Culture flipping and reloads

I had a number of enemy planets showing the little red "in danger of flipping" icon and figured I would just let them flip instead of invading them - my brilliant AI enemy had sent colony ships into my territory to claim "extreme" worlds and I let them through.

One planet flipped to me, but the game crashed.

I reloaded, and the planet did not flip - I figure there is randomness, so no biggie. I noticed the red icon was no longer there though.

I only had short periods of time to play in this time though, so I'd play just a couple turns at a time...and I noticed none of these planets *deep* within my territory were flipping (and I was destroying any ships they built to garrison).

This leads me to wonder if culture flipping gets reset by saving and loading?

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Mumblefratz

Join Date 07/2006

+139

I'm pretty sure it does. At least the way it worked in DL is that every turn foreign influence is four times greater than the planets native influence, the planet "rolls" to determine whether or not it will "flip". It takes two successful rolls for a planet to flip. On the first successful roll the pirate flag is set for that planet. Once the flag is set then one more successful roll will cause the planet to flip. The flag is cleared once the ratio drops below 4 but the state of this flag is not remembered in the save game. So effectively you need to start over when loading a save game. This means that late in the game when turns get very long it can become virtually impossible to culture flip planets. This may be getting fixed in DA/TA v2.0 and above.

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whismerhill

Join Date 03/2006

+19

the major problem I think with influence is that even if you get x12 or x24 ratio on a planet, it won't flip any faster than an x4 planet... (not sure, but it's what I remembered from the DL days ...)

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WIllythemailboy

Join Date 03/2006

+70

This is still essentially true up to TA 1.96, at least. It is impossible to get a planet to flip on the first turn after loading, and nearly impossible on the second. After 3 or 4 turns the rate will be back to what it should be. Even with the fixed Mind Control Center in TA, planets will not flip the first turn after loading.

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Planetary influence does not immediately take effect after a game loads. Actually, the root of the problem is that the game does not incorporate influence bonuses initially. It takes some event in the galaxy to cause a recalc, like a starbase being built or a planet being acquired or any other event that affects influence. In a quiet game phase, it can take several turns for this to happen. You can force a recalc manually by building an influence starbase before taking the first turn, then again by deleting it the next time you take a first turn. It has been this way since the beginning. I've actually used it to my advantage on occasion. There are times you may not want a planet to flip your way. For example, an evil freindly race with a big military is down to its last planet. If it flips, you'll end up with a boatload of pirates to contend with. I may close the game after each turn until I can position my fighters to intercept them. This could be considered a cheat and probably should be fixed, but I think it's one of those things that's been overlooked all this time.

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