Now for those who want to play along ... my game plan was to seal the AIs in, back fill my land, build wonders and to then crank up the cultural slider to reclaim the AIs tiles. As a tile was clawed back, I would rush in a settler to build a new front line culture hammer city. Lets follow 1 particular tile as the game developes ... below is a shot of Karaorum going into revolt. Take note of the forested hill three tiles directly South of Karaorum and the tile directly South of that tile. Both of these tiles (and actually the next tile South too) are eligable places to build a city (ie no other city within three tiles).
Here is a better shot ... I've circled the three tiles in question. They are all well within Khan's control (at the moment).
The next picture shows Karakorum (a capital!) flipping to me. I actually got Monty's capital to flip too. The picture also shows that I have placed a sign on the location that I *can* build a city
A decade later, the tile situation has changed considerably ... these possible city locations are almost within my reach. If you look closely, I have a settler ready and waiting to go. I also have a stockpile of missionaries, multiple religions and also backups to found the city and then pile my religions in there too. I am running Free Religion at this stage (see later screenshot for the religous mix I ended up with).
Another decade and I now control the tiles I need. The new city is founded and a theatre is started. These cities are critical to the success of this operation. The AIs have improved the tiles, fully farmed and cottaged ... actually fully grown cottages commonly called towns :lol: are just ready for my use. I plop a city down and it goes straigh into full growth mode, running at 60% culture slider means the border pop at 10 culture happens in the first round. Flipped cities would restart their culture counter at zero but would be putting out 60-80 culture per turn from round 1, that nets me 3 culture border pops inside of 6-8 rounds!
Turfan finally flips to me in 1971. Notice my 'new' town is already size 3 and will grow to size 4 in 4 more turns.
And here is where I get to repeat the process ... a new settler building another city. You can see that earlier city has now grown to size 9 while Turfan has regrown from size 1 (the size when it flipped) to 15. Looking back, I should have built a grainery first off followed by a theatre so that it would grow quicker :duh:. Also note the crazy gold that I am generating. I really think you should be able to deficit spend in this situation, pushing your multipler to 110% or 120% (as long as your cashflow remains positive).
Ok, pop quiz (as they say in the movies), which city was the naturally build one (ie settled by the player or AI to take account of the terrain) and which was the one that was squeezed in much later?
