I already knew their strong point was culture and thats great but can anyone tell me what culture does? Every planet I took still involved fleet actions to capture it. I was expecting culture to reduce my bombardment time, or cause planets to convert to my side automatically... Never happened.
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Culture is a secondary mechanic. You can't really win games through culture directly, but it can help in various ways:
- Culture increases allegiance of friendly planets. You'll notice that each jump away from your capital reduces the planets' allegiances. One jump away and the planet is already at 90%, only generating 90% income from the taxes and mines. Culture raises the max allegiance by 10% on every planet affected by it, so across the empire you get higher incomes. The Advent have a tech that further increases max allegiance (another 10%) through culture.
- It decreases hostile planets' allegiance. If your culture overtakes an enemy's and fully spreads to a planet of theirs, that planet will start losing allegiance. When it drops to 0, the colony will rebel and flip to neutral. The process is somewhat slow, but still there. In addition, that planet will make less and less money while the allegiance keeps dropping. To see allegiance gain/loss/status, select the planet you want to look at, and at the bottom center of the screen to the left of the portait there will be some numbers. The top is the current health, the middle is allegiance - hover over it to open up an info card that has allegiance stats.
- Each race has friendly culture bonuses. These are researched in the culture techs. The TEC's ships recharge antimatter faster in friendly culture. Vasari ships do more damage, and Advent ships have higher shield mitigation so they take less damage.
Also, does Culture stack? Fictional example, I put a Broadcast station at my Homeworld right at the start, and half an hour later, my culture has extended 4 jumps away. I capture a border planet, 3 jumps away (within my culture radius) and put another Broadcast station there. Will my culture from that planet spread faster? Will the culture effect (whatever it is) be stronger?
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Yes, culture spread stacks. The way it works is that every jump diminishes culture spread. The more culture you generate, the faster and farther it will move before diminishing completely. In your example, the left over culture from your capital should be added to the output from the new colony, but the info cards will not show this, they only show the raw culture output of the planet (hover over the planet, and it will have a line for culture/sec).
That said, allegiance gain/loss is actually capped. So lots of culture can overwhelm an enemy planet faster, but it will still decrease allegiance at a capped rate.
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