted by ArmaGeddin
...
I rely on the fact that there is always some anal retentive individual ready and waiting to point out my mistakes.

My man!!!

[Fitz]

I only lose 1-2 cities to the AI about every 2-3 games, typically in the very early game when attempting culture warfare (and losing). I typically have 4-5 CF to me from the AI in every game. But then, I don't play on the hardest level, and I am not a typical warmonger.

I usually have 1.5 times the culture of the next biggest culture amongst the civs once into the industrial ages, and only attack when attacked. When that happens, I try to get as many allies as possible (usually can get about 1/2 the civs to join) and stomp the offender into the ground as fast as possible, paying attention to the counter-flip techniques along the way.

Maybe it's time for me to bump it up a notch. But regardless, the Culture Flip & Culture as a whole is the main reason I play this game over SMAC. It's fun, easy to understand, and generally speaking easy to stack the odds on your favor (or reduce the odds against you) once you understand.

[Lord Merciless]

CF never happens during the turn the city was captured, so you can safely dump in as many troops as you want. Once the resistance is over, pop-rush buildings. A temple can eat up 4 population points, a Cathedral more than 10.

[aaglo]

Yesterday I had a wonderful experience about culture flips.

I'm the Egyptians (yellow)
Difficulty Monarch. Large random map. Apolyton university rules/mod (or whatever you call it )

The indias lost their city with great wall to me by cultural flip. And none of my cities was on that continent . And the flipped city was next to the capital of Indians...

My capital is in the red circle, and my FP is in the blue circle...

[TacticalGrace]

ooh, the RNG loves you... it wants you to be its friend!

[Tattila the Hun]

Yay, no more problems with barbarians!

[aaglo]

Well, the great wall was already obsolete, so no 50% against barbs... but still, I got the city walls to all cities (a change made in the AU1.06...)