How to take over a city using loyalty

[Jaraxxus]

We've has been fighting against Georgia since ancient times, but I'm on the highest difficulty level and now she has such a tech advantage that my best attacks do nothing to her. The only possibility is to cause a revolt in the capital, but I don't know how to go about it. That is, apart from founding cities around and assigning this governor with an appropriate promotion. I noticed the spy mission "cause unrest" but I don't really know how it works. "Reduces loyalty to the enemy" - who is this enemy? If we're at war, it's probably me, but then who would need this mission, and it's always available, so if Georgia isn't at war, who is the loyalty against? There is nothing about it on civilopedia. And in this case should I end the war with her? Because it leads to war fatigue, which leads to a decrease in satisfaction, which ultimately leads to a decrease in loyalty, so it's good for me, but I don't know if it's logical for a city to want to join the enemy, maybe it will be easier without it? Does anyone know any other tricks to do this? Thank you for every answer.

[TheNightglow]

huh?
you place a spy in a non-allied city, then Foment Unrest will reduce the loyalty of that specific city

i m not sure where you are getting the "Reduces loyalty to the enemy" from?
the description of this spy action should read something like "Reduces the citys loyalty by 25"
anyway this action has nothing to do with war or enemies, it just targets the city your spy is in

if you want to rebel a city, a one time reduction of loyalty wont really help you if the city isnt already loosing loyalty or is currently low, as the city just gonna regain the loyalty again
the mission "Neutralize Governor" is better, as a governor gives the city i believe +8 loyalty each turn (maybe even more depending on policy cards and governor), so removing the governor reduces the loyalty generation of the city

if you hover over the loyalty bar of the city, you see the current loyalty gain or loss per turn, how high is it right now?

also "Recruit Partisans" (only available at neighbourhood) is brokenly overpowered, it just summons an entire army of the citys tech level
you say georgias tech is too high for you? well it wont be too high for the partisans, they might very well just break down the city to 0 health

[grognardgary]

Okay loyalty range is 9 hexes. Loyalty is directly related to population with adds for monuments, governors. some districts and some wonders however at 10 hexes it is zero.
So if you don't have a city within 10 hexes of his capital and probably multiple cities you aren't going to flip his capital.

[plaguepenguin]

You flip a city by getting their loyalty below zero. That happens if the loyalty pressure from your cities is greater than the pressure from theirs, for long enough that each turn's negative loyalty gets them down from the 100 of full loyalty, all the way to zero.

The basic factors in determining how much loyalty pressure a city applies is its population and how far away it is from the target enemy city. High population and close proximity create create greater pressure, with the population of the target city itself being the most powerful, since it is at no distance from itself.

This alone makes the enemy capital quite difficult to flip from loyalty. It's the other civ's oldest city, it started in at least a fairly good spot, so it's likely to have a high population. Worse for the prospects of taking it by loyalty, it is likely surrounded by the next oldest and largest enemy cities, all of them exerting loyalty pressure, because empires mostly grow by spreading out from the capital over time, the nearest sites occupied first, because the closer the cities the better they can support each other in war, and supply district adjacencies in peace.

Expansion by flipping cities only has a chance at the edges of an enemy empire, where you have more nearby cities exerting pressure than your enemy can match. Unless Georgia's capital is -- quite unusually -- right on the border with your empire, and you have bigger cities closer than it has the same, flipping the capital isn't going to work. You could include a screen capture if the situation seems in doubt, but I can't say I have ever seen loyalty alone succeed at taking a capital, unless preceded by conquering most of your victim's cites next to its capital, and you tell us that conquest is not possible here, at least not now.

There are modifiers to the basics of population and proximity. Having a governor in a city gives it +8 on defensive pressure, with Amani and Victor having promotions that let them exert influence on other cities. The defensive +8 is weighty, but the effects on nearby cities aren't so large, and I have never seen them permit aggressive flipping, loyalty conquest that isn't just a late stage adjunct to conquest by armed force.

You mention the spy mission that decreases loyalty. It does so, if successful, by -20, which is big, but it's only a one-time effect, so you would need five of them on the same turn to get loyalty from 100 all the way to zero. I believe that only one spy can be working on the loyalty reduction at any one time, so the -20 can't get you down to zero unless the target city is already 20 or less.

Even worse for you, the -20 only gets the city down to zero loyalty, not negative loyalty, and it doesn't flip until after its loyalty pressure for that turn is added to the zero the spy managed to get it down to. The result is that loyalty pressure per turn on a city has to be negative from all other factors, for being at zero or below from this spy mission to make it flip. The decrease loyalty mission only works as an adjunct, to get your target to zero loyalty more quickly in a setting where the loyalty per turn is already negative.

Another spy mission, "neutralize governor", is actually more effective at flipping, because it removes that +8 from the governor that the target city gets every turn, not just as a one-time effect like the "incite unrest" mission. That still only results in a flip if your target needs the governor's +8 to keep its head above water, to keep its per turn loyalty positive. It seems unlikely that Georgia's capital needs its governor in order to stay in positive loyalty pressure territory.

You're going to have to find some other way to deal with Georgia. At Deity you often have to bide your time, and, even if a neighbor needs to eventually be conquered, come up with a way to either conquer or at least stymy it some other way, figuring out how to do that as a medium or long range plan, rather than right away. The only exception is if your are completely hemmed in and can't expand right from the beginning. You can't be that badly hemmed in if you're still standing all the way to the Renaissance and spies, so overseas expansion may be a possible way out of being hemmed in by Georgia. There are all sorts of ways forward, but loyalty flipping does not seem to be one of them in the situation as far as you have described it.

[Evrach]

Maybe you should just restart a game, but at a lower difficulty ?

[colostmy4]

You can also reduce a city's loyalty if you play with the secret societies mod and have voidsingers as your secret society. The units that you make with that society can reduce a city's loyalty as well as produce for you a nice artifact to improve your religion and tourism.

[Jaraxxus]

Originally posted by plaguepenguin:

Expansion by flipping cities only has a chance at the edges of an enemy empire, where you have more nearby cities exerting pressure than your enemy can match. Unless Georgia's capital is -- quite unusually -- right on the border with your empire, and you have bigger cities closer than it has the same, flipping the capital isn't going to work. You could include a screen capture if the situation seems in doubt, but I can't say I have ever seen loyalty alone succeed at taking a capital, unless preceded by conquering most of your victim's cites next to its capital, and you tell us that conquest is not possible here, at least not now.

I should mention that I play on heroic ages mode and on it I had situations where entire empires were transformed into free cities, Georgia has a dark age and I have a golden age and a rebellious city next to it and there are no other cities. In this situation, it seems quite likely that I will be able to do it if I do everything I can perfectly. I would add screenshots if I knew how.

Originally posted by TheNightglow:

i m not sure where you are getting the "Reduces loyalty to the enemy" from?
the description of this spy action should read something like "Reduces the citys loyalty by 25"
anyway this action has nothing to do with war or enemies, it just targets the city your spy is in

also "Recruit Partisans" (only available at neighbourhood) is brokenly overpowered, it just summons an entire army of the citys tech level
you say georgias tech is too high for you? well it wont be too high for the partisans, they might very well just break down the city to 0 health

(1) in my case it is written like this and it is -20 not -25
(2) there is no housing district and it was always the case that when I did these missions there was one rebel or they all died before my turn started, so I don't know where you got the idea that they are strong enough to conquer the city


And she doesn't have a governor there either

[jmerry82]

That spy mission reduces the current owner's loyalty. And while you might or might not be at war with them, they're certainly not your ally - because you can't place spies in an ally's city.

And the "reduce loyalty" mission can be pretty good in the right circumstances. With a newbie spy and no mission speed improvements at standard speed, it's 20 loyalty for eight turns of effort - not worth it. But that loyalty increases by 5 per promotion on the spy, and there are several ways to make missions complete faster (a policy card, a spy promotion, and cultural dominance over the target). In a game I just finished (domination plan, actually won by culture), I had a master spy knocking off 35 loyalty every two turns.

Low loyalty also has effects beyond flipping - reduced yields and growth in that city. A spy repeating that mission with the right boosts can cripple a city even if they don't flip it.

[KingKickAss]

I'll give it to you in bullet points to make it easy.
-Governor Amani.
-Higher population a city has, the stronger the loyalty.
---This also affects the loyalty pressure it puts on other cities(High pop cities reduce loyalty of other civs nearby).
-Governors add +8 to the loyalty of a city(can knock them out with a spy).
-Spy mission that reduces the loyalty of a city.
-Project for the Entertainment Complex district amplifies loyalty pressure based on population.
-Golden Age buffs loyalty.
-Dark Age reduces loyalty.

So if you're a generic civ and you want to just do a loyalty attack on someone, have high population cities all over their border with Entertainment Complexes constantly running their project. This kind of thing only really works if their cities are set up in a way where loyalty is bad, its hard to flip someone with a bunch of cities unless you're playing Eleanor.

[plaguepenguin]

Originally posted by jaroslaw20b:

Originally posted by plaguepenguin:

Expansion by flipping cities only has a chance at the edges of an enemy empire, where you have more nearby cities exerting pressure than your enemy can match. Unless Georgia's capital is -- quite unusually -- right on the border with your empire, and you have bigger cities closer than it has the same, flipping the capital isn't going to work. You could include a screen capture if the situation seems in doubt, but I can't say I have ever seen loyalty alone succeed at taking a capital, unless preceded by conquering most of your victim's cites next to its capital, and you tell us that conquest is not possible here, at least not now.

I should mention that I play on heroic ages mode and on it I had situations where entire empires were transformed into free cities, Georgia has a dark age and I have a golden age and a rebellious city next to it and there are no other cities. In this situation, it seems quite likely that I will be able to do it if I do everything I can perfectly. I would add screenshots if I knew how.

Originally posted by TheNightglow:

i m not sure where you are getting the "Reduces loyalty to the enemy" from?
the description of this spy action should read something like "Reduces the citys loyalty by 25"
anyway this action has nothing to do with war or enemies, it just targets the city your spy is in

also "Recruit Partisans" (only available at neighbourhood) is brokenly overpowered, it just summons an entire army of the citys tech level
you say georgias tech is too high for you? well it wont be too high for the partisans, they might very well just break down the city to 0 health

(1) in my case it is written like this and it is -20 not -25
(2) there is no housing district and it was always the case that when I did these missions there was one rebel or they all died before my turn started, so I don't know where you got the idea that they are strong enough to conquer the city


And she doesn't have a governor there either

Okay, so flipping the capital may be doable, because it sounds like Georgia's capital now lacks favorable loyalty pressure from its own cities -- if I understand correctly what you are saying about "a rebellious city next to it and there are no other cities". If this is accurate, great, no defensive pressure except what the capital itself exerts.

That said, there is that defensive pressure from the capital itself, which I imagine is a reasonably large city, and whose pop points suffer no attenuation from distance. To flip you still need offensive pressure on the capital greater than this defense. Do you have nearby cities to exert this pressure? You're not getting this done just with spy missions. Your target has to be losing loyalty already for the -20 from the spy to even help the effort, and you need cities within 9 tiles exerting enough pressure to get the per turn loyalty into negative territory, because if the per turn is positive, your target will just climb back towards 100, full loyalty to Georgia.

It may be that you don't need to do anything further. Maybe Tbilisi (that is Georgia's capital, right?) is now close enough to enough of your cities that have high enough pop that its per turn loyalty is already in negative territory and it will flip to you soon enough. Use a spy to hasten the end if you want. However, if Tbilisi is not already losing loyalty every turn, the thing you need to do is to acquire pop points close to it to create enough loyalty pressure to send it into negative territory. Capture that "rebel city" near it, plus any others within 9 tiles, to turn their population points into sources of loyalty pressure on your target. Settle new cities within 9 tiles, if there are empty spaces, and they would not themselves succumb to Georgian loyalty pressure. That's the foundation, pressure from your pop points that are nearby.

You can check the relevant numbers on Tbilisi's city display. I have to be a bit cautious here, because I have had UI mods installed for so long that I have no memory if what is easy for me to see is standard game, or is courtesy of one of my mods. That said, enemy cities in my game have a loyalty icon to the left of the city name on that scroll that sits over the city. A green up arrow there means it is gaining loyalty per turn, while a red down arrow means it's losing loyalty every turn. On my map, I can turn on a loyalty lens, which adds a bar below the scroll with the city name that displays where the loyalty is currently, anywhere between full loyalty of 100 and 0. There is an arrow to the left of that bar that tells you exactly how many points of loyalty the city is gaining or losing every turn.

[grognardgary]

And note even if through spies are what ever you managed to flip it to a free city if you don't have enough offensive pressure coming from your own cities to flip it again unless it is the only civ left other than your own you likely only made your situation worse since free cities will autonatically start out with the most advance units available in the game

[Jaraxxus]

4 cities founded just to rebel the capitals, and then georgia reaches the golden era and all for nothing. 7 turns before reaching the goal. I could do it, so for all readers - it is possible, but you still have to take time into account.

[Goof]

The Bread and Circuses project can flip cities very quickly if within 9 tiles. the Loyalty pressure that EACH population in the city exerts, is boosted by 1.