How to counter enemy culture?

Lose

It takes a while for the culture to fade and allow you to colonize, the best thing I found to do was to leave a ship or two behind to prevent the AI from re-colonizing, and then keep moving the bulk of your fleet forward. You need to be knocking out broadcast centers to deplete the influence, so you need to bring a large enough fleet to be able to mow through several planets with relative ease, otherwise it'll be real slow.

Your capital ships *should* also help drop influence faster, the tooltip says they slow the spread, and I imagine that also mean they contribute to the drop once the colony is destroyed, but that's something I can't really confirm by myself

I didn't notice it take very long for the enemy culture to drop when I invaded. But maybe it was only partially developed to begin with.

I think I made the mistake of taking out the home planet first, as the longest oldest planet the culture never faded away to allow me to colonize it, I'll reload and try another outlying planet first and try and crack into the system that way.

depends how many broadcast centers were around that planet, I've noticed if its 2 or more, you almost have to destroy them to be able to see the culture lines recede.

I don't remember. There was at least one broadcast center. I think most of the stuff in orbit was gone before the colony was destroyed, so the culture was probably already decreasing by the time I was looking for it.

finally managed to colonise a planet last night, had to take that planet, and the two planets beside it, kill all the broadcast towers, there was 2 per planet, and then finally the culture link was broken and I could colonise in that star system.

Also I had to turn off auto colonise as the my ship kept on colonising the planet only to have it turn enemy instantly. which meant I had to bombard it again!

Are you playing the most recent version? What you are describing should not happen in the current build -- the planet should be yours long enough to build a broadcast center, at the very least.

I am playing the Beta 3, is there a new verion of that? The planet goes back to enemy instantly.

There was a beta two patch with that (much needed) feature! BUG ALERT!

It shouldn't. In my experience, once the culture drops low enough that the planet can be taken, there's a warning on it saying it'll flip back shortly. In my case the culture was decaying still though, so the message disappeared after a bit and the planet never flipped.

Orion, do you have a replay that shows the planet instantly flipping?

Hmmm, I'll try and find one. The enemy culture was high enough that the planet was flipping from "cannot colonise" to can, and my ship was on auto colonise, so when the planet was colonised it instantly flipped.

I'll try and dig out a save game.

Send some American's over to the enemy; that should destroy their culture.

You will need to kill broadcast centers. Generaly N (the variable) braodcast centers on 1 planet can reach planets N jumps away. Again generaly the computor (and as should you) should only build braodcast centers on 1 or 2 planets (much better effect then building 1 on each planet as this way requires less logistic and has more tactical advantages). What this means is find the farthest thing from there planets and start there. Then go fourth and attack all his planets. You will be able to colonize the second you destroy enough broadcast centers (when number of jumps is > then broadcast centers.)

I now have a record of the colony flipping, how do I get it to you?

No -- you need more than just 1 or 2 planets having them, since the cultural boost also increases income gathered. On smaller maps you're quite right -- on larger maps you need as many as you need, but only one per planet except at border worlds.

Email it to [email protected] witha note about what happens (and when and where in the replay), and a note that the colony prohibition needs to be extended a bit longer since instaflips are still possible right as it expires.