Beta 5 Culture Flips Still Overpowered

Seconded! We can assimilate all other cultures/factions without (almost) effort. It´s really too easy!

Here we are again

making the AI boost influence would be good.

Plus reducing the Inf boosts (%) from Benevolent would be good.

My two closest neighbours are fully covered in my influence area at the moment, and there's that wonderful choice to force flip everything available.

What am I doing wrong. I am playing as the terrans and I am not taking over anyone's planets. I am building Consulates and researching culture and diplomatic techs. 

I am not threatened by them but I am certainly not threatening them. I will admit that I am not spamming culture star bases. Is that what I need to do ?

Compared to GCII is seems to be well balanced to me.

Oh BTW, I have that benevolent trait that is supposed to flip planets and it is not working on my map. I have been playing mostly large to immense maps. Do I need to play tiny maps to see this effect?

As far as I've been able to tell, the Benevolent trait that is supposed to flip planets works, but it only flips the planets that are in your ZoC at the time you pick the trait.  After that it does nothing.  So I don't know if it 's working as intended, but it does do something.

Ahh, so this trait is giving you planets that you are going to get is 10 turns anyway. Not so powerful after all, if it is working as intended

Are you finding culture flips to be too easy? I am not. I won an influence victory on an immense map  but it took over 300 turns and did not come easy. I could have won a military victory long before that.

I don't understand how anyone can say that the AI is easy to flip. In the above game the Yor had the no flip trait and never lost a single planet to a flip. You know, you can win with influence without flipping a single planet. An influence victory is based on ZOC and you can gain control of 75% of the galaxy without flipping planets.

Is the OP referring to single player and is he saying that he can't avoid winning with influence. I would really like to know how that works. Anytime I am going for a conquest victory I have no problem avoiding planet flips until their empire is devastated and victory is certain. At that point I frankly welcome the fact that I don't have to go through the tedious process of invading 15-20 planets that are beaten anyway. I look at as a feature ano a balance bug. Planet flipping is as much a part of conquest as it is influence victory.

If the invasion process is so slow that he is being awarded an influence victory before he can take them all out maybe it is a problem but I have never had that problem

jmho

The problem with influence is that the ai isn't combating it.  I accidentally wiped a map out with culture because I was just utilizing powerful planet features.  A snuggler colony with three embassies wiped three sides out inside 200 turns without pushing culture tech just because they didn't act to stop it.

It's not at all overpowered, just completely ignored by the AI decision making at this point.

I am all for limiting culture buildings to 1 per planet. Anything more is arguably an exploit and if they code it the AI can exploit with the best of us.

LOL, I'll have to try that snuggler thing now that I know you can build more than one embassy.

Quoting Franco, reply 5

Ahh, so this trait is giving you planets that you are going to get is 10 turns anyway. Not so powerful after all, if it is working as intended

Are you finding culture flips to be too easy? I am not. I won an influence victory on an immense map  but it took over 300 turns and did not come easy. I could have won a military victory long before that.

I don't understand how anyone can say that the AI is easy to flip. In the above game the Yor had the no flip trait and never lost a single planet to a flip. You know, you can win with influence without flipping a single planet. An influence victory is based on ZOC and you can gain control of 75% of the galaxy without flipping planets.

Is the OP referring to single player and is he saying that he can't avoid winning with influence. I would really like to know how that works. Anytime I am going for a conquest victory I have no problem avoiding planet flips until their empire is devastated and victory is certain. At that point I frankly welcome the fact that I don't have to go through the tedious process of invading 15-20 planets that are beaten anyway. I look at as a feature ano a balance bug. Planet flipping is as much a part of conquest as it is influence victory.

If the invasion process is so slow that he is being awarded an influence victory before he can take them all out maybe it is a problem but I have never had that problem

jmho

End of Franco's quote

A single good quality planet surrounded by influence star bases will cover the entire galaxy quite quickly on gigantic.  I don't have any saves left from the last game I played but I was one turn from a cultural victory about half way through the second tech age.  I turned it off to experiment a bit more before starting a new game.

The key is to use only your best planet for influence.  Other planets won't speed it up.  Benevolent makes it more broken but isn't necessary.

Plus in Beta 5 the influence effect suddenly jumps... I was gaining slowly on my surrounding foes as usual - hex here hex there - then a bit of jump when a (Benevalent Bonus) gave me a sudden Influence jump... then a at some point later after many turns of hexes here and there pushing my borders slowly forward I suddenly jumped from just on 20% of the map under my influence to nearly 40%... taking in almost all of one other nations and large chunks of two more...

I had this in the previous game but that was a test of Beta 5 on a small map and didn't look such a big jump. Gaining 20% of a large map in one turn was huge. Of course I had to wait for the enemy planets to flip but hey... I'm not complaining about free occupation

The benevolent trait that does a one time flip does flip Minors, which otherwise (I think) would ordinarily not flip due to ordinary influence.

Not Embassy, sorry, Consulate.  Embassy is +1 diplo.

The Snuggler does +2 adjacency, so ideally you could do a full circle and have all +4 structures, plus the 5% snuggler bonus.  This is actually not as great as it sounds, because the snuggler doesn't get boosts from being surrounded by the adjacency bonus granting Consulates.

If you just optimize the big single tile boosts from planet resources, you'll end up pushing vastly more influence than the AI is whether you end up creating a big producer or not, they built almost none as I rolled them over, even passing up +3 improvements to build something else with no adjacency bonuses.

In my current game I have been steadily expanding my influence but so far have flipped only a couple of planets.  But then I haven't put much effort into building influence buildings and haven't built any cultural star bases.

This is more like what my experience has been. The only culture bases I have built are the culture rings on the archaeology bases. They have not had any effect that I noticed but the culture tech has been truncated in the betas and a lot of the modules are not available.

I think culture flip is too easy indeed.
I had colonized a planet and several turns later when I had already built 1-2 improvements an alien race colonized the other planet in the solar system. In only 3-4 turns their influence started to push mine a lot. So I started building Influene imrpovements many turns later I had their planet in my influence and finally I got it.

What I discovered was a planet with only 4 imrovements low techs only 1 influence improvement and bad use of tiles. It's the only planet I got from another race the game later crashed to point of no return so I abandoned but.. this AI behavior is familar to me from GC2.
As humans we are smart enough to use our tiles the best way we can bonus tiles, improvements of the same type together, build this kind or the other depend what's best per planet. But AI? Well no I haven't seen in GC2 good use of tile space and I don't see it here or at least I hope to see it.

In GC2 I remember I was taking planets by culture flip or by force very late in game 300-400 turns and too many of them were half empty or not smart use of tiles.
Seriously? All my planets were fully built and upgraded to best tech at this stage of the game but AI seems to be slow.

So culture flip is just a side effect of AI strategy when it comes to planet use at least in GC3 and the one planet I got.

This is an area that we're focusing on right now actually.

Well good luck.. or I should say keep up the good work so far game looks more and more interesting despite the bugs.

It also grabs starbases, which you normally can't grab.

else, the math for influence is also questionable (not just the AI).  I don't know the current math, but it appears that Influence only grows over time and it's a contest to see who can grow it faster, with no downside to deleting influence buildings once you get 'enough'.

That in and of itself is a problem.

The game mechanic really should be similar to --

Inf range of planet (Ie, what's the maximum distance this planet can affect)

Inf strength of planet (how much Influence does it produce)

Each hex (starting from planet) gets a (planet strength / distance from planet) value out to planet range. (PS/1, PS/2, ..., PS/PR)

Where Planet range is mod'd to a 1-100% range.  (1 hex from planet = 100%, max range from planet = 1%)

Sum all Inf from all sources. 

Contest vs other influence producers.

Simple and straight forward.  Plus, if you modify the range or strength of the planet (by adding or deleting improvements/upgrading them) it modifies it on the map right away.

One of the big issues is that the massive bonuses you can get from say, UP HQ or that benevolent trait boost the influence that's already been generated in addition to boosting future generation. You go from having reasonable borders given your influence production to having massive ones in a single turn. Those big bonuses should only work on any future points generation and not what you've already built up imo.

@Frogboy, I got a fairly good save game where it starts to get out of hand.  Conquest victories will probably never happen with the current balance.

This is what I'm afraid of and it's why I turn off influence victory...every game.

Great idea, this sounds like the perfect solution to me. If you are playing single player, just turn it off and forgetaboutit. 

I realize that with the I victory turned off planets might still flip but as long as the outcome is a conquest V, what's the difference. In any war as the stronger faction starts closing in major segments of enemy territory come under siege and start collapsing without a shot being fired. In a way it mimics surrender.

"All we have to do is kick down the door and the whole rotten structure will come falling down"

FWIW, in GC2 if you turned off cultural victory but then culture flipped every planet in the entire galaxy, it counted as a military victory.

Sounds good to me. I wondered what would happen if the last planet flipped before you could invade. 

Hell, this sounds like a feature to me. One of my biggest complaints about conquest victory was the need to kill off every single, out of the way, dinky little, class 4 planet to win. This way when you have crushed them and they are losing every battle, they will collapse and save you the trouble of the mop up. 

If the fight is still even and you have not pursued any cultural/influence advantages in the closet, their planets shouldn't be flipping any more than yours are. If I didn't want to flip any planets, I wouldn't build a single consulate, I would destroy all the snuggle bunnies in favor of a military improvement and generally disdain anything having to do with influence.

If that doesn't work and you want the immersion of crushing every planet by invasion, it shouldn't be that hard to mod any trace of culture and influence out of the game.