Why won't the minor flip?

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Just who are these uppity aliens anyway? With these sketchy details, it sounds like the I-League. They are super resistant and you basically have to invade them.

The minors also have plenty of culture restisting social structures as well. They can culture flip, but it will take time and patience.

I find it's usually easier to just go to war with them and demand the start system in return for peace.... OR failing that use more "traditional" means of star system appropriation.

Even without culture resist buildings, most minors are extremely resistant to culture flipping with the exception of Alexians.

do they have massive numbers of ships? the fact they all like terran burgers and sushi doesn't mean squat with enough battleships in orbit.

If they had no culture resist buildings, then they flip liek everyone else. At least in my experience.

Sometimes it takes several party palaces in the same sector to flip a minor. The Carinoids and I-League tend to have a very high cultural resistance rating.

Get the Carinoids early or it'll be nearly impossible to flip them. I had 4 party palaces in their system and they just wouldn't flip. And since it was near the end of the game and I had given them quite a few ships, I decided not to invade.

Bah any time a new race shows up I invade! They have no chance :/

Usually just one transport does it all

If its late in the game and you have some massive tech
advantages, approaching the beyond human tech levels, and the
minor is on the opposite side of a gigantic
galaxy from you, you can trade for 2 of their 3 systems
with massive tech trade and use those systems to launch
an invasion of their last system.

This works exceptionally well with the I-League for
getting cultural bombs in far away places in the middle
of a majors terrirtory.


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This is just my opinion, but if they do resist culture flipping (and I think they do) then this is for a very diliberate reason. This is good for trade economies where you build a lot of trade boosting starbases when trading with them and don't want to lose them as a trading partner by flipping them.

It would be nice if you could put some anti-terran propaganda modules in a starbase. This way, you could build starbases (for trade, speed, military, etc.) and prevent culture flipping where you don't want it.

I am playing a game now with the Carinoids in the adjacent sector to my home planet. They flipped around 2186, with no culture modules built within 3 sectors of their home system. I did have 2 systems in their sector, and 3 systems in my home sector, but the two starbases in those sectors just had mining/production/defense modules built in them.

Regarding ships/starbases belonging to minors, when I go to the Diplo/Trade screen, I NEVER see ship/starbases for the minors listed, and this is with "neutral" relations with them. Are players not allowed to buy/trade for minor's ships/SBs?

If you could buy their ships, they'd flip in a second. The ships in orbit always add to the cultural resistance, which is why they are untouchable.

Is that right? Ships in orbit add to cultural resistance? That's the first time I've heard of it!!

I think map size also matters a lot when it comes to flipping a minor. I don't think the minor's cultural resistance ability is adjusted for map size.

On gigantic, you're definitely going to have lots more planets than the minor, giving you a larger advantage before starbases. On tiny, you'll probably only have a few more planets, so you'll need more party palaces to flip them.

Crushbone: It's documented, I've read it, i just don't remember if it was in the manual or in one of the documents in the Encyclopedia section of this site. This really helps the minors since they tend to have fewer planets but with more defenders.

For the record, I often consider it the crowning glory of the game when I manage to culture-flip an I-League planet

Notice that when an AI feels like a system is under serious culture bombing that cannot be cured, it will sometimes pull back ships from other assignments to go to the troubled planet and improvements will be sold one by one as well. The result is eventually a planet with a morale of 1 that flips and becomes a big problem for the new owner, who now has to satisfy these overcrowded people who have no improvements.

They finally flipped and when they did I found my influence to be 1 million+ in the sector. Bad part is I also flipped the planet I had all my trade routes going to, and it was 2 sectors away.

It's best to have a lot of money on hand, grab a transport and rush over. Rush buy everything up to 100 that pertains to moral, and ferry quite a bit of population back to your main colonies.

Does the AI intentionally destroy improvements on a planet that's "doomed to flip"? I frequently flip planets that are lacking soil enhancement or entertainment network.

Does flipping a planet destroy improvements?

They certainly do seem to destroy improvements on planets that are going to flip. I can't understand how else they could possibly get 80000 million people on a class 20 planet with no improvements built. I always end up buying improvements on these planets until the moral goes above 1, because when I do (and populations are over 30000 or so) I see a big jump in tax revenues. I only do this because (nearing the end of a gigantic map) my economy pull in about 20000 total per month, so buying improvements isn't that costly. Also, as an evil empire, I've had a couple of those random morality events where you can allow corporate corruption in exchange for reduced interest costs.

The AI does employ scorched earth but seemingly without consistency. I have flipped planets in the same sector. One came scorched and the other completely intact as far as I can tell.

I've seen both, fully loaded planets and bare ones after a flip (in the same system no less).

As an addendum to the tactic, try this. Instead of using all those constructors to do yet more cultural improvements to those bases, add on some attack bonuses instead. Then you send over a couple ships to wipe their orbital fleet, which will make them flip alot faster.