I can get them to defect pretty easily with 2 upgraded ISBs.

I think the majority of players don't care for influence victories so the trend has been to make it harder and harder to get the cultural victory. This would make sense if the difficulty was added to the high difficulty levels but I think it extends all the way down to cakewalk.

I might be wrong about this since I am playing only on the tough level now but I believe the coding for planets flipping is the same for all levels. Maybe I should try an easier level and see.

I like the culture victory route as a way to end the game and the later versions have all but stopped me from playing the bigger maps. I piddled around with a gigantic map recently and I couldn't even cheat my way to a culture victory without going to war with the last standing civ.

I will qualify this by saying that I could have culture bombed them with influence bases next to their planets. That might or might not have led to war but it probably would have. Jason is correct that a couple of maxed out i bases will flip them and usually get a domino thing going.

What you can't do anymore is win a cultural victory by owning and maxing out every (4-5) influence resource in the galaxy along with researching evey culture bonus tech and filling your planets with cultural exchanges.

Personally I think it has been over-nerfed but I may be the only player in the galaxy that thinks so.

I've suffered the same issues both with and without a Mind Control Center. As a matter of fact, I have never flipped a planet once I built the Mind Control Center. I've thought morale had something to do with it but even planets under 50% morale refused to turn. Sometimes, pushing the score higher than 4 helps but certainly not always. Ironically, the few times my planets are under threat of flipping, they never last a month in the danger zone. Not fair! (sniff)

The drop in influence in the native ability options, the antagonizing effect of starbases near planets (often resulting in wars) and the threat the AI sees in being near a nation that has a certain amount of influence has discouraged me from trying to use it as a weapon. After all, once the AI notices it's losing the influence war, it'll just start a real one so I learned to just skip the niceties and open fire first.

I really like culture as a means of expanding but the reduction in effectiveness has forced me to seek out other means of galactic domination. No longer am I selling genetically engineered Florida oranges with added sigar taste (Yuk ), instead, I'm handing out the latest Psionic Phaser Pummeller to whoever wants to use it against the...well, bad guys so to speak.

Nope, no problem with flipping planets in 1.11, I have even flipped the Drengin homeworld in one game fairly early on with just one influence starbase two parsecs from it.

I think the majority of players don't care for influence victories so the trend has been to make it harder and harder to get the cultural victory. This would make sense if the difficulty was added to the high difficulty levels but I think it extends all the way down to cakewalk.

Remember that flipping planets and winning a cultural victory are two different sides of the coin: You don't need to flip a single planet to win a cultural victory. Hence your argument doesn't make much sense.

I had planets flipping very rarely in my latest game on suicidal (version 1.11), although I own the Mind Control Centre (I don't think it does anything though). I own all four influence resources on the map but only two planets defected on this huge map in total.

Remember that flipping planets and winning a cultural victory are two different sides of the coin

Yes and no.

I have won many cultural victories without flipping a single planet but on a huge or gigantic map it is impossible to extend your influence enough to take over the galaxy with influence mining, influence buildings and influence techs.

The only way to reach out and touch them without going to war is to culture bomb them with influence bases which will likely result in a war anyway. To say that flipping planets has nothing to do with a cultural victory is what doesn't make sense.

e-stab, I defer to you as a top player but frankly I doubt you know much about culture victories. I notice you have one such victory and I wonder how many planets you conquered by force to set up that victory. Come back when you have won a cultural victory without ever researching planetary invasion.

Also experienced this. As an evil race I was doing ok flipping planets, once I built the mind control wonder, NOT A SINGLE PLANET flipped, EVER
They could have (25.0) influence for several years and still they refused to flip.
Thats just.. wrong
I had 15 planets with revolt icon for 3 years, none of em flipped after I built the mind control wonder. Before that it was quite slow to get em to flip aswell.

After upgrading to the latest 1.2 beta patch, this appears to be fixed. I got tired of playing my current game, so I decided to go for a tech victory and just max out my research and press the turn button over and over again without doing anything else, which only took about 20 turns after that. During that time, six enemy planets actually defected to me. So never mind!