Do you think cultural influence should not be as strong?

I also think its overpowered, in each of my games, i try to go about a military victory,but i always end up having to race to the enemy systems because 90% of the time they end up rebelling and joining my empire. if there was at least an option to turn off cultural rebellions it would be much easier. either that or make a screen come up asking if youd like to allow them to join you or to send them packing.

flipping a planet makes a lot more sense then invading it. you dont have to worry about building transports, or depleating a planets population to fill those transports, or even have to worry about loosing buildings or planet quality. there are too many bonuses to getting a planet to culturally flip then it is to invade a planet. not only that, there are no negative consequences when you flip a planet, the AI doesnt get angry or anything. in my opinion, i think they should ether make it harder to culturally flip a planet, or maybe add some perks to invading a planet, such as a huge boost to moral on your other planets with each planet invaded.

Culture has been nerfed more than once already. First was when party palaces were reduced from +200% to +100%. Second was when the influence power of cultural starbases were changed to make it relative to the distance from the nearest friendly planet.

Still, I too find it easy to culture bomb everyone to death up to Crippling.

Well that happens when culture mods multiply each other instead of adding like everything else...

I don't build a single culture mod nowadays Bug. Influence resources, TGs/wonders and culture bomb planets are enough to flip the universe.

The common scenario where you keep having a plannet flip back to you that you don't particularly want annoys me a little. I hate having to destroy colonies but what else can you do?

Max out a cultural SB in that sector and gift it to them. Just remember to max out and gift in the same turn.

Is culture to strong? YES

Culture is not too strong, unless one is only going for the other victory types, of course. What happens a lot of the time is that people naturally go for being the dominant superpower. In that case, you will probably have the best base influence and with the other natural tendancy to get influence resources and party palaces, become unstoppable. Watch what happens when the reverse is true: the alien has the cultural superiority and your planets start flipping.

But I do agree that starbases with culture modifiers be additive and not multiples. It is just that a good culture bomber does not need party palaces to culture bomb, much less multiple party palaces in the same sector.

I disagree IMHO culture flipping is to easy, at the moment it is the fatest way to assimilate an enemy because the AI has no clue to counter culture dominance. For culture victory you need the most influnece in 80% (90 %he galaxy). Most influnece in a sector shouldn´t not mean that every single planet turn sides a joins with you. Once you have established that you are military superior to anohter still healthy empire, you can simply put up starbases in suroundin sectors an watch even enmy core worlds switch to your side once a word in their zone of influence flipped it is snowball effect.

Gaining worlds through culture has the benefits compared to military conquest:
No act of war declared, full polulation, no transports nor population lost on your side, planet is perfect in conditions, self amplifying effect on ohter worlds in the same sector of the galaxy =>nearly joining you instantly

Try playing with culture victory turned on, on medium,large size galaxy( painful or above): Its quite a race winning with military means because the worlds flip though fast that your attack fleet can´t catch up with the frontier.

- For the book I am "builder" type of player

Culture is not too strong.

Culture is too easy to pursue relative the AI.

The AI needs to be tweaked to actually build more culture boosters of their own rather than just continually nerfing it until we are playing with rubber knives against them.

I completely agree with Code Monkey.

The AI does not defend against culture.. I have never noticed them building culture starbases.

The big thing for me is --
The AIs will SELL me an influence starbase that is just keeping them alive.

My typical Crippling game consists of one big war which ends with me having a decent victory...

I grab all the influence perks I can, but the grand finale is always when the AIs SELL me Influence Starbases that are keeping them alive. Quite frequently their civ is wiped out a few months after making the sale.

I turn culture off, this comes up as a military victory.

Absolutely!

I guess I should have made the subject of this post: "They should make the AI fight cultural assimilation!" I completely agree with the comments. The AIs lack of fighting your influence is what bothers me. If you have a couple of influence resources mined and you build some influence wonders, then all you have to do is hurt turn until you control the galaxy. My question is, if the AI is set to genius do they fight influence better?

Nope, they fall as easily at Genius.

interesting question.. I agree the higher the AI gets it should be able to adjust for different victory conditions.. can you imagine writting the AI routines to do that though.. thats why I think they will be using algorythums from real players for AI routines.. its a great way to improve AI



~SDC~

It can't be any tougher than military A.I. routines. Let's see... Terrans have more influence in my sector then me, built starbase with culture modules in same sector. Sounds pretty straight forward to me.

Or... I just lost a planet to those supposed Terran friends of mine. Maybe I should smush them into the ground with my superior Dreadnought fleet? Nah... They couldn't possibly flip all of my planets to their side one by one when I've got my huge fleet to protect me and strike fear into my people so they won't defect

They could program stuff in there to react to situations like that. I guess that's why cultural victories aren't worth that much.