Concept for growing borders with culture again.

[dusky granite]

I like the way that borders grow now by building improvements, but the problem is it makes culture kind of useless on a city by city basis. I have an idea which is that you have your hard borders that grow from placing improvements and your cultural borders which grow tile by tile from culture, like borders in civ5/6. If you settle a city inside your cultural borders it starts with +1 pop, and the AI cannot settle within your cultural borders. This would mean if theres a hole in your empires borders it gets filled it by your cultural borders, so the ai can’t put annoying cities down and encourages you to eventually settle it. If you culture bomb into your cultural borders with an improvement the culture border tiles shift outwards.
The ai also can’t culture bomb your cultural borders and visa versa, and cultural borders can’t take over other civs hard borders. Although maybe the cultural borders could clash with each other, like civ 4 but less annoying.

This is a pretty basic idea of how this could work but I think it could be interesting. It would also help differentiate culture from science since right now they both have the exact same function of unlocking stuff on trees.

[foggy kindle]

this seems like an unnecessarily complicated concept for a very simple gameplay mechanic which will rarely come into play

[velvet orchid]

I kinda dig it. Best of both worlds scenario.

[unborn saffron]

I think part of it is "culture bomb" is an outdated term and doesn't actually make sense anymore since you can't buy tiles with culture anymore. It's more like a "growth bomb" now.

Culture gives you access to policy cards which encourage you to plan your settlements in a certain way to maximise the selected cards, which in my opinion is far more on theme than culture somehow making you acquire more land.

[dusky granite]

To be honest i don’t mind if this is never implemented but I like when you have a high culture game in 6 and get extremely fat borders and that just isn’t a thing anymore. Like i remember having a Māori game where my borders were connected across the whole ocean and that is missing from 7.

[velvet orchid]

Culture does seem to be lacking an extra purpose besides advancing civics.

[foggy kindle]

What is the extra purpose of Science?

[velvet orchid]

I guess that is true, but science seems to give more benefits, most especially with unit upgrades that are essential to defend let alone attack.

[high palm]

Yeah, I always thought it was weird that culture magically made your borders grow, and the new system of food and working a tile is a much more realistic system. It would be kind of interesting if you could still secure tiles from the AI by purchasing them with gold (which is also historically on theme), but I am not sure how that would mesh with the current system.