How to counter decadence and check conversion

[Facemeister]

I'm not very experienced at the game so I wanted something easier for the start. I pick Ptolemaic Egypt, but right now I'm struggling a bit. I got crazy amounts of decadence from start, cant make any buildings to lower it yet. I also have a lot of egyptian culture, but I dont know how to check anything about religion or culture. Checking province details doesnt help much, I still dont know what is conversion rate or what religion is my state religion.

[Prometheus]

Culture is how you counter decadence. Your placement in the ranking you see every turn is based on how much culture you are making over how much decadence. The quickest solution is to put people into working culture. This also makes you a bit of money and increases loyalty.

Do not be afraid of decadence making buildings. Regional decadence degrades by 10% each turn. So a building doesn't give you infinitely upscaling decadence until it overcomes you. Take the monument you have probably seen. When its decadence is fully spun up it is giving you 10 culture but only 2.5 decadence. So you are winning the ratio.

Note that any given category of building has tiers. You can access tier 2 when you have 3 buildings of its type made, and tier 3 with 6 buildings. Note that these are separated by type even if they share the same line in the UI. So infrastructure (yellow) do not advance the tier of military (red) buildings. If you really want to boost your culture you want those tier 2 and tier 3 buildings.

Final note here. Don't panic if you dip in the rankings because of some early conquests. The rankings tend to be very close early on so a little bit of change can swing you pretty wildly. Plus you get a shot of extra decadence when conquering a new territory but the 10% per turn degradation still applies. As long as you don't let yourself stay in the bottom third for so long you regress it'll be fine. Get the territory you need, stabilize your culture, expand a bit more and so on. As you get bigger new conquests will hit your ratio less and less so you'll see smaller and smaller swings.


As for your religion. Its all tied up into your pop's ethnicity. As egypt you likely have a mix of egyptian, hellenic and desert nomads. The non-egyptians will convert gradually and you'll get decisions and events to help push that along.

[starbuck310]

The tier 3 buildings give some great bonuses. Also you need to develop your cities as you expand. Slow expansion and develop your cities.

[Facemeister]

I didnt knew that you can switch population between food, culture, infastructure, money and I'm surprised that I'm losing money and CDR is not high enough. Thanks for fast responses.

[starbuck310]

You can make them into a Provence to and set various manpower levels across the whole Provence. Check the tab. You can also fine tune each regions manpower click on the manpower and it will allow it to be moved from say agriculture to culture

[Facemeister]

Okay, now I regressed in my government to old monarchy and suddenly dropped 100 more decadence. I was on 1,76 ratio and still was progressing in aging tokens, now I dropped to 0,88 so how I can stop this from regressing? When I drop one level its just game over because decadence take over?

[Facemeister]

Okay, some random "desert tribes" just took one of my provinces. I wanted to get it back but Cyrene just get there and snatched it. Now I need to wage war on them? Also I have 25% of getting aging tokens, but somehow I got 7 in 19 turns. Nice. Right now I'm so annoyed by this game that I probably stop playing it.

PS I got status age penalty +139. I regressed in government rank and get some nasty modifiers. What game does? Add twice more decadence so I can crumble at much higher rate...

[starbuck310]

I expect you expanded too quickly without developing your regions. Less war more build ;-) Get rid of all regions not in a provence. Your annoyed? Its working as intended. Its a great game and FoG2 for battles is a perfect combination IMHO. I play some modded total war. This has it beat easy.

[Facemeister]

Yeah, expanded too quickly getting 0 provinces.

BTW I got status age penalty at +200 without getting any new provinces. I had most of my population working on culture but my CDR is still tanking.

PS If this is beating TW so easily tell me where I can find my conversion rate details, how many pops converted from egyptian to hellenic, etc.

[securitas04]

I won my Aegypt campaign in 100 turns:

http://www.slitherine.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=563&t=98992

Here are 4 save game files from my Aegypt campaign:

https://we.tl/t-92OLKXfTr3

Just DL them into your save game folder and open them up in game. You can check out what I did in detail.

One strategy is to use diplomacy to add Nubia, Aethiopia and Cyrene as Client States. This seals your borders with buffer states and doesn't give you decadence from conquest. Then concentrate on culture. Also, plenty of buildings don't add any decadence. Build those. If you do conquer a region, deconstruct any buildings that cause decadence.

P.S. This is from the manual (chapter 6.3.4) on ethnic conversion:

You can slowly change the ethnicity of your population by enacting
certain decisions. The chance of a given population point converting
to your ethnicity is related to their underlying unrest value (6.4.2,
derived from their own ethnicity). Basically a Germanic population
point is less likely to change ethnicity than a Hellenic one.

I don't know how this works exactly because I win anyway. Good luck!

[Facemeister]

Yeah, but buildings and conquest isnt my main problem with increasing decadence. It was mostly growing because I dropped to Old Monarchy. Suddenly my decadence was over 100 from that and after few turns it grown to 200.

[starbuck310]

Conversion rate is a % in the city screen. It also includes all the ethnic groups in the region in the mouse over. It will convert a small % over time depending on various factors. Some buildings give this a % boost like 5 or 10%. I like the random building allocation in empires. TW it’s on rails.

[securitas04]

Facemeister, once you are in decline, it's hard to turn it around. Have a look at the files I posted and give it another shot.

Here's a link to a lot of general tips I made:

http://www.slitherine.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=563&t=98599