So I got the message that cultural conversion has begun on one of my outposts. Is there any way to stop or avert this???

Produce more influence than your neighbor. 

Promethian wrote:

Produce more influence than your neighbor. 

THank you. Now if I can just figure out how to do that... LOL

@HermesBird has it right. It took me a while to figure out that I did not need to add each and every civic tree option offered me and in fact can go through a game with almost half the civics tree options unselected.

I feel like it was a good call on the devs' side to rapidly increase the cost of the civics, because it communicates better that they're something you should carefully pick, rather than treating it like you're every now and then presented with A/B choice. I'd just like to know if Osmosis can actually force someone to unpick a civic, for example, I rarely pick the Slavery one and every now and then I get a grievance for some empire in my sphere of influence not changing their slavery policy.

If you find yourself falling into enemy's sphere of influence, consider choosing Aesthetes for next era as other posters wrote, they come with boost to influence production and have a special action allowing you to convert your tiles back. Buuut if most of your territories aren't threatened, you may want to consider just letting a city fall under enemy influence, especially if your cultures are close to each other. You need excess stability to handle Osmosis Events that would try to force their civics on you, but it also opens up possibility to receive same class of events that let you grab free science or even pay to unlock techs that the other empire has already unlocked.

DNLH wrote:you may want to consider just letting a city fall under enemy influence

How do I do that? I feel like I don't have influence (pun intended) on this (and on a lot of other things), but probably I'm missing some knowledge.

Just simply don't force higher influence production with the intent on stopping it.  you can see the influence "battle" between cultures by clicking on the civic button in the bottom left and zooming out a little bit.  Influence and religion are more like a mini game.  

It's not necessarily a bad thing that someone else is the cultural leader or the religious leader.  You don't need to be the best at everything.  For example, there are religious tenants that allow you to pick bonuses if your people follow someone else's religion, or later on you can even choose to convert your state religion to someone else's in order to gain the tenants they have selected.  Or the civics osmosis can give you civics for free potentially at no influence cost to yourself, so you can save it for expanding or other things.

Ermac218 wrote:

Just simply don't force higher influence production with the intent on stopping it.  you can see the influence "battle" between cultures by clicking on the civic button in the bottom left and zooming out a little bit.  Influence and religion are more like a mini game.  

It's not necessarily a bad thing that someone else is the cultural leader or the religious leader.  You don't need to be the best at everything.  For example, there are religious tenants that allow you to pick bonuses if your people follow someone else's religion, or later on you can even choose to convert your state religion to someone else's in order to gain the tenants they have selected.  Or the civics osmosis can give you civics for free potentially at no influence cost to yourself, so you can save it for expanding or other things.

Ahhh, I forgot about that view, I'll examine that. Thank you for the tip!

Oh, okay, that's good to know. You don't get influence refunded for revoking civics, normally it costs you instead, but I think that neither revoking, nor accepting AI choice through Osmosis actually costs influence, so that's another thing you may actually want to happen, especially now that the individual civic costs ramp up quickly (the cost for choosing next civic will still go up, though, so better think twice, if you're gunning for a particular one). Defiant indeed doesn't stack, just refreshes duration, but depending on era and city, hit of 50 stability may be quite devastating, so that's definitely something to take into account if you know that a territory may/will flip soon.