Counter culture strategies

War always works well, be it from you or all the other races you paid off. In my last game the Torians were taking everyone to town (paid off the galaxy to fight them). They were winning, until I too thier home system (culturally, but military would work also). Suddenly they lost thier momentum and were overrun. They went from controling about 50% of the galaxy to about 15-20 in a year.

Another, be sure to trade for any influence tech they have. If they have techs raising influence that you don't, snag them post haste! This will greatly slow thier culture influencing you, as thier bonuses are now gone (while helping you on your other frontiers).

A cultural influence war can actually be as expensive as a military one in my experience. I got into one with the Arceans in my last game and we spent a few years building influence starbases around in each other and advancing our cultural techonology.

I ultimately won the "war" simply by being the better economist. I began buying up other races' favor and technologies to the point that even the Arceans were heavily interdependent with me that they happily agreed to an alliance and I won via diplomacy.

Alliances are also great since you can then flip you allies entire civilization without them doing anything.

In tune with using your diplomatic channels, if you have the cash try buying up their starbases. It aint cheap, but you can buy up their major source of influnce generation and add it to your own!

Plus plain old out teching them in terms of your influence works well. If your doing this I would avoid selling said techs to anyone else seeing how the AIs are willing to trade most any tech for the right price!

I'm finding it terribly easy to win Culture Victories.

Pretty much all it takes is ownership of 3 maxed-out (needs the Industry tech line) Influnce Mining bases, and a maxed-out influence tech line.

I won my last game (gigantic map, 7 enemies) without firing a shot. It took me about 5 total hours to go from one planet, to 85% coverage of the galaxy.

I'm finding it terribly easy to win Culture Victories. Pretty much all it takes is ownership of 3 maxed-out (needs the Industry tech line) Influnce Mining bases, and a maxed-out influence tech line. I won my last game (gigantic map, 7 enemies) without firing a shot. It took me about 5 total hours to go from one planet, to 85% coverage of the galaxy.

Hilarious.
I have had similar experiences but my latest game on "masochist" level is kinda different. The Torians are the ones with the 3 maxed out influence mines. I am not laughing this time.

Thanks for the feedback, those were some good ideas. I've got to try out tech trading more often, I tend to neglect that aspect of the game. There's so much going on at once, its hard to focus on it all.

by far the most important thing to defeat a culture threat is to get the cultural galactic achievements. I always get the restaurant of eternity, and the galactic showcase (I think that's it). and everything else you can. If you don't have them, then the others, Torians especially, will overwhelm you. Every once in a while I need to flat out buy it, but it's worth it. The result is that once I'm powerful enough (tech trading is where it's at), I only need to invade and seize the enemy's home planet and I take cultural control of virtually their entire empire. I was shocked the first time it happened, but I seized two planets in war, got three more in the peace deal, and almost all the others flipped to me within a few weeks. twas key.'

and, as metioned by others...trade technologies every single chance you get.

Especially trade older techs for money, one at a time. If you have laser I, II, & III, for instance, and the Torians have laser IV, you could still sell them the older techs, as long as you do them 1 at a time. Take the money you get, and buy another civ into making war against the bad guys. The only techs you should have on your trading list are the ones you definitely don't want shared around the galaxy. Also, if you do sell a tech to one civ, try to sell it to all the other civs. You may not get much, but you will get more than if your trading partner trades it to someone else before you.

I won my last game (gigantic map, 7 enemies) without firing a shot. It took me about 5 total hours to go from one planet, to 85% coverage of the galaxy.

Heh heh... can we ask what the difficulty level was?

I like taking the cultural victory approach myself, when I can... but as I've been bumping the difficulty, it gets much harder. Maybe on 'Beginner' difficulty (or lower!) you can acheive that in five hours (although even that sounds like a bit of an exaggeration with those galaxy settings). If you were to go as high as Tough or Challenging, it will be a very different story - not to mention the difficulty levels beyond those.

Basically, if you're finding it terribly easy to win cultural victories, you're probably playing at a Terribly Easy difficulty setting.

I have no trouble winning cultural victories, and though I haven't cranked it up to a particularly difficult level, I most certainly am not running at a beginner or "terribly easy" difficulty level. It takes a little tightening of the screws on your populace, and running on the bleeding edge a lot of the time, but if you can keep track of all the details and ride the curl (sorry, surfing metaphor but very appropriate) it can be done. The only thing I have a problem with is being patient enough to let every last planet of every race flip, I am constantly tempted to crank out a few insanely overpowered combat ships, knock out any protection on the last few planets, and fly in some heavily packed transports (3 adv. troop pods each, 2 ships per fleet, as I don't like destroying existing improvements, at least not until after I own the planet and see how badly the AI has allocated its available land).

I have no trouble winning cultural victories, and though I haven't cranked it up to a particularly difficult level, I most certainly am not running at a beginner or "terribly easy" difficulty level.

The difference even between 'Normal' and 'Challenging' is significant. I had 'no trouble' winning cultural wins at Beginner and Normal, and so far I can win a cultural victory on Challenging, but the AI gives me a good run for my money if that's the victory method that I'm going for. I wouldn't say 'no trouble' at that level.

And I was really just making reference to Funkstronaut's comment that he flipped a *gigantic map* with 7 civs, in *five hours*... there's *no way* that's happening on anything other than the easiest difficulties.

My current game on normal is turning into a real slug fest but after doing a little research on the forums it has been getting easier. Who would have thought i could make more money by lower my tax rate

Any how the damn Torians and Archeans are gobbling up the galaxy with massive culture. i was trying to go for a tech win but for some reason i cant keep researching and fighting a culture war; so i switched up and i am going for a diplomatic victory by way of war! Both the Toreans and Archeans have very weak military. After a couple of years it was me, torians, archeans, and the thalans (starting with 9). The thalans are losing the culture war. So i have been maxing out my research in war type stuff building military star bases around my border planets and have the 2nd largest military next to the thalans.. guess what coming next?!?!

Culture wars suck! its all about huge fleets and massive Destructo-matic Death Ships and Dominator Troop transports! ATTACK KILL EVERYTHING THAT BREATHS WATER OR HAS A FUNNY NOSE!!!

Heh heh... can we ask what the difficulty level was?

It was on Challanging. I've since moved to Tough, and I'm not going back.

The game is a little better now, but the same rules apply: Pump Influence with tech, and Wonders, and aquire Influence star bases by all means nescessary.

If you know the AI has a star base that is going to give you a huge edge in a culture victory... spend any amount on it. Chances are that if you get 1 Influence Base from a couple different Civs... then you won't need all that bling, because the game is going to be over soon, anyway.

Along similar lines to you Funk, I am winning cultural victories easily with those settings (Gigantic, sparse, Challenging)...

In fact, I'm having trouble with finding a balance in this game...

What I really want is to have massive fleet battles between more or less equally matched superpowers (more than two), so that I'm having to use some military strategy to win, not just out-teching and out-influencing them to death.

But my games (now on Tough) either go the route of my dying in short order (gotta improve my initial moves), or my overwhelming the galaxy on influence.

How in the blazes do I create a game where the influence is basically static? Personally, I'd turn off influence entirely if i could - it too often unbalances things for me.

In my last game I managed to win an military victory through influence on Large/Suicidal (i.e., conquering the entire galaxy with influence victory turned off simply by flipping every world). This took about 10 hours of game play. I could probably have cut that down a lot if I'd managed to get any of the influence resources at the start.

Initially it was very hard because of the AI's huge production and economic bonuses, but ironically the mid/late game moved much faster because the AI researched all the techs and built up their planets so quickly it created a cascade-- every world that flipped might have several industrial sectors pre-built, so I could just churn out farms & culture centers. At one point I was flipping 2-3 worlds per turn. It was strange winning a military victory without firing a shot

I just finished my 2nd game on masochistic level (dengrin domination). Wow what an experience after my 1st when the torians took me to the cleaners via influence.
I beat everyone one at a time but had a huge bit of luck early game when the torians who were at war with someone else surrendered to me (oh how I laughed).
Strange thing was after all these "I won influence victory in 10 minutes" posts was how little gain I ever got from influence. Yeah, I got planets every now and then but no windfalls, even tho I had all the achievements etc 5, yes 5 influence mines at max and dumped about 10 maxed out influence bases right in korxx territory on the same turn I bulit the 4th (at max) influence mine and took out the terrans.
It was quite dissapointing when i built all those 200-300 influence bases all in one turn after about a million mouse clicks and a lot of planning and preparation to get so little in return. I think difficulty level makes a big differnece to planet flipping.
In the end I just kicked ass in the traditional way to win.
One thing I did notice was sometimes I would destroy the fleet in orbit and the planet would "go red" for bad influence. That is undocumented right?

Oh and I also noticed the hyper computers at the end of the ecm tree - ohhh what a bonus (well it would have been if i had not maxed out most research already but worth bearing in mind for later games)

Strange thing was after all these "I won influence victory in 10 minutes" posts was how little gain I ever got from influence. Yeah, I got planets every now and then but no windfalls, even tho I had all the achievements etc 5, yes 5 influence mines at max and dumped about 10 maxed out influence bases right in korxx territory on the same turn I bulit the 4th (at max) influence mine and took out the terrans.

Influence mines act as a multiplier, so you need a strong base influence to get high flip rates. Since population creates influence, it creates a cascade effect-- as more worlds flip, your influence rate gets higher. The map can very quickly change from a half dozen pirate flags to every planet without a re-education center flying one.

Try hippie music. It worked in the 80's.

Oh, and also, search the galaxy for any influence resources, then gain control of them- by hook or by crook.

well what else can I do? Maxed out on influence tech, maxed out on all influence starbases (both types) got all the fruity achievements, the map was ALL red and still very few defections. I think in high lvl dificulty games influence cannot be relied upon.

well what else can I do? Maxed out on influence tech, maxed out on all influence starbases (both types) got all the fruity achievements, the map was ALL red and still very few defections. I think in high lvl dificulty games influence cannot be relied upon.

I don't think it's difficulty, I was able to get up to a max of 2-3 flips per turn on suicidal.

No one but the devs seem to know what determines the flip probability, other than you need a 4x advantage. I've heard loyalty, morale, proximity to homeworld, etc. all effect it. Maybe the races you were trying to flip had loyalty bonuses?

I have only played a few games, but despite my use of influence starbases, my territory was getting eroded away. By espionage I could tell that the Altarians were building 6-10 influence buildings on mutible planets. I invaded those 4 planets and sued for peace. In a couple of turns the influence war had flipped, and I was dominating them in influence.

Population is a big decider on influence. Build farms as well on influence producing planets. I've found that if you just grab the biggest planet (best PQ rating) in a sector, you can let the AI colonize the rest, as you'll flip the others eventually.

Were most of your Drengin planets 5B people?