After several culture wins (and a few losses) on Noble, Prince, and Monarch, I think I have a pretty good feel for what it takes to get a cultural victory at standard settings. This is not to say that the information contained within is a perfect strategy. It can lose, and it does lose. But it seems to win more consistently for me than alternative strategies.

The goal
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Consistently win a cultural victory on a standard map with 7 civs.

Civilization traits
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This has a huge impact on cultural games and is probably the most important decision to make. I'll do a quick rundown on how each trait affects a cultural victory.

Agressive - no direct impact on cultural wins.

Creative - seemingly great, but on further analysis only so-so. 2 culture/turn is not very much. Even in the late game when your cities have +150% to +300% culture boosts, this is only 5 to 8 culture/turn. Since most of the 50,000 culture (at normal speed) will come in the last 100 years with cities generating 250 to 1000 culture/turn, an extra 8 is not a big factor at all. In my estimation, this trait adds about 3% to your total cultural output for the game. This is reduced if you receive a large portion of your culture from great artists. Of course it also helps a bit with early city development. Not having to build an obelisk means you can build other important buildings sooner. That shouldn't be ignored, but early theaters largely reduce this advanatage.

Expansive - happiness is usually not a limiting factor in my cultural games, though health sometimes is. So expansive looks nice. Unfortunately, +2 health basically means +2 food (when a city is around the limit). So that's 1 extra citizen. So one (or two) extra tiles being worked or 1 extra specialist. Of course it will be a marginal tile (or it would be worked sooner). Assuming a smallish city of size 12, an extra tile generates around 8% more "stuff" (commerce + shields + food). Probably less since it's probably a marginal tile. I'd estimate a 5% or so gain in culture. This is reduced if you receive a large portion of your culture from great artists.

Financial - this one is huge. Fully developed cottages (with the appropriate techs and civics) will generate +7 commerce per turn on plains and grassland or +8 on a river. Financial makes this +8 or +9. On other tiles, the effect is seen as well. +2 coasts become +3 coasts. Hills with windmills on a river go up 1. Early in the game, financial contributes 25% or more to your commerce production. Late in the game after cottages are developed, financial contributes 15% or so to commerce production. Based on making the cultural slider 90% or 100% late in the game, that means 15% additional culture being genreated from commerce. Of course much (about half in my games) of your culture will be generated by cultural improvements. So in my estimation, financial adds about 7.5% to your total cultural output. Note that this figure is further reduced if you get a significant amount of your culture from great artists. In my games, I generally get around a third of my culture from great artists, so financial is really only contributing 5% to my total culture.But the real bonus of financial is the 25% gain in early science output and the 20% or so gain in mid-game science output. That is a huge factor in monarch games, where you otherwise won't be able to keep up in tech.

Industrious - this looks great, but I don't like how this plays out in monarch games. If you can get to techs fast enough, industrious will allow you to get certain wonders you otherwise would fail to get, particularly when combined with stone and/or marble. The problem is when you don't have stone or marble and you get beat to a tech, so you don't get the wonder you anyway. Industrious has the potential to be a huge cultural boost, but it also can be a waste in some games. I personally avoid financial at monarch due to this inconsistency. At lower difficulty levels, Industrious can be dominating (I've built well over half the world wonders in one noble cultural victory).

Organized - not very good, but I haven't measured the effects to know the exact effect. You will probably end up building anywhere from 5 to 9 cities. The reduced maintenance for these would be nice, but the extra income from financial will more than make up for any maintenance costs.

Philosophical - very good, whether you build wonders or not. This clearly isn't a 100% gain in great artist generation. For starters, much of your great artist generation will occur under Pacifism (+100% output). Also, much (say half) of your great artist generation will occur in a city with the National Epic wonder (+100% output in one city). So figure +200% naturally in your main artist generation city and +100% everywhere else. Philosphical will make this +300% in the National Epic city and +200% everywhere else. So about a +250% nationwide (vs +150%) assuming that half the production is in the National Epic city. So Philosphical is really closer to a 40% effective gain in great people points (3.5/2.5 = 1.4 or 40% gain). Also, the costs of the great artists go up with each one produced. So the actual gain in great person generation is closer to 30%. I typically produce around 12 to 16 great artists in a game with Philosphical. Without philosophical, this would be 10 to 13. So figure philospical adds an 2 to 3 great artists, generating 8,000 to 12,000 extra culture (out of 150,000 total needed) for a boost of 5% to 8%. Actually, 2 to 3 extra great artists can generate more than 8K to 12K culture (more on this later), but these numbers are fine for this discussion.

Spiritual - this one is more difficult to measure, but I don't think it's particularly wonderful on monarch. If you can get more religions, you definitely beneift. But number of religions founded is more dependent on starting tech than on the spiritual trait. What spiritual will do is allow you to avoid anarchy. In my games, I generally make about 5 or 6 switches. So spiritual means I have 5 to 6 more turns at hyper culture growth at the end of the game before my opponent wins the space race. Considering I lost one game by 2 turns, this could be critical. Or not.

Starting techs
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I'll just mention the three that can be very important early in monarch games.

Mining - required for the quick expansion by deforestation strategy. You develop Bronze Working at the same time you get a first worker. 10 turns later, you have your first settler, and perhaps 10 turns after that you have your second settler.

Mysticism - If you want a guaranteed religion at monarch, you almost have to start with Mysticism. Personally, I prefer to develop other techs before Polytheism, so this isn't big for me. But polytheism first might be a better strategy.

Hunting - one step closer to archery, which can be critical when the barbarians have early archers (which they will at these difficulty levels).

Other techs can be nice depending on your starting location, but since these are so heavily dependent on your terrain, I don't feel that they consistently provide any early benefit.

Unique Units
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I generally only develop to around democracy, liberalism, and gunpowder before I stop tech advancement. This means getting very quickly behind in military techs. This deficiency can last for up to 75 turns or so. It is quite possible that as you approach your cultural victory, the AI will send tanks at you. Therefore, having a unique unit around these techs is nice.

Without doing a great deal of research, two that work very well in this regard is the Russian Cossack and English Redcoat. If needed, you can fight off moderate tank invasions with these two units. Just expect to lose a lot of units.

I would love to here about other early industrial or pre-industrial era unique units that can help.


Civilization Selection
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Based on all of the above, it shouldn't come as a surprise that I prefer Elizabeth (phil/fin starts with mining/fishing) and Catherine (fin/creat starts with mining/mysticism). I've had the best luck with Elizabeth using a strategy I will outline below.

Basic timeline
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4000 BC - found city and start building a worker (assuming you have forests nearby). Have scout/warrior explore nearby (but don't stray too far). Try to find a good second city spot.

Second build - settler. Use the selective deforestation method to rush a settler. Use the warrior to protect the worker, and later the settler. Deforest in the city if you have to and just outside the workable area if you can.

Third build - warrior or archer or settler. Depending on how lucky you feel,

Fourth build - warrior or settler or archer. Whichever you didn't do last time.

Basically, you want to get setup on 3 good city spots as quickly as possible (city location is a big factor in how quickly you can win). But you can't completely sacrifice military, since the barbarians will really start being a problem about the time the 3rd settler is ready.

Once I have 3 cities, I stop rushing units. A 4th city is a priority, but I won't rush it, since I need a little time to get a little commerce going anyway.

Between 4000 BC and 1 AD is all about getting my main 4 cities setup and founding any secondary cities (which will be used for resource aquisition, temple construction, and military unit building primarily). Note that it is often cheaper to build axeman with the city raider promotion and take barbarian cities than it is to build settlers. I usually end up with 1 or 2 barbarian cities.

In my 3 cultural cities, I build cottages (rather than farms) in the open areas, and mines wherever they are needed. I generally leave forests alone at this point.

In my specialist city, I build farms and mines.

1 AD - I begin to prepare the core cities for the culture rush. I do this by making sure I have whatever religions I have established in all my cities. I also make sure I have temples built. This will maximize my cathedral buildings later. Other cultural buildings (monostaries, for example) are nice, but sometimes you need another city imrpovement more. DOn't get too caught up in culture production at this point, but also don't completely ignore it.

In the core cities themselves, I begin to cut down all forests that aren't on hills and replace them with cottages. In some cases, the production will crash. I don't care. What I need at this point in these cities is as much commerce as I can possibly squeeze out. Plus, I want the cottages relatively well-developed by the time I hit 1500 AD. Mines also get replaced by windmills in the core cities and lumbermills get built wherever I am not clearcutting (forested hills, for example, or forests in non-core cities).

1500 AD - Do your final preparations for the culture boom. Determine which 3 cities will end up being your legendary cities. Do this by temporarily sliding culture to 100% and looking at the stats. You may determine that the 3 cities you identified back in the BC years aren't the actual best cities. No big deal, but you need to know now what 3 cities to go with. Build the Hermitage in one of the cities. Build your available cathedrals in the 3 cities. Optimizing this can be tricky, but if you have stored your great artists, you can afford to make some mistakes. Have your non-core cities start serious military production. You need to build a large enough base of units to survive tanks with your inferior units. You may never get attacked, but you need to be prepared.

1600 AD - Flip the culture switch. I prefer doing this around 1600 AD, but occasionally I find myself not quite ready (for example, I am 10 turns away from Democracy). I defer it if I have to, but don't wait too long or you will be seeing tanks and spaceships before you win.

1900 AD - Win. 1900 should be a comfortable win. Other civs may have SS Casings and Thrusters built, but not much else.

City location selection
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In this strategy, I generally use 4 base cities. 3 are designed to maximize commerce. This generally means as much grassland as possible. Rivers are a bonus. Coasts aren't a deal-killer, but in general, inland is better than coastal. Grassland/Forest or Grassland/Jungle tiles are ok as well. But I do try to avoid pure jungle for an early city since it will generate maintenance problems without generating much commerce. Basically you want open space, balanced with enough un-improved food production to support a reasonable population (12 to 15 is adequate, 15 to 18 is excellent). These cities will eventually become almost 100% cottage.

The 4th city (often the 2nd one founded) will be a specialist city. Here, you want maximum food production. In general, that means as much flood plain, food resources, and grassland as you can manage. Rivers are essential for farming, so river bends are ideal. Ideally, this city will be able to dedicate 6 or so citizens to be great artists, generating 100 or more great person points a turn (if you are philosophical. Sometimes the specialist city will end up being one of your 3 legendary cities, but most of the time, you will have 3 cottaged cities that will outperform it slightly. But since this city will still be producing a fair amount of commerce, if you are stuck with 2 good cottaged cities (rather than 3) and a specialist city, use the specialist city.

Additional cities are purely about resources or production or simple land grabs.

Specialists
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Using this strategy, the only great person I ever want to create is a great artist. Great scientists aren't a disaster (particularly if developed early), but every great artist puts you at least 2.67% closer to your goal. I generally develop about 15 great artists during the course of the game, so that gives me 40% of my needed culture

So how do I generate great artists without building any world wonders? The national wonders are a minor help, but basically it's all done with artist (culture) specialists. I religiously look at the F1 city info summary screen. Whenever a city is at it's limit in happiness or health, I manually stop it's growth and switch excess people into artists. Generally this means 1 or 2 specialists in about half my cities. Spreading great person point production across multiple cities isn't ideal, but most cities will end up generating 1 or 2 great persons sometime during the game.

Once I get to the end game, almost everything will be coming from the specialist city. In good games, this city will be generating up to 100 great person points a turn without a single world wonder. That will give me a great artist every 15 turns or so in the end-game (obviously the time goes up as you get more).

One thing to watch out for is the AI creating a specialist. When you have your science slider high (which is 90% of the game), the AI will tend to create scientist specialist. When you see this, switch the scientist out for an artist specialist. Again, great scientists aren't a disaster (use them to build academies), but great artists are better.

So what should you then do with your great artists? Whatever you do, don't immediately go create a great work. You may think you know which 3 cities are going to be your legenedary cities, but in my last 3 games, my 3 best cities were always different than what I thought my 3 best cities would be when I started the game. Clearly I am not a perfect judge of terrain yet.

Some people would suggest adding the great artist to one of your 3 cultural cities as a super specialist. While this is technically the best approach, I don't do this. A great work will produce +4000 culture in one lump sum. A super specialist will produce something like a base +14 culture/turn. But this value is modified by improvements. So a +14 super specialist in a city with 1 cathedral, The Hermitage, and free speech (+250% bonus) will actually generate 49 culture/turn. That would mean it generates more culture in less than 100 turns.

The problem with this is the same problem as immediately creating the great work - you may not be good at predicting which city needs the improvement. Perhaps the city you think is your 3rd best city is actually your 4th best. Perhaps your improvement causes a city to hit 50,000 culture while another lags behind at 40,000. Ideally you want all your cities to hit 50,000 at the same time. The only predictable way to do this is to save your great artists and use them in a single great work rush at the end. 12 to 15 saved great artists is a wonderfully flexible way of evening out your top 3 cities (and by then you know exactly what your best 3 cities are without any mistakes).

As I become better at identifying which cities are best earlier in the game, I might start using more super specialists with my early great artists. But for now, things work out well enough by saving them all.

End of Part 1

Part 2

Religion
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Religion remains the primary weakness of this strategy. In most cases, you need the +% cultural benefits that cathedral buildings provide. To get these, you need religion, and the more religions the better. What you don't need to do is found a religion.

If you don't found any religions, 2 or more religions will almost always spread to your civ (particularly if you have open borders with everything - which I highly recommend).

Whenever a religion spreads to me, I always start a monostary in that city and start building missionaries to manually spread the religion in my civ. Evenetually, I want the religion to be in 3, 6, or 9 cities (depending on how many I have) so that I can build as many cathedrals for that religion as possible. Eventual, I make sure I have temples in each of those cities, though I only prioritize temples if I have early happiness problems. Monostaries are also nice for the science boost.

I generally do not adopt a state religion until one of two things happens - another civ insists I convert (and then I weigh the risk of converting carefully - better to not anger a neghbor) or I develop philosophy and want to switch to the pacifism civic. When I have multiple religions, I obviously adopt the one that makes my immediate neighbors happiest.

Even with this basic strategy, I have most often failed to win when I am alone on an island, or have 1 neighbor that never develops their own religion. In my worst game, I didn't get a religion of any sort until 1500 AD. At this point, it was too late to prperly develop it (or take advantage of pacifism).

The answer to this problem might be to start as someone with mysticism and develop Hinduism immediately. This would virtually guarantee a religion (at least at monarch - higher difficulty may still be a problem), but it would come at a cost of delaying initial settler spread by 15 turns or so. This may not be all bad since you could get a couple warriors built, but it could be too high a cost. Catherine is ideally suited to Polytheism first, then bronze working second. Of course I would also then have to weigh the advatages and disadvantages of building the holy shrine. Normally, it's a no-brainer, but building a great prophet will cost me a great artist. I'm not sure that is worth it.

I still probably wouldn't convert to Hinduism until I had to even if I got it first. It's something for me to explore in future games.

Important world wonders
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None. Seriously. I can't guarantee I will get any built, so unless circumstances are fairly unique, I don't bother to even start any world wonders in some games.

The only one that I might stretch for is the Parthenon. +50% great person points is great (but hardly required). If I have easy access to marble, I willstretch to get this, but not too much as it requires two additional techs (masonry and polytheism) that I prefer not to get early.

Note that I also don't depend on the late media wonders that give a +% culture boost (Rock and Roll, Broadway, Hollywood, etc). There are two problems with going for these. First, you will get beat to them in some games. Second, if you are waiting to go 100% culture until you get these techs, another civ will likely beat you with a spaceship.

Important national wonders
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National Epic. +100% great person output is very nice. This goes into whichever city will have the most artist specialists. Be careful about building this prematurely. I have had games where the city I thought would be the artist specialist city ended up with fewer specialists than another city.

Heroic Epic. Not critical, but defense is always good. This generally goes outside my core 3 cities, into my highest non-core production city.

The Hermitage. +100% cultural output. If you put this in your highest culture city, you get the most gain. But then that city may get finished before you have enough great artists for the remaining two cities. If you put it in your slowest city, you get the least gain, but the city will be legendary with natural gain closer to your faster cities. But since I use great artists as equalizers, I don't worry so much about the timing. I generally balance this by putting the hermitage into my second largest cultural city and then use catherdrals to further balance gain out. Ideally, I get my 1st and 2nd city to hit 50,000 together and use great artists to buy off the 3rd city's deficit.

Important techs
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I list these techs in the general order I aim for them. Obviuosly tactical situations may lead me in slightly different directions (such as getting monarchy earlier when I have a significant number of grape resources).

Bronze working - to rush settlers through deforestation. This is nice to grab the 3 (or 4) key city spots

Hunting/Archery - early defense is extremely important at monach level. You can fight off the wandering barbarian archers with archers. Eventually you can roll back any barbarian cities with axeman (with city raider promotions), but as a stopgap, archers are great. If I had very easy access to copper, I might consider skipping archery since I could go straight to axemen for defense and offense.

Pottery/Animal Husbandry/Agriculture/Fishing/Wheel - These are the basic land development techs. The order I develop these in changes from game to game based on resources to be worked. I would recommend not doing pottery last if you can help it since getting a few cottages developing early can be a huge tech and finance boost early.

Mysticism - if I really need an obelisk in an early city, I research mysticism somewhere amongst the land development techs. This is often the case when my city is 2 spaces away from 2 to 3 resources. If I am creative, I don't bother with this. If I can get by without obelisks, I might skip this since I aim for early theaters.

Drama - This is the key early game tech for me. Building theaters gives me large early game culture games (for borders) and also allows early happiness control. If needed, I have no problem setting the cultural slider at 10% (or rarely 20%) in order to keep my cities growing.

Iron Working - Only needed if I need to chop down a jungle. Jungle cities can be great commerce cities long-term (endless grassland for cottages), but are a real problem short-term.

Calendar - often leads to a quick +3 or so happiness in every city. Well worth it, and since I don't really focus on obelisks there is no downside.

Literature - Required for the national epic. I am somewhat flexible about this tech. If I my specialist city is still growing, I bypass this until I really need it.

Code of Laws - Another flexible tech that I only grab when I really start the great person production. At that point, you need the caste system civic.

Philosophy - Pacifism gives +100% great person points. Critical for great artist boosts.

Music - music is low since I just assume I won't get their first. The free great artist is nice, but I like predictable over unpredictable. When I have aimed for it early, I get beat to it half the time. Early theaters is more important, so I now skip music until later. However, this is critical in the late game as you need the cathedrals to improve culture gain.

Liberalism - A long way away at this point, but still needed for free speech. +100% culture and +2 gold from developed cottages is huge.

Banking - Mercantilism might be worthwhile due to the free specialist. I haven't played with this enough to know, so I may be playing sub-optimally.

Economics - +1 trade route is nice. I have to see if mercantilism is better.

Printing Press - +1 commerce on cottages is great

Nationalism - Needed for the Hermitage.

Democracy - Universal Suffrage is nice for the town shield production (which will restore production for those cities that became low production after the deforestation). Emancipation is great for the increased cottage growth if you are behind in cottage development, though this does come at the cost of slower great artist production (no caste system). This tech is optional, if you are way behind in tech, but still have reasonable cottage growth.

Rifling/Military Tradition - may need for unique units. Potentially optional, but I prefer to have the better units in place. Optional in extreme cases.

Corporation - nice for the extra trade, but not basically optional

I'm probably missing a couple in here, but I normally flip the culture slider when I get democracy and/or rifling. Occasionally I have to switch before democracy and simply hope for the best.

A sort of typical game
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Just to give people an idea of what cities need to look like to win, I will include a few stats from my last game, a Monarch, Continents, standard settings game.

Great Person City - was producing 112 gpp/turn

3 culture cities (stats at win, with culture slider at 90%):
City 1 - 172 financial/turn, 796 culture/turn
City 2 - 109 financial/turn, 451 culture/turn
City 3 - 111 financial/turn, 270 culture/turn (obviously most of the great artists went here)

7 total cities

14 great artists produced during the game. 1 great scientist produced (wasn't paying attention to the AI specialist decisions).

Multiple civs had completed the Apollo Program. Nobody was past thrusters and casings.

Year won - 1898

Acknowledgements
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OK, there are too many to mention. But most of these ideas are not mine, but are gleaned from the strategies of others. Others have suggested the power of financial long before me. I didn't start using a great person city until recently. I like the basic results. The settler rush was definitely not my idea, and I was openly skeptical of it at first. But now I deforest my 3 cultural cities in the end game anyway, so doing it early to one of my cities doesn't bother me a bit.

And hopefully, the responses to this thread and other threads will teach me more. Another couple wins at monarch and I'll try it on the next level of difficulty (and probably get trashed). Fun times.

This seems like an interesting strategy. Personally, I had thought of cultural victory as a more esoteric strategy, something to do for a change of pace on a custom game with the space victory turned off. The fact that you can pull it off on a standard game on Monarch to me is very impressive. I do have some questions though:

Typically how big does your civ get? You seem to push for early expansion, which is something in my experience isn't the best thing to do.

With the AI advantages of Monarch, its not long before your neighbor is able to build to your border relatively quickly. My approach is that since the AI has a production advantage over you, then you simply must have more land to keep up. This typically means I take out my first neighbor with a swordsmen, and my second with a macemen. It doesn't sound like you go to war at all, and I'm wondering how you get by with such a small population base.

As far as for techs, even with twice as much population as my nearest competitor I can barely catch up techwise until the modern era. How are you able to keep up without falling hopelessly behind?

One thing to watch out for is the AI creating a specialist. When you have your science slider high (which is 90% of the game), the AI will tend to create scientist specialist. When you see this, switch the scientist out for an artist specialist. Again, great scientists aren't a disaster (use them to build academies), but great artists are better.


Didn't know you could do this. Will have to check out how to do it.

All very good questions.

1) My typical civ size is 6 cities to 8 cities, with 7 being pretty normal. If I am alone on an island, I'll definitely try to stuff in a 9th city (so I can build 3 cathedrals for each religion). You can do this with only 4 or 5 cities, but 6 is the real magic number for me (again, having to do with cathedrals).

2) I have a quick expansion push to 3 cities, get my 4th relatively quickly after that (through a normal 17-turn or so settler build) and then go with completely natural expansion. If I go faster, maintenance begins to hurt my tech too much. Natural expansion might mean grabbing a piece of marginal land by a desert that the AI doesn't seem to want. Or often it means capturing a couple of barbarian cities and keeping them. Or it might mean filling in a largish gap between 2 of my cities. The first 3 cities (and 4th if there is space) are all about location. Sometimes these get a bit spread out. Subsequent cities go whevever there is space. Even a little size 6 runt city can produce military units at a decent rate. Or that city stuck between ocean and desert can provide a little commerce.

3) I do try to avoid war (except with barbarians). The culture will eventually grab much of the border land, so my resources actually increase over time, even though my cities stay constant. I suppose I would be sorely tempted if I were neighbors with a small civ stuck between me and another civ. But as my cottaged cities tend to be light on shields, I'm not sure I could pull off the production for a quick victory. My main military strategy is build enough units for a defense, rather than offensive actions.

4) I do get hopelessly behind in certain techs, but stay largely in the techs that are important for culture. For example, I completely ignore the religious techs until I need them as pre-reqs for Philosophy. I completely ignore the economic development techs (metal casting, machinery, etc) until I need them for liberalism or democracy. As long as my cities can develop, none of this matters. I am behind in military tech, but gunpowder is fortunately a quick jump off of liberalism, so that catches me up quickly.

Where it gets tricky is when the culture slider goes to 100%. This strategy would never work in multi-player because another player would come and stomp my rifleman or cavalry or redcoats or cassack with tanks. In fact the AI sometimes tries, but they usually come in small enough quantities that I can manage to fight them off.

So in effect, I try to keep up until the industrial era (financial really helps with this) and then I fall hopelessly and deliberately behind. But you should end up winning early enough (before 1900) where it doesn't matter.

Great post! This helps explain why I'm screwing up my first play-to-complete Noble game as Mansa (sp?). I got super-paranoid about the AI eating my lunch, and stuck in Civ3 mindset kept up my research. I now have a stack of 15 8-XP tanks (as spiritual, I also kept switching to military civ's whenever I did a big unit rush) to fend off AI invasions, but it's also probably too late for me to go all-culture and win, even at Noble -- India just completed Apollo and is probably on its way to a space race victory, unless I can start a world war.

Also, I didn't do enough MM of specialists, so I ended up with a mish-mash of different ones. At Noble was able to capture quite a few GW's. You're right about the Modern-era wonders: even at Noble I got Broadway but lost both Holywood and Rock n' Roll.

The hard part of executing this strategy is having the OCD-ish level of focus and concentration not to get distracted by other temptations. For example, I'm realizing that I shouldn't be building the UN right now!

* bump * I'm curious if others found this helpful or just obvious. I eked out a cultural victory in the Noble game that I thought was hopeless after sticking to my guns and going 100% culture. Asoka was halfway done with his ship by that point, so I think I had at least 15-20 turns of safety... I had also managed to get myself elected UN Secretary-General so a diplomatic victory was possible, but unlikely. I think the original poster's strategy is surefire, but skipping Wonders feels a little, um, mediocre? Next time, though, I will focus more on specializing my cities' great people. It helps to know you have a civ-wide GPP threshold, not city-specific, so putting lame cities on GPP is a waste...

I think the original poster's strategy is surefire, but skipping Wonders feels a little, um, mediocre?
Build them if you can. I just want people to understand that there is an alternative when they try their regular "oh, I need this tech to build this wonder" and then end up getting beat to the wonder anyway. This happens pretty frequently on higher difficulty levels. But I actually do manage to found a religion (usually Taoism) in about 20% of my games and I manage to get 1 or 2 wonders in about 50% of my games at Monarch. Failing at wonders isn't all bad anyway, since the money is useful.

What I try not to do is sacrifice a known good for the chance at a religion or wonder. I won't go for philosophy (to grab Taoism) if I really need music, for example. I won't research the tech for The Parthenon if I don't have marble and I really need to get my road network going.

One thing I probably do need to explore since The Parthenon is useful is deforestation to rush it. That might make it worth going for more frequently.

I was playing a cultural game last night and it got nasty near the end. I was the Cat with best friend Elizabeth, going for a cultural win. I waited until later to pump to 100% culture, although I did have it a 50% since Demo. I was say 20 turns away to vic when i realize that Eli was going to finish her spaceship in 10. I did what any Machiavellian whould do, I tried to sabotage production, and when that failed, I nucked her capital, twice. She had SDI and none hit, but it got her to switch production away from her spaceship, and I won as the tank invaded my homeland. (I neglected defence a bit).

The point about the multiple religion is well taken. Had I done things differently, I would have spread them more and built mulpitle cathedrals.

Since walkerjks's strategy involves storing up Great Artists rather than merging them into super-specialists, this question isn't on point to the exact strategy, but personally I like the super-specialists just because they're Super! Anyway, if one were to go for merging super-specialists, would a Great Merchant actually be better at generating oodles of culture because of that +gold bonus? Do specialists' bonuses get city multipliers?

For the wonder-addicted, here's a list of all the wonders that generate Great Artist points:

Broadway, Hollywood, Notre Dame, Rock & Roll, Kremlin (???), Parthenon, Sistine Chapel, Taj Mahal.

If merchants DO generate lots o' culture as I suggested above, there are the related Wonders:

Colossus, Eiffel Tower, Great Lighthouse, Statue of Liberty, UN, Versailles.

Besides which these all generate $ which translates into culture (if the slider is so set).

I'm playing at Noble so YMMV, but right now Elizabeth is doing really well, and I've got a pretty decent army guarding my lines against Saladin, who is much happier with me now that I've switched to free religion. The hard part is trying to pick up a religion that you didn't found... I've never seen the AI send missionaries, at least not at this level. C'mon Saladin, I can use some Buddhism here!

I got huge brownie points by adopting someone else's religion. :) He demanded it of me, and what the heck, why not. Plenty diplo points with him.

Then I conquered him and kept his holy city and all his temples for myself. :)

Right ... the last game I played I picked up some new religions by culture-flipping some nearby cities, but this only works some of the time. I then proceeded to mission the heck out of my own cities. (Do this before you hit Scientific Method or you're screwed!)

Since walkerjks's strategy involves storing up Great Artists rather than merging them into super-specialists, this question isn't on point to the exact strategy, but personally I like the super-specialists just because they're Super! Anyway, if one were to go for merging super-specialists, would a Great Merchant actually be better at generating oodles of culture because of that +gold bonus? Do specialists' bonuses get city multipliers?
Yes, they do get a city's multipliers. As an example, I've had a +14 culture/turn specialist become add +56 culture/turn (presumably I had +300% culture in that city). That's why adding the aritst as a super specialist is clearly the better idea. And I'll start doing that once I have a better feel for my cities. I've just had too many games where one of my three hand-picked cities is beng outperformed by a 4th city of mine. So I've been a little gunshy of using super specialists (or building cathedrals early). As I play on Emporer diffculty, I am finding that I need to optimize more early.

The great merchant idea is intereisting and worth looking at. Part of the usefullness will depend on whether the bonus comes as commerce (so effectively science early and culture late) or as gold. Gold isn't as useful. Even though iit allows you to run the science/culture sliders higher, you don't get as many multipliers with gold as you do with culture.

I've done a cultural win on prince, 1968, with two people in a space race at 5 structurals. I figure 15 more turns at most.

I got maybe 8 great artists in that time. I have bad luck getting the ones I want - 10% is chances happen half the time for me.

The funny thing is, I never put a single point into the cultural slider. I got a lot of wonders, and rode the tech advantage. Granted this isn't feasible on monarch, but I was very surprised at how much culture you can generate without it. I got all three of the late game culture centers though.

It was on the same "random" map everyone gets, starting in the center of the larger northern isle. I never went to war except to claim a barbarian village. No one ever went to war with me. I captured 3 cities with cultural expansion - if you can make border cities your cultural centers, its almost inevitable.

I made all three of my cultural centers great artist generators (as best I could), though I'm not sure if that is the best solution or not. They are generating culture as well as GP points, but is it worth more than if they were on a town?

Interesting strategy. I play on Epic and have modded my game to go even slower so I am wary of trying very different strategies like this because a game takes so long. Be careful when playing on Epic because the victory conditions are different than on Normal. I had a Prince game as the Romans (I know, weird civ to have a cultural victory with, but I wanted to try it) and thought I was about to reach a cultural victory with my 3rd city about to pass 50,000 points. Boy was I surprised when I didn't win after getting 50,000. I looked into the matter and found out you need 75,000 on Epic so needless to say I was beaten to a space-race victory by the French...

Very Interesting.

1) Great Merchants can be good for upgrading your entire defences if used for a trade mission. I doubt their effectivenes as super specilists for this strat. My feeling is that you could not get enough multiplyers to equal the culture production of an artist.

2)I am having the same problem with judging my 3rd city. the top 2 I can see without doubt, but the difference between the 3rd and 4th gets hazy in most of my games. However, making super artists in city 1 and 2 seems quite effective. If you get them in soon enough, they can make 6-8k of culture, saving yourself .5-1 great artist raise them later.

3) I also seem to end up going for biology. The +1 for farms adds 1/2 a specilist per farm, which is alot in the specilist city. More then doubled production of gpp and the extra culture from all those specilists makes it a close run at 3rd, at least in my games.

Just a couple of thoughts

I can't do the number-crunching here now, but say 1 of your 3 cities is sitting in the middle of a flood plain / hill combo -- essentially, you can only build cottages on the flood plains. Which creates more culture (or other benefits): cottage for straight gold -> culture, or farm for GPP -> culture?

(Yes this is my current situation. London started on flood plans, I moved one space to have an oceanfront view, and the other tiles are hills, one with gold and the other with stone. Don't ask how I got such a sweet deal... it did screw up my original lumber-chop strategy, tho!)

What I prefer to do is farm the flood plain city and go for artist specialists (for great artists) and then have 3 other cities that are commerce factories. In practice, I don't usually have the luxury of 3 other great city spots, so the specialist city ends up being one of the 3 cities, and I really on the culture generated from the artist specialists more than commerce from cottages in that city.

Still, I wonder if the 4K culture spurted out by a GA matches the commerce of towns x culture slider consistently pumping out turn after turn. You're right that it would be ideal if this city wasn't one of the 3, but in this case it is, so I think I'm sticking with the towns rather than farms.

btw, by this strategy Wonders can actually be harmful: they will divert GPP towards less useful GP, e.g. prophets, ugh!

i just tried this strat and it worked out quite well...however, i tried it using mercantilism and i think that you're better off with the extra commerce than being able to pump as many artists as you want into one city. the highest i could consistently keep my slider on was 80%

that's just my experience though...i didn't have an ideal starting location and i also went into one tiny skirmish of a war that i fought defensively.

hooray for my first civ 4 cultural victory! thanks OP :)

Completely agree on mercantilism. I tried it in a game and didn't really like it at all. The extra specialist in the 2 cities with real gpp production was nice, but for the rest of the cities, 1 specialist couldn't replace the multiple +8 trade routes that got replaced by domestic routes.

I may have underestimated the overall importance of trade. Since trade routes add to commerce (and therefore science and later culture), grabbing currency early seems like a nice way to boost your economy.

At the moment, I see the following post-ancient techs as all pretty nice. I'm not sure the best ordering to get them -

1) Monarchy (manage unhappiness through military units)
2) Drama (manage unhappiness through theaters)
3) Currency (extra trade route, so +2 or more commerce in each city)
4) Calendar (+2 or +3 happiness in typical games)
5) Mathematics (health management + pre-req for other good stuff)

I'm finding myself going for early drama less and less (particularly with Catherine, since I need the culture boost less at this point) and doing math/calendar/currency and then picking up philosophy or drama.

oh, and another strategy that worked for me quite well involved me playing on a terra map. i could only get 6 cities, so i was wondering how i'd be able to get a third cathedral for my other big culture city. however, what worked out really well for me was letting other people's religious spread through. some of my cities had four or five different religions (and somehow i was able to found taoism...lucky trading i guess?). i ended up having a jewish, taoist, and a bhuddist cathedtral in three of my cities.

thanks for the strategies :) early drama worked for me...if anything it allowed for more specialist early. but, i'll try some other ways as well. but anything that can a) increase the size of your city and b) increase the commerce of your city are priorities. i guess it's more dependent on terrain as to which you should go first.

edit: oh yeah, and the thing that kinda bugs me is that i never saw a single culture flip during my game. i had cities that were completely surrounded by my culture, and i even saw one riot in a french city. however...none of the cities flipped to my control. yes, there were troops in there, but these cities were completely surrounded and in some cases only 24-28% of the foreign nationality. what gives?

I've been wanting to try a multiplayer game with a permanent alliance.... Has anyone tried this while going for a cultural victory? If I have an ally, will we win if I have 2 legendary cities and he has 1, for instance?

Could be interesting :)

I finally won a cultural win in 1910 on emperor. Some random thoughts on playing on emperor:

1) Being alone on an island stinks. There's no terrain grab, but you'll be virtually religion free until 1500 or so.

2) Religion is important, but probably not important enough to found them yourself. I figure each religion is worth approximately 150 culture/turn at the end in a 6 city game (so 3 temples, 3 monostaries, and 2 cathedrals in your core cities). Contrast this to my last game (panagea to guarantee I wasn't alone) where I managed to get 6 religions (3 by natural spread, 1 spread by another civ's missionary wave, founded Taoism, and a Hindu city flipped around 1700 AD). There were too many religions to fully exploit, but having lots of religions around 1000 AD is a lot better than having 2 religions at 1600 AD. Lots of religions also solved any happiness issues before I flipped the culture slider (I went straight from paganism into free religion).

3) I think I like Catherine better than Elizabeth. The downside is you lose great people. My +44 gpp/turn city would have been +66 gpp/turn with Elizabeth. This would have gotten me 3 or 4 more great artists. On the upside, creative is really good for an early land grab. I got early access to resources 2 and 3 spaces from my cities without having to build obelisks, libraries, or theaters early. This freed me up to concentrate on whichever tech would give me the biggest advantage. The second upside is the unique unit. With Elizabeth, you need gunpowder and rifling. Rifling is a fairly long path from where I typically end. Plus, redcoats are better at city defense than they are at protecting your precious towns. Cossacks only require gunpowder (1 tech from Liberalism) and military tradition (1 tech from Nationalism). And their mobility can better protect towns. Oh, one more plus - Catherine starts with mining and hunting, so you are 1 tech closer to archery, which is nice for early barbarian management. You are one tech farther from pottery, so it quickly evens out, but getting archery 5 turns or so sooner can save you some real pain.

4) Town development is always a bit of a problem. When you hit 1600 AD, you might have size 15 or so towns working some cottages that are towns, some that are villages, some that are hamlets, and some undeveloped. There isn't a lot of time left in the game for the newer cottages to grow. So I developed a strategy that seems to deal with this fairly well. Since my core cities generally have a little (or a lot) of gap between them, I build a town as close as 3 spaces away from the core city. I make sure that this city works the cottages for the core city. That way when the core city is ready to take them over (when I flip the culture slider), they are already partially developed. The extra cities also provide places to build temples (and military units). So even though your space my only support 4 real cities (which can easily happen on Emperor since the AI spreads pretty quickly), you can build 2 more cities within your existing borders. Don't overbuild these too early since there is a financial cost, but around 1000 AD or so might be a nice time to build these stub cities.

I've never played higher than Noble; is tech trading possible at the higher levels? If so, can you keep your military up-to-date with selective tech trades since you might even be ahead of the tech curve on culture-related techs?

This is a great article. My two cultural wins on Noble were made using Industrious civs and getting the culture from Wonders, but this forces you to research techs that slows your advance. Plus the best cultural wonders, Broadway, Hollywood, Rock and Roll and the Eiffel Tower are pretty far away.

My opinion is that Mercantilism could be VERY useful if you're alone on an island.

Okay, gotta go try that now :)

I won my first cultural victory today in 1960 on Noble as Frederick. I, too, had the problem of the city that I thought was going to be my third city ended up being not good enough.. the Incan capital I captured worked much much better.

I put the cultural on 100% around 1800 and watched the culture zoom.. I was 500+ in all three cities, and even got Berlin up to 750 before I dialed them back.

I agree with the trade routes. You can't have enough of them. I was running in the green at 100% culture thanks to a cornucopia of trade routes and commerce - and this without financial.

I probably could have won it earlier - I got a lot of non-artist great people (I had started this game before this thread had been posted actually!) and I also never had a golden age. Eight turns of extra commerce might have shaved a couple of turns off.

FYI.. Tried a game at Fast/Quick speed usig this strategy and it failed miserably. I'm assuming the game doesn't speed up resarch/production when game speed is altered?

...I developed a strategy that seems to deal with this fairly well. Since my core cities generally have a little (or a lot) of gap between them, I build a town as close as 3 spaces away from the core city. I make sure that this city works the cottages for the core city. That way when the core city is ready to take them over (when I flip the culture slider), they are already partially developed. The extra cities also provide places to build temples (and military units). So even though your space my only support 4 real cities (which can easily happen on Emperor since the AI spreads pretty quickly), you can build 2 more cities within your existing borders. Don't overbuild these too early since there is a financial cost, but around 1000 AD or so might be a nice time to build these stub cities.


Lol! Talk about rezoning at its most devious. This is a really neat little trick.

I'd like to add some conjecture, if I may. I am currently working out my own cultural win strategy, and am in the process of databasing all the buildings I think could be important to the cultural win (for different reasons).

This is what I'd like to test/see tested: where all the breaking points of this strategy lie. For example, since the key elements of this strategy are some early culture, much late culture, adequate maintenance coverage, good GPP, lack-luster early research, and non-existant late research, I am curious to see what happens when these variables are played with. For example, is it possible to move the big switch to earlier than 1600 by switching to a more building/wonder centrist strategy with the Industrious trait? Artistic wonders might make up for the loss of the philisophical trait. This brings Qin Shi Huang to mind. Of course, the risk here is that you are also depending on having the appropriate stone/marble. Another thing you might do here is to focus mainly on Production in your core cities (and maybe use your rezoning strategy above) rather than specialists.

Could an increased tech focus work, with the idea being to reach 1800, ready for the big switch but with a much higher culture output than 500/turn due to things like Hollywood, Broadway, Eiffel tower, etc? You might combine this with the Kremlin and all that Commerce to pop a bunch of temples and cathedrals at the last second, instead of focusing on them earlier; if you manage to get Universal Suffrage quickly.

How much better is it to have 100% Culture than 80% Culture? Well, it depends on what you have to give up, but 100% Culture means your win will come 20% faster once you flip that switch! Coversely, you could also say that 80% Culture means you will win 25% slower than if you'd have 100%.

Or, what if 30% were pure profits? Profits that could be spent on hurrying production and upgrading military units at the last moment to ward off the incoming invaders.

Just some ideas.

=$= Big J Money =$=

FYI.. Tried a game at Fast/Quick speed usig this strategy and it failed miserably. I'm assuming the game doesn't speed up resarch/production when game speed is altered?

I just played at quick on monarch and did a cultural victory. 2 civs had appolo, but not much else. I'm going to try on emperor soon.

So I said I was going to try on emperor - I did and I won! I played on large continents, 8 civs, normal speed. At the time of my win a couple of civs had appolo and only a couple ship parts. UN was built but and I was voted secretary general oddly enough. I had a pretty good location, never fought a single war. I suppose I'll try on Immortal sometime soon, although I think that may be a little too difficult.

walkerjks, Thanks for all this precious usefull information.
At this moment, I've only played at Noble.
I had all my best cultural win with not 0 wonders as you but with a little one located in my cities producing Great Artist. I've had 2 different cities producing Great Artist in order to gain more but I did not check the number of Great Artist i've got!
I only buit the wonder generating Great ARTIST People Point : Notre Dame, Sistine Chapel , Taj Mahal...
I had another cities producing only Scientific Great People point: scientisc specialist and The Great Library (+2 more scientis specialist) in order to produce academy in the big commerce cites in order to boost science!


I'm thinking of another point: generaly I use to play cultural game with between 5 and 10 cities. But I'm wondering, what happens with more cities.
With more cities, I would be able the have cities producing specialist each : one city producing Engeneer, another Great Prophet.
Indeed, Great Prophet is huge. I construct the Shrine of my state religion in one of my game and I used Armies of Missionnary around the world: the effect is huge : +1 more gold for each cities having your relegion... with the use of missionnary plus the fact that my relegion was sprend automaticaly I had around 12 more gold each turn just with the Shrine of my religion.

LeSphinx

It seems like under Free Religion, the cathedral class religious buildings have a prerequisite to build them. For that civic, it seems like you have to have a temple of that religion in every city to build its cathedrals. It's something to keep in mind, but one should probably be running Pacifism for the religious approach to Cultural Victory, anyway.

Just curious, what kinds of scores you getting with ur wins? Both winning and end game?

Not a temple in every cities but you have to construct 3 temples of same religion in order to construct One cathedral.
LeSphinx

Have been following this thread with great interest. One thing I don't understand though. How come in my games I need 4 temples to build 1 cathedral instead if 3? Something wrong with my copy of Civ4?? :confused:

bobko, Something strange with your 4 temples instead of 3. Are you sure ?
LeSphinx

They have to be 3 temples of the same religion.

The amount of temples required varies by map size. Small needs 2 temples, standard needs 3. I can only assume you are playing a large map :).

Moved to "Strategy Articles" by popular demand! :D

great article!!

The amount of temples required varies by map size. Small needs 2 temples, standard needs 3. I can only assume you are playing a large map :).

That must be it. I always play with hugh size map and never tried small and standard maps :lol:

I tried a cultural pursuit with this article in mind with Gandhi on a pangea map, everything standard, seven civs on Immortal.

I ended up losing to space race in 1898, with only 4-5 turns to a cultural win, but two of my cities had way over 60 000 culture points. I found that I had chosen the wrong city as my third culture city. I had four religions (one of my own, one from normal spread and two from missionarys), and nine cities giving four cathedral buildings in all my culture cities.

Playing with Gandhi and early access to marble gave me lots of early wonders (Stonehenge, The Oracle, Sistine Chapel, Taj Mahal and more), but that only made my great people almost all turn out to be prophets, so that is not a very good thing I guess.

Just to see if it was possible to win (which I was very sure it was considering my bad choice of third city and other mistakes) I did a reload and chose another city as the third city, somehow this time the AI kept attacking me so I reloaded even further back and started to build more military. This approach slowed me a lot, but the warmongering AIs were obviously slowed even more fighting amongst each other so I ended up with a cultural win in the 1940s. This time I had fully developed SIX religions in my culture citys, so 6 cathedral buildings in all. The biggest culture producing city (the one with all the wonders) was pumping out way over 1000 culture points per turn.

Just wanted to say thanks to a great post by walkerjks and say that a cultural win using more or less this strategy is VERY POSSIBLE on Immortal. Even without a financial/creative/philosophical leader.

Drunken Master, when this occur, you have to use spy (by constructing the Scotland yar before) and send them around the world or just in the foregn civ most advanced. Then, you can sabatage his work in the space ship in order to achieved your cultural win.
I've done it twice.

LeSphinx

LeSphinx. Yes, that is a way, problem is I would have to research Astronomy or Chemisty plus Scientifit Method plus Communism before I could even build Scotland Yard. That is at least 15 turns of extra non-100% culture slider. Plus I would have to devote 10% or so to gold to be able to fund the spys activites, which would make te culture victory another couple of turns further away. Do you think (lots of) spys are capable of delaying a space race by as much as 15 or 20 turns? And it was not just one AI that was building SS life support etc...

Lot of spies: your are limited to 4 spys.

When I used one 2 times, it delay much more than 15 or 20 turns.
I do not remenber how much time but the space **** component are long to construct so It can help.
As soon as you notice a civ is constructing some space ship component, building is a must have even if you have to improve your research rate and slow down your cultural rate!

LeSphinx

I used a strategy based on this and it worked for me!

Prince/Standard/Lakes/Elizabeth/All victories

Won in 1970! The tough part was disrupting space race and holding off highly advanced militaristic civs.

The solution to both is mad diplomacy skills. Bribe the science civs into fighting the military civs. While you huddle down and wait for the culture win.

Tough victory, but very fun!

Thanks for the post and subsequent posts. I love cultural victory (and dimplomatic to a lesser extent) as it's imo a very hard way to win because of the risks and chances that have to be taken. The thing that drives me nuts, and this really goes for all victories late in the game, is the scoring system is out of whack. There was somebody here asking what a typical score is so I figured I'd add the stats from my second cultural victory (never completed one though have played half games several times):

I was playing as Catherine of Russia (my normal civ as I speak Russian some and love that they have actual Russian voice, is a good cultural victory civ luckily too). Settings were continents, normal speed, monarch difficulty, small map, against all pretty non aggresive civs (inca, egypt, arabia, germany/fred, and one other I think, didn't see most civs until very late) (good and bad, won't steamroll you militarily but sometimes outdistance too far in tech and make it hard to win). I didn't get into any war but people were getting pissed at me late. Got two religions, but founded none.

final stats were 6889 score with an in game score of 1835 (was second to last). I won in 1920 AD and thought it would show up in the final stats page but didn't so I can only estimate to making around 11 great artists (and one engineer that rushed a wonder related to great artistry).

I was on a continent with Frederick of Germany and had only 5 cities until around 1100ad when a nicely placed barb city converted by culture (my military was that weak heh) and then a decent germany coverted a bit later. I converted 2 or 3 crappy cities and just gifted them to the highscoring civs to cripple them slightly as they spent alot of time in rebellion.

I only saved and reloaded a few times when my buggy mouse made me click things I didn't mean to (like the time very late in the game my mouse froze them came to while in control of a great artist only to research monarchy for me instead of doing a masterpiece thingy); just added this to clarify it wasn't a trial and error "perfect" game.

It wasn't the best game in the world, but should give some of the people wondering about typical games happenings and scores and such some perspective.

The pisser is it was my 4th highest score on monarch level and was well behind my 51k+ 900AD domination victory on duel size map despite being one of the harder games I've played. The scoring system really frustrates me.

Gonna go up a difficulty level and see what I've learned from my first completed cultural game and all the goodness of this thread :P

The real question is why I'm so passionate about cultural and diplomatic wins and completely despise warmongering... think maybe I'm just a sissy >_<

Curious:

If you have a "specialist farm" city, won't that city have a lot of culture purely from the amount of artists? If so, would that city be a good candidate for one of the "3"? If you rush a few cathedrals there, having 6 artists has a base of 6 x 16? 14? x cathedrals and free speech, so a base of something like 300 culture/turn, and some commerce with culture slider will probably pop it up to 4 or 500... AND it's generating culture during the whole game (if that becomes its purpose)...

Any thoughts on this?

Can you guys post some some replays of games using this strategy? I have a hard time trying this out on Prince difficulty and always end up with the lowest score.

My specialist/greatperson city was my most cultured city and my capital. I didn't intend this, but I started near floodplains with gold I think it was near there. I actually didn't build farms like I normally would and just built cottages so that one city was actually my most cultured, generated nearly all my great artists and also brought in the most amount of cash. Think about the strategy, but keep in mind you may have to addapt it.

Most of the time when you're playing a cultural victory you'll be woefully behind in points, especially late when you turn the meter up to as much culture as you can get as you will no longer be gaining new techs. This is one of the reasons it's fun and challenging though, you'll pretty much always feel like the underdog. My advice is to make friends.

~~~

I have a question for more advanced civ4 players: ever used slavery, even mid game. The population hit didn't seem all that bad if you've got large cities with graneries and alot of food. I was thinking maybe it would especially handy for the great person generating city that sometimes doesn't have the greatest hammer output. Usually, unless very unlucky and lacking any religion, I wouldn't see the unhappiness hit being an issue? Anyone have thoughts or experience with this? I wanna try it soon but won't be able to play for at least 3 days and am not always the best at implimenting and examining ideas.

Just curious. Why do you have to stop researching completely?

Can't you just adjust the culture amount only for the 3 cities that you're targeting for the culture win?

Req

ED: Never mind. I just figured out that the slider in the city doesn't change it for individual cities but is exactly the same as the universal one.

Nothing to see here.... Move along :P.

Just curious. Why do you have to stop researching completely?

You do not stop research totally, you just put the science to 0% and culture to 100% (or 80/90% if you have money problems).
Since you use a lot of specialists, if you choose reprensentation (i always do, i see no reason to do differently), each of them will give you science. Many monasteries, universities and so on, so your science input is not so low.

The main point i have encountered is the difficulty to have artist, most of my GP are scientists/prophets, because i don't see early means to have more than 2 artists specialists (except for some wonders) with theater, you have to go radio to have more :/

I managed to win culturally using this excellent guide trought prince and monarch, on the last i was even first on ladder but with an excellent territory (china on earth 1000 AD scenario). Nevertheless, prophets profusion was a difficult point to manage. I used them to make specialists to help culture cities to produce, but aftermath i wonder if it would not have been more efficient to limit cityies growth as to use only 3 specialists, so with a majority of artists.

Being very strong on religion is not the better way, maybe, but in another hand it is really useful for cash and to not allow too much cash for the ia.

theatres and some wonders if I'm really trying usually get me to caste system (i think is name) with a couple great artists. Once I get caste system I crank up full great artist production, which also helps alot with culture of that city, which is often my capital (seems the starting location system is good about providing food resources for me), which means my capital/great person city is very often one of my culture cities. Makes the other cities jealous being my capital often does so much, but works for me. I guess a one sentence response could have been: "I don't make very many great artists before caste system, at which point I crank them out as best as possible.

My next game I'm planning on turning 3 cities into great artist generation (aka burn some cottages for farms) somewhere between caste system and culture bomb time to see how badly it straps me as it's great for culture gain and I think can more efficient if you've got 6-9 cities. Not sure what's better for culture alone, all farms and artist specialists/gp production or all cottages with maybe a specialist or two.

Couple of thoughts. Overall great advice and extremely useful.

-----------------------------

Being a little too focused can be "double or nothing".

Game I just won yesterday with cultural victory, early on I specifically went out of my way to get mounted archers, because two of my neighbors were aggressive and I had this itch they'd be coming in a few hundred years. Sure enough, and those units not only kept me alive, they allowed me to wipe out the incoming stacks. This will set back an aggressive AI quite a bit, because he'll then redirect most of his cities to rebuild his military (taking away from his science and economic advancement and effectively setting back his infrastructure).

Point is, these are great strategies, but I think it's important to be flexible and to keep your eyes open. Simply following a "play book" is going to get you in trouble.

On the other hand, I think the general strategic advice is wonderful...

-------------------------------

Let's see, I had one other comment. Oh, yeah. Much was made of the choice between what would be the Big 3 cities. Very true. However, I daresay that the choice is not all THAT significant. Sure, make good choices, and don't pick them at game start, but it's not necessary to wait until the endgame either.

Let's say you pick them in early midgame. Say you get one of them "wrong", wrong meaning you make what turns out to be a suboptimal pick. You decide on a city that by endgame would be your 4th biggest cultural provider (instead of the 3rd). So what? The difference is a few culture points only. And, by popping a great artist in there as a Super, earlier, you get the benefit of XXX culture points that you otherwise wouldn't have. (The turns that he is in the city as a Super specialist instead of simply fortified in your capital as a Unit.)

So, this comes down to this: you choose "right", and you get the extra XXX free and clear. You choose "wrong", and you break even, no harm no foul. With this, I'd say there's no downside to picking your Big 3 earlier than suggested.

Wodan

I agree with your bit about picking your big 3 cities, Wodan. One thing I've noticed on higher difficulties is that wonders really can't be relied on and that a cities culture is basically made when you decide it's going to be a city to plot cathedrals and national wonders into. My last game most of my somewhat old cities were pretty equal in the grand scheme of 50k culture (my capital slightly ahead, but the difference a drop in the bucket), I have no doubt I could have won similarly with any 6 of my main cities. I saved most of my great artists for the 4k punch, but next game I'm going to try to make more early and pick my big 3 very early as I'm pretty confident now in choosing based on terrain now.

Have won culture games on emperor level in each of the last two days at about 5 hours played for each. I've gotten pretty good at dodging wars when they would hurt most by learning to judge when a neighbor is getting antsy and flipping to their state religion until a different neighbor gets mad; you'll lose a few turns of anarchy, but at least won't get annihilated. With this method I usually maintain pacifism from when I get it until the end of the game paying no additional upkeep for units.

Winning culture victories on emp is becoming easy enough I'm almost thinking it's the easiest way to win on maps bigger then tiny (where of course domination/conquest isn't all that hard of wins).

Thanks for the article Walkerjks - very useful stuff. Also thanks to Ainwood for moving it here, I totally missed it wherever it was before :) .

Great Article!
It help me a lot to achieve a deity culture victory!:goodjob:
http://bbs.kuankuan.com/attachment/Mon_0511/282_144050.jpg

I'm beginning to really like The Great Lighthouse (at least in games where your main three cities will be on the coast and you have sufficient excess forests to chop for it). My last game was pretty typical (Emperor difficulty, built 6 cities, won just after 1900 AD) and I kept track of the benefit of The Great Lighthouse at different stages of the game. In this game, The Great LIghthouse gave me around 2000 extra science (adjusted for libraries) before 1500 AD. That is allowed me to flip the culture switch about 12 to 15 turns earlier than I could have done without the Lighthouse. Of course, the cities aren't completely developed yet before 1500 AD, so each turn I flip early may only net me an additional 450 or so culture per turn (as opposed to 1350 culture/turn in 1850 AD). Still, 12 turns @ 450 culture/turn = 5400 extra culture. Plus, I can start building Cavalry or Cossacks that much sooner.

Once I flipped the culture switch, the extra trade routes generated an extra 3000 base culture (before bonuses) in my core 3 cities. This meant an extra 9000 or so total culture spread between those 3 cities.

So I figure in a game where your 3 core cities are on the coast, The Great Lighthouse is worth somewhere in the neighborhood of 14,400 extra culture.

I keep getting my ass handed to me trying this strategy if I'm surrounded by neighbors. Dead simple if I'm alone or nearly alone on a continent. Otherwise, I find it impossible to prevent some neighbor from declaring on me - there just seems to be no way to keep everybody happy. With just 6-7 cities there is no way to keep a military and go for cultural victory at the same time. Now I'm on a Prince game as Alex where I mopped up my nearest neighbor by 1100 AD to get myself 15 cities, and am now going cultural. With 15 cities I can easily dedicate 5 or 6 to do nothing but pump units.

In the late game, if you're in a cliffhanger game, one vulnerability to watch out for is the U.N. Not for diplo victories so much, but the "global civic" votes.

If Global Civic/Emancipation passes the U.N. you lose your unlimited artists from Caste System, and there's nothing you can do.

If Free Religion passes, then you lose the 100% great people bonus from Pacifism.

If Global Civic/Enviroment passes, it can hurt your finances. (I've found that as a Kulture in the late game, one of the stats you're usually #1 in, is foreign trade, since you're being so cooperative with everyone. Enviroment loses you a trade route per city compared to Free Market, so the trade loss can really cut into culture production.)

I just lost an interesting nailbiter from this happening. GP rate tanked, cash dropped, and Elizabeth stole a space race win. I don't know how to prevent it... maybe vote for the most war-like candidate available as secretary.

It was an interesting way to get kneecapped, having the numbers turned against me like that.

I am currently playing my first game that implements these culture strategies. Some of the questions that I have are:

1) What do you build in your legendary cities? I've built temples, theaters & cathedrals where I can. What suggestions are there for other useful builds?

2) How many of you use missionaries to spread the various religions in your empire? What's the quickest method to spread the religions? I've found it pretty easy to spread 2 religions in all cities, but it's a little harder to get 3 different ones in each.

3) I don't have a lot of food bonuses in my current game. I'm finding that I need a lot of farms to produce extra food to support the artist specialists. Any other suggestions on how to support the specialists?

1) What do you build in your legendary cities? I've built temples, theaters & cathedrals where I can. What suggestions are there for other useful builds?
+happiness buildings are key early. In the late game, health is often a problem, so I tend to build any health improving building I can. Harbors are great for culture, parrticularly if you have built The Great Lighthouse.

In my mind, the most important buildings at the end of the game tend to be (in this order): +% culture buildings (primarily cathedrals), theaters (no unhappiness once you go all culture), harbors (one harbor can easily provide 12 base commerce - that will give you more culture than any other non-wonder), +health buildings (getting to work another tile, even if it's a +3 coast tile is as good as most other culture producing buildings), and all other culture producing buildings (temples, monasteries, libraries, etc).

Note that some of the buildings that are not terribly important in the end game (temples and libraries in particular) can still be very valuable for growing.

2) How many of you use missionaries to spread the various religions in your empire? What's the quickest method to spread the religions? I've found it pretty easy to spread 2 religions in all cities, but it's a little harder to get 3 different ones in each.
Almost always. Every once in a while, I'll have a game where the AI will flood my civ with their religion. I love it when it happens, but it's rare. So I generally have to spread the religions myself. What I don't do is spread the religions too early. If I have 2 religions by 1 AD, I may only spread a state religion (and even then I might leave a couple cities without any religion) in the hopes of coaxing another religion to spread to my civ. Around 1000 AD, I go into full religion spread mode and start building the temples needed for the cathedrals.

2 religions per city is probably fine, even if you have more options. I generally try to spread all religions to my core 3 cities (more temples and monostaries to build for the culture), but if I get too carried away with building temples in the other cities, I often find myself with a weak defense, or more cathedrals than I can actually build in time to do any good. If I can get 4 total cathedrals built (plus the Hermitage, so +100% culture bonus in all 3 cities), I'm pretty happy. Any more than that is gravy.

3) I don't have a lot of food bonuses in my current game. I'm finding that I need a lot of farms to produce extra food to support the artist specialists. Any other suggestions on how to support the specialists?
This happens sometimes. The best thing to do is find the city with at least 3 high-food resources. Maybe it's a pair of 5 food sea resources with a 5 food grain resource. That's +15 food from 3 tiles. With the extra 2 food from the city, you can support 5 specialists in that city, which is enough to generate 7 or so great artists. Not great, but you work with what you have.

If farming really helps, go for it. Just remember that a farm only adds half a specialist (pre-Biology). That may be enough to get you another great artist, but in the end game, a tile with a town will produce more culture than half an artist specialist.

I just finished a gruesome cultural win on Monarch as Gandhi. Started on an island by myself and won with Cyrus two parts away from a spaceship victory; everyone else had built Apollo and at least a couple casings.

From it I learned a few important lessons.

Mercantilism is suicide. Due more than anything to luck and a serious Great Artist drought, Bombay was about eight thousand culture behind Delhi and Madras. Cyrus had begun his spaceship and Bombay was chugging along at about 480 culture per turn with roughly 20 turns until 50,000 (Delhi and Madras were already legendary). I grew worried as the messages regarding Cyrus' spaceship started coming up faster, and took a look at my civics to see if there was any way to speed my culture; I'd been on Mercantilism since I discovered the relevant tech. On a gamble I switched to Free Market, hoping the free artist I lost would be compensated for by trade routes. Immediately upon switching Bombay was now producing 585 culture/turn. The lesson? As soon as Culture goes to 100% (I didn't do it until Mass Media), commerce is king.

I have this Stonehenge addiction I need to break. 75% of my great people all game were prophets, even when the % chance of great prophets was down in the twenties. I find building obelisks manually to be incredibly irritating, so I try for Stonehenge whenever I can - and Gandhi certainly makes that easy, it was my first build in Delhi - but that's kind of a self-defeating decision.

Defense matters even when you're all by yourself. Without a single war until the nineteenth century, I was happy to defend my cities with a single warrior each. Isabella, that wench, landed a dozen infantry next to a fairly high-commerce city, declared war and burned it with no trouble. Fortunately, my cities were widely spaced so I could upgrade and build a few infantry of my own before she did more damage; nonetheless, the eight turns I spent fighting her with both science and culture at 0% for upgrade/rush money nearly cost me the game.

I founded Judaism and Hinduism myself but - again thanks to Stonehenge - missed out on all the other religions. After finding I was on my own island, I stunted my own growth to finish Stonehenge. My tech pace suffered as a result. Founding religions does seem awfully useful in a cultural game; +5 culture/turn from the 2 or 3000's BC is really a great deal of culture, and not having to wait for natural spread in order to build temples lets your cities grow larger sooner.

Next time, I'm probably going to try a monarch pangaea cultural with a different civ, and if I remember, I'll come back here and revise my ideas with whatever knowledge I gain.

This is a "so close" victory type. I was playing a Prince game as romans. Epic length. I had a nice lead on the computer at 1640ish. But wasnt aiming for a cultural victory. But i thought yawn another spaceship win. So i saved the game and went for a cultural victory. I wasnt really to good at it. I started off with a 90% culture. Then went to a 70% culture. Then 60% for a bit and back up to a 90% then to a 100% when i saw spaceship parts :eek:

On epic you need 75k culture in 3 cities btw. I needed about 30 turns more. The computer won by spaceship in 1927. Which im not sure what to think about a 1927 win by the computer on Prince seems pretty fast. The computer doesnt normally pressure me that much. Maybe i got lucky in previous games. It could be because they got all the wonders after i turned off research. That might speed the computer up. Or maybe the computer is scripted to do stuff when it can project your cultural victory.

Getting religions is absolutely crucial for this victory type. You need 9 cities. It seems like its going to help if you see more then a couple of religions in your empire before 1600. Seems like it would be really nice if you can have 3 types of cathedrals in place before you hit the switch.

@walkerjks - Thanks for your original posts (extremely helpful & thought provoking) as well as your response to mine.

Well, I completed my 1st culture game...I lost. It was close. I lost a spaceship race. I should have won if I wasn't as careless. 1 city was at 60k+, one was at 51k+, and the 3rd was at around 47k. I think the method that walkerjks has outlined is very good. I plan to start a new game right away and try it again. I think I can win this time. I was Elizabeth in my 1st game, playing at Noble. I may try Catherine in the next one. I haven't used a Creative leader yet. Do you get the +2 culture right off the back? If so, this would be great for early city expansion!

+happiness buildings are key early. In the late game, health is often a problem, so I tend to build any health improving building I can. Harbors are great for culture, particularly if you have built The Great Lighthouse.
Yeah, health became the problem in my larger cities. I was fortunate to have many trades for food resources which helped my health somewhat, but I did need to build aquaducts in others.

In my mind, the most important buildings at the end of the game tend to be (in this order): +% culture buildings (primarily cathedrals), theaters (no unhappiness once you go all culture), harbors (one harbor can easily provide 12 base commerce - that will give you more culture than any other non-wonder), +health buildings (getting to work another tile, even if it's a +3 coast tile is as good as most other culture producing buildings), and all other culture producing buildings (temples, monasteries, libraries, etc).
How about marketplaces and the other economic buildings? I started building marketplaces in the late game because I didn't know what else to build. Plus, aren't banks the double production speed build for the financial civs? These will provide more culture via the economy.

If farming really helps, go for it. Just remember that a farm only adds half a specialist (pre-Biology). That may be enough to get you another great artist, but in the end game, a tile with a town will produce more culture than half an artist specialist.
Good point! Because I had mostly farms & cottages I was fairly hammer poor (single digit hammer totals in cities). Do you build a few improvements for hammers, say work some mined hills? Cottages that grow to towns produce 1 hammer in the later game?

I think you kind of eluded to this an a few earlier posts, but what civics do you recommend. Do you beeline to any? For religion I used Pacifism for the +100% Great Person rate. Economics I ran Mercantilism for the extra trade route. Labor I ran Caste System for the unlimited artists. For legal I eventually got to Free Speech for the extra culture. Government type was the one I really wasn't sure of. I don't see where one of these really helps a culture win in any way. Maybe representation to get some beakers after going 100% culture?

What percentage of your games do you build shrines? You mentioned in earlier posts that you don't make it a priority to found a religion. Is it that hard on higher difficulty levels? It just seems that shrines can really give a huge boost to your economics which will transfer into culture.

How about marketplaces and the other economic buildings? I started building marketplaces in the late game because I didn't know what else to build. Plus, aren't banks the double production speed build for the financial civs? These will provide more culture via the economy.
Firaxis created a lot of confusion by using the same symbol for gold income and commerce in all their help. Harbors, for example, increase commerce income from trade routes. Therefore, they increase science (early) or culture (late), depending on where your slider is at. Markets, banks, and groceries, however, increase your gold income. Nice, but a relatively small factor in a game where you run 80% science early and 90% culture late.

There are only two situations where I will build these structures. First, if I need the secondary benefit (+happiness or +health based on resources I have). Second, mid-game when I have nothing better to build. Though you may be better off building military if you are truly out of culture/happiness/health buildings. Very late in the game, I would rather build "culture" than a bank in my core 3 cities, and I build cavalry (or cossacks) and catapults outside my core 3 cities.

Good point! Because I had mostly farms & cottages I was fairly hammer poor (single digit hammer totals in cities). Do you build a few improvements for hammers, say work some mined hills? Cottages that grow to towns produce 1 hammer in the later game?
It's definitely easy to end up with a very low production city (particularly in jungled areas). Having a couple hills can make a huge difference. But if you don't have any hills, you still can either really on production from towns or by using cash to rush in truly critical building (a cathedral, for example). Both require either Democracy or The Pyramids.

I think you kind of eluded to this an a few earlier posts, but what civics do you recommend. Do you beeline to any? For religion I used Pacifism for the +100% Great Person rate. Economics I ran Mercantilism for the extra trade route. Labor I ran Caste System for the unlimited artists. For legal I eventually got to Free Speech for the extra culture. Government type was the one I really wasn't sure of. I don't see where one of these really helps a culture win in any way. Maybe representation to get some beakers after going 100% culture?
I switch into caste system/pacifism once my great artist city is ready to go. I occasionally switch into organized religion before that, but only if I'm playing a continents game where all my immediate neighbors share the same religion. The only other early game civic that I use situationally is hereditary rule. If I have lots of health resources and few happiness resources, I'll pick up monarchy (often through trade) and control happiness through military. Can get a bit expensive with pacifism, but does solve both happiness issues and keeps you from looking weak.

What percentage of your games do you build shrines? You mentioned in earlier posts that you don't make it a priority to found a religion. Is it that hard on higher difficulty levels? It just seems that shrines can really give a huge boost to your economics which will transfer into culture.
You absolutely can get an early religion on Emperor if you really want to. If you don't start with mysticism, you can get Judaism by making a beeline for it. Alternatively, you can set yourself up to chop-rush The Oracle and get either Confucianism or possibly Theology (requires some extra tech). In both cases, the problem is the techs that you are bypassing early in order to get the religion. Also, The Oracle tends to create a situation where you get more great prophets than you really want and great prophets are about the worst great person to have when you run out of shrines to build (though the +2 shields can be nice for your lowest producing core city).

An alternative is to get to Philosophy first. This happens reasonably often in my games (maybe 30% of the time?) and I could probably increase this percentage to a near certainty if I wanted to. Again, you may need to bypass some techs that you really need earlier to deal with other situations, such as Code of Laws, or Monarchy, or Calendar. That said, Philosophy can get you most of that other stuff in trade. Still, I don't think it's normally worthwhile to stretch for Philosophy just for the religion. The exception to this is when you are playing a Continents game and find yourself alone on an island. In this case, you may not see any religion until 1500 AD or so (generally 1200 AD or so) if you don't found one yourself. That means no pacifism before then and little time to prep the temples for cathedral building. My worst games always come in Continents games when I am isolated on an island (custom Island games are another story entirely).

Is a shrine worth it? Certainly if you have the religion and a great prophet (from The Oracle, for example). I need to do some analysis to see when it's worth generating a great prophet (instead of a great artist) in order to build a shrine. It's a nice culture boost in it's own right, and the income obviously allows you to produce more science and culture. I'm not sure the end result is as good as an artist, but it's worth taking some time to figure out.

Firaxis created a lot of confusion by using the same symbol for gold income and commerce in all their help.

There are several graphics mods that fix this problem. I like this one (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=3370089&postcount=6) myself, but that's just a matter of taste. I strongly suggest getting one of them, however, since the difference between gold and commerce is important.

Firaxis created a lot of confusion by using the same symbol for gold income and commerce in all their help. Harbors, for example, increase commerce income from trade routes. Therefore, they increase science (early) or culture (late), depending on where your slider is at. Markets, banks, and groceries, however, increase your gold income. Nice, but a relatively small factor in a game where you run 80% science early and 90% culture late. Hmmm...maybe I don't understand. Is it different from Civ3? If you have a bank and it increases your gold by 50%, doesn't that potentially offset any increases to a slider, or are they totally seperate now? If I adjust the culture slider, and say put it too high, that's going to deplete my gold reserves, right? Perhaps I have to do some more reading to understand this concept.

Hmmm...maybe I don't understand. Is it different from Civ3? If you have a bank and it increases your gold by 50%, doesn't that potentially offset any increases to a slider, or are they totally seperate now? If I adjust the culture slider, and say put it too high, that's going to deplete my gold reserves, right? Perhaps I have to do some more reading to understand this concept.
No, you are correct. But look at the gold being produced by your cities sometime when you have the slider at 90% (science or culture) during the mid-game. Your city may only be producing 5 or so gold. Instead of building something that gives me 1.25 more gold (market, grocery), I would prefer to build something that lets me work another tile (3 to 9 extra commerce) or adds 2 or more base culture. So +% gold buildings are certainly useful, they are just a very low priority for this sort of strategy.

Where they do make a big difference is in very large empires (conquest games), when your science will probably dip to somewhere between 40% and 70% or games where your end game strategy is based on rushing things with money (so you run very low science or culture in order to maximize income).

A major exception to this, which should be mentioned is any city with a shrine in it. You will notice that the shrine income applies to this one city only. So regardless of where your slider is, this city will be making a lot of money and would benefit significantly from +% gold buildings.

I've enjoyed playing around with cultural strategies in pursuit of various victory types (I have emperor and above wins on over half the civs so far - yes, I've been playing too much civ!). A couple thoughts:

1. The most effective way to delay AI spaceships is to give them wars to fight instead. This doesn't require a huge military on your part, just enough to defend your holdings.

2. Commerce+cathedrals is indeed the key. Great Artists are a red herring. Great scientists and engineers are more effective in developing your civ. If you get an artist accidentally, they don't suck, but the other options are stronger.

3. Depending on your traits + availability of stone/marble, wonders are a viable source of culture/GPP/unique effects. My earliest actual cultural win featured Asoka getting Pyramids and Hanging Gardens early, and riding the Great Engineer train to a virtual wonder monopoly. I went ahead to Flight in this game before the switch, so the 1904 win date probably could have been improved upon.

The darkhorse candidate is the infinite Great Merchant strategy (each two super specialists will feed a regular). I got a city to 19 Merchants and 2100 culture per turn (312 GPP/turn) with this approach.

I'm nearing the end of my 2nd cultural game. It's going well, but I'm not sure if it's going well enough. I'm in the early 1800's: 1 city is producing +/- 550 cpt, the other 2 are producing +/- 440 cpt. I'm playing on Noble and don't know if I'll beat the space race.

I'm trying something slightly different than walkerjks' original startegy. I'm using some of my great artists as super specialists in my city #'s 2 & 3. Once I knew for sure which ones they would be, I brought in the specialists. I only added 3 each to #2 & #3 culture cities. I added 2 at a time to one city and found that those 2 added 70 cpt in 1 city. I was very surprised, that's 35 cpt each:eek: I guess it has to do with the multipliers?

I played on continents. I ended up with just the Aztecs on my land mass. I did a fast expansion and paid for it for quite a few turns. I was down to only 40% science at one point. On the flip side, I have many temples built. I also have 3 different religions. I expected that I would be able to build multiple cathedrals in my 3 culture cities, but I'm not able to, even though I have enough temples built. Can you only build 1 cathedral per city:confused:

@Bezhukov: Thanks for the info.

...Great Artists are a red herring...
How so?

Depending on your traits + availability of stone/marble, wonders are a viable source of culture/GPP/unique effects. My earliest actual cultural win featured Asoka getting Pyramids and Hanging Gardens early, and riding the Great Engineer train to a virtual wonder monopoly. I went ahead to Flight in this game before the switch, so the 1904 win date probably could have been improved upon.
Are you able to complete most wonders at Emperor level? Do you use the engineers to complete them? Do you typically use Asoka as your leader?

The darkhorse candidate is the infinite Great Merchant strategy (each two super specialists will feed a regular). I got a city to 19 Merchants and 2100 culture per turn (312 GPP/turn) with this approach.
Wow, quite impressive! If you had 2100 cpt in 1 city, how much did you have in the others? How long did you have to wait for the other 2 cities to catch up achieve your victory?

Great Artists are a red herring. Great scientists and engineers are more effective in developing your civ. If you get an artist accidentally, they don't suck, but the other options are stronger.
I will admit that great engineers and great merchants might be more useful in some quantity. I haven't done enough analysis of the numbers to fully determine this. There is no question that 3000 or so gold in the last 50 years (from a very good merchant mission) is better than 4000 culture from a great artist. The extra gold lets you push up the culture slider from it's natural 80% or 90% to 100%. A more typical (at least on standard maps) 1800 gold merchant mission is not as good as a great artist.

Just curious - what will a great engineer do for me post-1500 AD (when most of my great people come)? As I see it, I can finish a cathedral or The Hermitage instantly. If I don't have the correct resource to halve the time, this might save 30 turns or so. +50% culture for 30 more turns is 3000 total culture, at best, so I don't see how that's a good use. Are there specific late wonders you are using them for? And as good as a great engineer is as a super specialist, I can't see how the bonuses truly put me 2.67% closer to victory as a great artist clearly does.

I'm not discounting the usefullness of merchants and engineers, I just haven't seen their usefulness for long-term culture. Yes, development = culture (indirectly), but I'm not sure it's enough. Now in other games, likes a one-city challenge, super merchants and engineers flat out rock (and artists stink).

There are two main reasons I love great artists -

1) The AI won't know you are winning, so you get attacked less. The AI seems to attack you as soon as it thinks you will beat it to victory. By storing 8 to 12 great artists, the AI never really thinks you are that close to victory. You may have cities at 49.5K, 38K, and 27K on one turn, and 50K, 50K, and 51K the next.
2) Great artists are the best city culture equalizers. I don't worry so much if one city produces +600 culture/turn, another is at +500 culture/turn and my thrid is lagging at 350 culture/turn. Great artists will equalize it in the end. I By spreading out the artists properly, all 3 cities will be at 50,000 culture before any of them hit 55,000 culture. So I waste very little

I found this thread and thought it was appropriate to be linked with this discussion:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=3416871#post3416871

The Parthenon topped their list of important Wonders. I've found it fairly easy to build (at Noble) before the AI if I start it right away. I think it's been proven that it isn't a must build, but I would think that it is worth trying get in all games?

Anyone have a cultural win in a multiplayer game? In games versus the AI, you can get away with having a weaker military (to a certain extent and depending on the difficulty level). Human players are much, much different.

Human players can also check out the victory conditions screen to see who has the cities with the next highest culture to theirs. If they see one of your soon-to-be legendary cities up there, you can probably expect an invasion. You may be able to trick them into thinking they can wait to attack by hording Great Artists for a last second culture grab, but if I was playing against someone with three cities at 30k culture I wouldn't wait...

Hi everyone.

I started off trying something pretty similar to walterjks' strategy and have played around with it over a few games. Certainly the early priority on deforestation and the preference of cottages over farms, especially when combined with a financial leader provide a great platform for all forms of victory.

Whereas population was power in earlier versions (especially Civ2), in Civ4 wealth seems to be the real key to success. I've just won a close-shave space race in a duel on monarch after playing pretty much the whole game for a cultural win but picking the wrong third city. It's a higher level than I usually play on and it says a lot for the power of the money, money, money approach that I could still win after dropping such a major strategic clanger and having to switch targets.

As to the great artist debate, the maths are overwhelmingly with the super specialist as far as I can see - culture gets lots of potential multipliers and they can clock-up some serious points. Obviously, later in the game it's more tempting to use the great work but early-doors it's no contest for me. The point about the AIs not knowing you're winning is an interesting one, though, so I might well give this a go next time and let you know how I get on.

The Parthenon, The Great Lighthouse and Eiffel Tower are priority wonders for me in a cultural game. The Colossus and Sistine Chapel are nice if they're gettable. I'll look to produce a great engineer to produce the Eiffel Tower if I think there's any danger of being beaten to it. I'm also a big fan of shrines - they really do generate a lot of wealth and add a great deal of power to the science and culture sliders. My favourite civics, currently, are free speech (bureaucracy until it's available); serfdom early on then caste system; free market; free religion following a spell of organised religion to get as many religions as possible in all cities to allow lots of Stupas/Cathedrals/Mosques etc. in the big three; and I just plain can't decide between the government civs, I just about lean towards representation at the minute.

Thanks for an excellent article walterjks, I can definitely say that I'm a far better player for having read it.

Thanks for this. Good stuff.

I tried this approach on Noble for the first time last night. Things went OK, but some rookie mistakes meant I wasn't close to winning until around 2000 AD.

About 2000 culture points from victory my neighbors went from pleased to declaring war in what seemed like two turns. I may have misplayed, but am not sure what I could have done better. Things ended really ugly. ;)

I'll try again tonight!

I have this Stonehenge addiction I need to break. 75% of my great people all game were prophets, even when the % chance of great prophets was down in the twenties. I find building obelisks manually to be incredibly irritating, so I try for Stonehenge whenever I can - and Gandhi certainly makes that easy, it was my first build in Delhi - but that's kind of a self-defeating decision.


Stonehenge shouldn't have been a factor in getting those Great Prophets. As I understand it, the GP points it produces go away when it becomes obsolete with Calendar. So after the early game, it wouldn't have been contributing to what kind of GP yougot at all.

Stonehenge shouldn't have been a factor in getting those Great Prophets. As I understand it, the GP points it produces go away when it becomes obsolete with Calendar. So after the early game, it wouldn't have been contributing to what kind of GP yougot at all.

That's correct.

After reading about Incan rushes, I thought I would experiment with the Incans for cultural wins.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=146674

There are seemingly three aspects of the Incas that make them attractive for culture wins:
1) You can conquer one AI opponent early. So instead of building your way to 3 cities, you effectively conquer your way there. And the enemy capitol will likely be in a better location than you could find available and will already be size 4 to 6 when you conquer it.

2) The leftover quechas will put you in great position to capture one or more barbarian cities. So you might be able to get to size 5 without building a single settler.

3) You start with mysticism and can easily grab Hinduism and Judaism if you choose. And depending on starting location, you might be able to conquer the civ that found Buddhism.

4) Since you aren't chop rushing settlers, you can use all your forests for wonders. Oracle, Pyramids, and Great Lighthouse are all excellent wonders for a cultural win.

You don't want to get greedy and try to take out 2 AI civs. By the time you are ready to take out a second civ, you will be facing chariots or axeman. Not good. And under no circumstances try to take out the Malinese. Quechas can handle archers in most cases, but Skirmishers are a problem.

There are some downsides:

1) The conquered cities will likely be far from your capitol. This is not a huge problem on lower difficulty levels, but it's a real problem on Emperor. Capturing a city that instantly saddles you with a maintenance cost of 8 gold is rough on early science. If you get Code of Laws early (with the Oracle), you can mitigate this with courthouses.

2) Even though grabbing religions early is easy, you still skip too many other techs. I had a lot of starts where my research got crippled early due to the spread out cities, yet I didn't have pottery or fishing or other income generating techs to offset the maintenance. Or I didn't have copper and hadn't researched iron working yet,

So my general recommendation with the Incans at Emperor is to:

- Research Polytheism first, then start looking at income-producing techs. That means pottery, mining, and maybe fishing.
- Takeover one AI civ and stop. Closer is better.

I haven't figured out if I can win earlier using this strategy or not. Earlier religion is certainly good and having 2 developed cities early is fabulous. If nothing else, early conquest makes the Incans a fun variant to Catherine and Elizabeth.

I just won my first game on Prince using more or less this strat, and it was a damn exciting game. I played as Frederick, got stuck on an Island with the Americans who became good friends and the Japanese who were stuck on the bottom below the Americans being either Annoyed or Furious at me all game long.

My tech was very slow, I didnt reach Democracy until 1800+ and couldnt manage a full culture flip until like 1850+. I didnt have much of an army, however a Defensive Pact with the Americans and very good relations with the #1 (Chinese) kept me safe from harm. I managed to get the culture slider to 100 by turning my 4 biggest subcities to producing wealth only, incurring minimal losses of around 10-20 gold per turn. My 3 top cities were producing between 400-450 culture, and I had a stack of some 8 great artists to go culture bombing, however everyone around me was building space parts like mad.

In the end I had one city that just reached 50000 with culture bombing, and I had one Great artist left, which I kept stationary halfway between my #2 and #3 city, not daring to run either way in case a great artist would pop up in that city spontaneously. In the end, with 3 turns left for my #2 city, I ran it to my #3 city to sac it for a great work. The 3 last turns were nailbiting and toe-curling, praying for the 3rd legendary city with mass newly constructed space parts rolling down my screen. Then, in the final turn, right the second when I thought I had won, it said in the middle of my screen "Saladin has achieved Space Race victory!". OMG! OMG! OMG! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

However, when my turn actually started, the game said that I had achieved Cultural Victory and I got the victory movie. So, does anyone know what happened here? Im a bit confused :confused: While I guess its a tie, Im claiming this as my first Prince victory anyway :king: :D

Well, I guess my message is thanks for the tips and ideas in this thread, cultural victories are great fun and Ive become a much better player for reading it. I almost feel bold enough to try Monarch, though I guess I should first try to achieve another win on Prince. :p

Oops, double post :mischief:

I managed to get a cultural win on lmonarch with the Incas so here are a few comments on what I did and why:
I started in a god location. Flood plains and a wine resource by a river. The latter with Financial and starting with mysticism granted me buddhism and hinduism, both founded in Cuzco. This may be a bit lucky, hadn't I had a wine by river I wouldn't have tried to found buddhism. But it is very very important imo to found at least one religion, because of the income it provides. Why? When you say There is no question that 3000 or so gold in the last 50 years (from a very good merchant mission) is better than 4000 culture from a great artist, I contend it is false. A great prophet is way better than both. I ran 100% culture in the end game and earned around 40 gpt running pacifism with several military units.
So I got two early religions founded and Islam later on.
I played with 6 cities most of the game but managed to flip 3 more. Why?
I took a barbarian city a little inside the German territory. This city would become one of the three big cities, and flip some of the german cities.
Quechuas are also great because with them you just don't need archery. Archery is useful to defend against barbs, but quechuas are just better against barbs. Archers serve against other civs but you don't want to go to war or else, in the end game, the enemy will kill you as you'll be lagging in tech. A religion with many missionaries helps your religion spread and the other civs will like you. Trade whatever tech you have to make them convert if needed.
I made sure to get the Sistine Chapel and the Statue of Liberty (+1 specialist per city is good). Other wonders I didn't get but I wish I had built the Eiffel tower, this would have saved me one tech to get the last +50% culture building.
Overall, I think aggressive and quechuas are best used defensively if you want a culture victory. They help prevent barbarians from raiding your cottages, since you'll either be 2.2 (quechua) vs 2 (warrior) or vs archer (4.2 vs 3) and can take a barb city, which saves a settler and the corresponding city growth. The rest is being financial and having towns everywhere.
Note my civics choices were universal suffrage (production from town + rush from gold for wonders and late cathedrals), were emancipation (I don't need the extra artists from caste system - 2 or 4 is enough given you must feed them), free speech (a must, even though bureaucracy earlier was good), pacifism and free market (for trade). Late culture can flip other cities and provide you with the 8th (Forbidden palace) and 9th (additional cathedrals/mosques/stupas...) cities. This got me a win around 1950.

Just made a Prince game and with only 3 cities (never got space for a 4th one) I managed to win on a very fun cultural game where I passed most of my time trying to convince much more advanced and military strong civs to not anihilate-me.

Well, I guess my message is thanks for the tips and ideas in this thread, cultural victories are great fun and Ive become a much better player for reading it. I almost feel bold enough to try Monarch, though I guess I should first try to achieve another win on Prince. :p

From what I've read about your interpretation of GPs 'spontaneously appearing', I think sticking to Prince would be a far better idea.

Your strategy is reaaly good but I just cant use it....I will exaplain you why....

When I try achieve a cultural win, theres always an aggresive civ declaring me war all game long.

they destroy all my cottage and when I switch the slider to 100% culture, they take huge military advantage and then they declare war again and destroy all my cottage again....

I jsut dont understand how you can manage to keep the pace in this case.

When I try achieve a cultural win, theres always an aggresive civ declaring me war all game long.

There are three aspects to not getting crushed by an AI:

1) Keep them happy. That means open borders as soon as you can, trading resources with them, gifting resources or tech to them when they demand, and gifting resources to them even when they don't ask (you can always get a resource back when you really need it). Once I flip the culture switch, happiness is no longer a problem, so I gift all my happiness resources (even when I only have 1) to the most aggressive AIs. I sometimes also switch out of Pacifism and into Free Religion late as well, if it appears that religion is causing a major issuee. Generally, the -4 from religion is offset by +10 or more for all the trade and gifts I have done throughout the game. I would look in some of the Diplomatic win threads for ideas on keeping everyone pleased with you.

2) Keep an army. If you research to Communism/Democracy (viable on Monarch and lower, but tough on Emperor and higher) to use the Kremlin to rush buildings (see the Catherine Cottage Rush thread for details), a late army is trivial. You are switching to 0% science anyway, so in every city that isn't either a cultre city (cottages) or great person city (farms), replace the cottages with watermills and workshops, go to state property, and suddenly you have multiple cities with a ton of production.

If you don't go to communism, it tougher to get the units you need. In this case, you really need a city with decent production dedicated to making units the whole game. You won't usually the best units, but having 2 axemen in every city up until gunpowder is usually plenty of deterrent to the AI. Post gunpowder, you need either military tradition (for cavalry) or chemistry (grenadiers) or rifling (riflemen). It's also useful to have 4 to 8 catapults lying around in order to suicide against stacks. Just build as many as you can from 1 or two cities and keep your fingers crossed. Since your cottages are critical in your 3 cultural city, don't let the enemy pillage these. If they come near these cities, take the battle to them. Grenadiers can kill tanks if necessary. You just need a lot of them (and it's a bit harder with the newest patch).

3) If all else fails, fight a holding action and first opportunity you get, sue for peace by offering one of your non-culture cities.

I used this strategy, it works! I had quite a few problems with finishing games but version 1.52 cleared most of them up. It was quite fun actually. I did a huge map, 18 civs, and 5 continents. Turned out me and the Spanish were the only ones on mine, and they declared war on me, so I took em out. I had the whole contenent to myself, so I crushed the rest of the barbarians, founded 4 religions and used them for my culture boom. I finished in 1852 AD, which is the quickest I've ever won so far. I was playing on epic, and I noticed the culture per city you need is 75000. That kinda sucked, but with the culture I was producing, I would have reached 100000 by 1900 AD in all three cities.

If anyone wants me to post this tell me how and I'll upload the game to the website, if they allow that.

After reading about Incan rushes, I thought I would experiment with the Incans for cultural wins.


I'm current on the thread to this point, but I've some comments to make that won't wait until the end.

---

First, "THANKS!" This has been a great read. Useful and thought-provoking.

Second, I think it's ironic that Pacificism requires a religion for which others of conflicting religions will go to war with you :) I'm of the opinion that much of the forum over-emphasizes and mis-applies religions. I think Pacifism is an optional component for this strategy. I'll defend that in a moment.

My credentials. I play Monarch, single-player, small maps, 6 AI opponents, random personalities, normal speed. I average around 11000 for score. I favor Mansa overall, but I like Qin, Catherine, and Elizabeth.

My caveat is that I'm not a consistent winner on Monarch, but I also like to try a lot of theories out instead of focusing on "teh win." It's not uncommon for me to scout out a better starting location in my games and settle 2-3 turns later "just to see if I can still win" (guarantees that you've got a pretty optimal 2nd site that you just vacated and puts a lot of border pressure on the unlucky neighbor).

Premises:

a) Adopting ANY state religion pisses off the AIs who invariably will adopt different religions either because they found them, are coerced into accepting another, or because they are just looking for an excuse. I often have cultural wins without EVER adopting a state religion.

b) Founding a religion ALWAYS has value, if for no other reason than it narrows the options for the AI opponents. If you can horde religions, the AIs will tend to converge on the same 2-3 religions which allows you to pick a side OR bribe cultures to convert so you can safely pick one.

A world at peace with no negative diplomacy will leave you alone as you spirit away the cultural win. A world at war will have retarded progress but increases the risk of military reprisals. If you can restrict AI state religions and pick the stronger side, Pacifism works wonders. If the political landscape is volatile, go Free Religion. Don't Open Borders everyone if things start to sour.

c) Capitulate to tribute for diplomatic value. Overtrade techs for diplomatic value. This will cause the AI eye to turn to other cultures for conquest. Let them fight it out. Sometimes, you can get a free tech down the road in return that you can then spread around for parity. If you do not pick a state religion, you have greater lattitude to bribe one AI to attack another, which worsens their relations and makes it less likely there will be a coalition against your aims.

d) The GPP benefit of Pacifism is fabulous, but you can still do fine with JUST Philosophical. A few choice wonders will help. Mansa is uniquely suited to take advantage of marble (mining->masonry+wheel & mining->BW for chop-rushing) for early Oracle/Parthenon... he also handles and executes rushes as well as anybody if the AI starts too close.

A lot of beginning and intermediate players fail to appreciate the power of Caste System for increasing GPP as well as culture. You can selectively and efficiently starve cities a bit (don't drop pop) for better output.

e) I understand the Great Artist hoarding but while you can't identify your 3rd cultural city with 100% accuracy, surely you can identify 2 of them. If you rush, the enemy capital is a near mortal lock for the 3rd.

The additional benefit from the Artist Super Specialist can be employed early on 1 non-capital city for major cumulative benefit. Since you're not usually getting to 9 cities, this allows you to focus your cathedrals on the other two cities and fill in the third city (I recommend your capital) if/when 9 cities becomes a reality. Lastly, your late game Great Artists will never be as valuable as Specialists, so absolutely hoard them to cap off lagging cities.

A single Great Merchant can ease your money woes for the rest of the game. Don't be afraid of Great Lighthouse. Since it does not have a commodity (stone, marble, etc) attached to it, you can nearly always pick this up with Qin or Elizabeth.

f) Whenever you get a religion spread to you, DROP EVERYTHING. Monastery it and spread it quickly. I will usually spread it to a city with fewest religions (for best success) and then let both cities spam missionaries to my culture cities until it takes and I can monastery it there. I avoid Scientific Method as long as humanly possible.

---

Hopefully, these thoughts have contributed to an already useful thread.

Cheers!

Hello,

I'm playing:

Version 1.52

Noble dificulty level

Marathon Mode

Huge Map

18 civs

All victory types set


Right now I have 3 cities with more than 100,000 culture points and I would like to know how much more will I need in order to achieve a cultural victory. I know than in a standard game the value is 30,000 for the 3 cities and I was wondering what is the value required in non-standard games.

Thanks in advance.

Happy New Year to everyone.

Quick: 25,000
Normal: 50,000
Epic: 75,000
Marathon: 150,000

Simple early sure fire technique for Monarch.

1. Indian - Gandhi = Fast worker and 50% wonder production.

2. You start with Myst. Go for Poly, establish Hindu

3. Add techs based on resources.

4. Nail down Priesthood. Build Oracle while researching writing.

5. BANG! You now have a free tech. I take code of laws and discover confucionism.

6. I now have established 2 religions. I have the Oracle, I am finishing construction of the Parthenon. I am now generating great prophets and using them to build their special building. This is all done before bronze and iron. I change civics to Caste System, stretch for pacifism. Ring the epic bell and I am now kicking out GP like no ones business.

This works every time.

I just finished a deity win that simply reinforces the fact that different games require different strategies. In this case, I only had 3 cities total, didn't found any religions, and in the end I didn't build any cathedrals (I should have skipped music as it turned out). In fact, I didn't research Nationalism, so I had no cultural bonuses other than Free Speech. I did build the great lighthouse.

Almost 57% percent of required culture came from 16 great artists (quick speed) producing great works.

Of the 43% that came from per turn culture, the per turn breakdown at the end is as follows:

7.5% Commerce from base trade route
7.5% Commerce from currency trade route
14% Commerce from great lighthouse trade routes
4% Culture from Great Lighthouse
27% Base commerce from worked tiles
6% Bonus commerce from worked tiles due to financial trait
12% Buildings (non-World Wonders)
1% Religion
1% Conversion of hammers into culture (city building culture).
20% Artist specialists

The overall affect of the financial trait (approximately 2.6% of total culture) is the lowest in any game I have won. The effect of philosphical trait (3 extra great artists, or 10.7% of total culture) was the highest I've seen. The creative trait might have actually been worth more extra culture (about 3%) than financial in this case, though direct comparisons are difficult since financial trait also means you research a bit faster, so you get to the end game sooner.

What was your finish date? It seems that finishing very early reduces the value of cottages, since they have less time to grow.

A'AbarachAmadan has an interesting writeup on a cultural victory in GOTM1.
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?postcount=304&p=3514854

Thanks for the link - I hadn't seen it. The win date was around 1975. Late, but the map was deliberately selected to slow down the AI (Archipelago with tiny islands) while providing me excess food in the form of seafood resources (hence the 16 great artists).

The general advice for how to use great artists is generally to use them as artist super specialists "early" and use them for great works "late". As far as I know, no one has ever properly defined when exactly the cutover is. Based on the game I just finished, I will attempt to do so. Note that specific dates are very much based on when exactly you will win and the speed you are playing on. So rather than include dates, I will simply include the turn number for each given event. Note that this game was a marathon speed game, so for epic games, you can divide the turn number by 2 (more or less) and for normal speed, you can divide the turn number by 3 (more or less).

Here were the important events in the game:

1 - game starts - all cities at cultural multiplier of 1x
418 - liberalism discovered - free speech adopted - all cities at cultural multiplier of 2x (+100%)
531 - Kremlin built - cities still at 2x, but rush building started
561 - Rush building ended - core cities at 4x multiplier (+300%)
622 - Small expansion due to neew religions - core cities at 4.5x multiplier (+350%)
725 - Cultural victory

The above oversimplifies the situation by a bit - the cities weren't uniformaly at that multiplier, but the core 3 cities averaged that multiplier. Additionally, all were within 0.5x of the average, so it a reasonable simplification.

Now, working backwards, we can determine the exact turn that an artist super specialist is better (for culture only) then a great work. At marathon speed, the great work is worth +12000 culture, so the cumulative culture must exceed that number for the super specialist to be better.

Without the Sistine Chapel, turn 411 is the magic number. This is 7x12x1 + 143x12x2 + 61x12x4 + 103x12x4.5 = 12006. That turn or before, the great artist should definitely be used as a super specialist.

With the Sistine Chapel, turn 486 is the magic number. This is 75x14x2 + 61x14x4 + 103x14x4.5 = 12005.

In a marathon game, that is 550 AD and 925 AD, respectively.

Of course, this doesn't tell the complete story. If you build The Pyramids and are operating under Representation, the super specialist will give you an extra +3 science/turn. In every case, the super specialist will also give you +3 gold/turn. For most of my games, where I have no religion to fund my maintenance, +3 gold/turn allows me to run the culture slider a little higher. Maybe not initially, but I always try to time the end of the game to run at 100% (since I will have the highest multipliers at the end of the game) and end the game with as close to 0 gold as possible. So +3 gold/turn in many respects is the equivalent of +3 commerce/turn. Once I hit liberalism, that's (more or less) +3 base culture/turn. This oversimplifies again, since things like banks will up the +3 gold/turn slightly, but it's a reasonable approximation.

Refiguring the turn numbers counting the +3 gold/turn from the super specialist as +3 commerce/turn we get:

Without the Sistine Chapel, turn 528 (1054 AD) and with the Sistine Chapel, turn 561 (1120 AD) were the magic dates for this particular game.

I just got a cultural win on Emporer (speed normal, everything standard) using the techniques you have described in this thread walkerjks. I'm really proud of this win because all the odds were against me from the beginning of the game: 1) started alone on an island surrounded completely by ocean, 2) only 1 single happiness resource (silver), and 3) was using the Kublai Khan of the Mongols (not exactly a great culture win leader). I wasn't originally intending on going for a cultural victory, of course, but since I was stuck on an island I didn't have much of a choice since domination and space race victories were out of the question.

My culture build started really late because I didn't get a religion until around 1500AD. I got 2 religions the entire game which allowed me to build 4 cathedrals because I had a total of 7 cities. Great artists weren't built until after I cranked up my culture slider because I was way behind in techs and I needed every commerce point to get the techs I needed until that point. 2 of my 3 legendary cities were commerce cities, and the other was a artist specialist city. I had 3 of my non-culture cities focusing on great artist building after I set the culture slider to 80-90%, and they provided me with 9 great artists by the end of the game. Finished the game in 1950, with the AI still having to build 3 more spaceship parts.

Starting on an island has many big disadvantages (limited resources, no external trade until Astronomy, no religions), but the advantage is that you don't really need to worry about your military or harassment by other civs. I didn't fight in a single war throughout the entire game.

What I'm trying to say is that even with isolated island starts on emporer, cultural wins are still highly possible.

I just got my second win on Prince and am 2-0 at that level, this time by culture. This strategy is excellent, the article well written - and the thread now surprisingly augmented with great information. Walker, if you have any extra time, could you break down the cutoff dates for all game speeds?

Your article really opened my eyes towards the cultural victory.
With Civ III I never even tried to achieve this kind of victory (with my playing style its always the space race or diplomatic victory).
But thanks to your story, things have changed. While trying to master the game on Prince level (and loosing the space race continuously), I once started a game with a random leader on a standard map size, continent, high sea levels and marathon speed. The leader turned out to be Catherine (cultural, philosophical). While exploring I found myself to be the only inhabitant of a continent. At first I went for the space race victory. But by the time you get off your continent with your caravel and your alphabet you're way behind the other civs.
But with the diplomatic victory as a goal, being the lone civ on a continent becomes a huge advantage! Why? Is saw no need to develop any seafaring or military techs in the early stages of the game. My opponents would'nt arrive with their militairy forces loaded on their gallions for the next centuries to come. Instead, I got to be the first to build numerous world wonders, founding taoism and islam on the way.
The continent was large enough to reach a number of ten cities. Three became the targets for the cultural victory, two others were designated to produce military units.
These units were enough to fend off the only invading force during the whole game; hower they succeeded in raizing a minor city, they couldn't get more than six units at a time on my shores. After two rounds of attack they were open for peace negotiations.
A few centuries later I experienced a very emotional moment: I turned the research to zero. From that moment on I was managing to get the culture rating to 100%. This was achieved by a form of micromanagement: having cities generate wealth, while employing merchant specialists. The only challenge I had, was that the smallest of my three cities needed a great artist to reach legendary status before time ran out. And at marathon speed level, there was just one more to be born...
And so, while my cossacks and riflemen were guarding my resources and the other civs raced to be the first in space, I won my very first Prince game and my very first cultural victory.
Thanks to you!

Congrats on the Deity wins Walker!

But looking through the player log, I noticed in one of the games that you built the Pantheon (pretty crucial for cultural chances), after the AI built Notre, Sistine and G/library.

What the heck happened there??

The normal wonder progression seems to be, Henge/Oracle, Pyramids, and then Pantheon (maybe the G/lib here and there before).

You must have thought all your Xmases have come at once, lol.

Great Achievement anyway.
I've been close on Deity with cultural, but could not defend the waves of the head hunters.

Cheers

Congrats on the Deity wins Walker!

But looking through the player log, I noticed in one of the games that you built the Pantheon (pretty crucial for cultural chances), after the AI built Notre, Sistine and G/library.

What the heck happened there??
The AI doesn't seem to care much about Parthenon. So every once in a while, it is available late. Same thing happens with Hanging Gardens in some games. With Elizabeth (or any other philosophical civ), The Parthenon doesn't have a huge effect, but every little bit helps.

The deity wins are a little bit "fake". It's Hall of Fame rules, so I pick my opponents (only peaceful ones), and turn off barbarians (though it would work with barbarians on the map I choose).

Most importantly, I handicap the AI as much as possible to neutralize the second settler. To do that, I choose archipelago map with high sea level and tiny islands. It's not uncommon to start on a 4 tile island.

Since there is no room for cottages, I instead get 60% of my culture through great artists. So regen the map until I get a starting spot with at least 1 hills and at least 5 food resources (I've had up to 7 seafood). Make heavy use of whipping to build early stuff. Build the Great Lighthouse. Settle only 2 to 3 other cities (on spaces with 3 seafood, if available, and 2 seafood otherwise). All 3 cities churn out great artists. Religion is only important for pacifism. I don't build any cathedrals (not enough production).

Oh, one more thing - if you play on quick speed, the scaling is off - the speed is 2/3rds normal speed, but you only need half the culture. So it's easier to win a culture win, but you can't really win early (like the 1100's wins that are in the HoF).

That's the deity strategy in a nutshell. It's very gimmicky, but a lot of deity-level HoF is gimmicky.

I tried to play as Spain in my attempts, pretty much normal settings but also Archipelago, so I can get a sea resource tile to work and found 1 or 2 early religions from it. Then work from there, spreading the culture.

In my 2 attempts I did manage to chop down the Pantheon, and also my land mass is usually big enough to get my 3 cities on it.

Once I had no iron, so that was a killer, but still I was doing well, great income from spreading the religions, culture building was super etc. But the wave of the attackers that came (2 declared war at once virtually) was amazing.

The other time I also founded early religions, but was an island hop away from Napoleon who despatched galley after galley of spearman, and defeated my defending axeman. (I hate that guy....)

I think cultural is the most plausible and 'fair' win on deity, the future start, the anarchy exploit are a bit of a joke I know.

I still think it's good that you pulled it off ! :-)

Maybe you could give it a try with Spain, as right now I simply find it too boring/not interesting to focus my game on cultural wins, I want to space ship win more often on Emperor.

Once you chop down the Pantheon and focus on defence, I think it's very defendable, especially if you get Iron for your Conquistadors. Their 50%+ v melee will be handy if you beeline for guilds early enough.

Cheers

I'm a Civ 3 veteran and got Civ 4 for Christmas. I always was a warmonger in Civ 3 and started that way in Civ 4. Thanks to this post and the one by walkerjks I decided to try my hand at a cultural victory.

3 losses (yes Virginia you do still need a military;) ) later I got my first cultural victory. I used these two threads for alot of my strategy and fine tuning. Thanks to the OPs of both threads and those of you who have added to the threads. I now have more than one way to try and win that I enjoy playing.

All of my culture wins have happened by accident. I have always gone for diplomatic or space race, and try to get my opponent's border citys. It's like when you are going for conquest and get domination or the other way around.

Please exuse my bad spelling and grammar

I'm a Civ 3 veteran and got Civ 4 for Christmas. I always was a warmonger in Civ 3 and started that way in Civ 4. Thanks to this post and the one by walkerjks I decided to try my hand at a cultural victory.

3 losses (yes Virginia you do still need a military;) ) later I got my first cultural victory. I used these two threads for alot of my strategy and fine tuning. Thanks to the OPs of both threads and those of you who have added to the threads. I now have more than one way to try and win that I enjoy playing.

LOL - I guess this post only makes a little sense since I thought I was posting in the notes and tips thread started by spiceant. But the point is the same - I now enjoy the game even more thanks to you all.

Great thread, I should thank everyone for the insights. I was a Noble player before GOTM, then I played GOTM2 on Prince and won Diplomacy. Now on GOTM3 it was Monarch and Tokugawa, but I pulled a Cultural! Will tell the whole story in the spoilers when they come out.

Just finished my first civ 4 win (cultural) with English on Prince on a standard map standard speed by 1942ad. My biggest mistake was realising value of spreading many religions and building cathedrals. By end of games on my island with America all my three cultural cities had 4 cathedrals each adding +50% culture with an added +100% by a certain civic. Having a tech lead i found 3 religions and the Americans found christianity. I think perhaps i could of cut off my science rate to zero earlier on as no other nation landed on my island all game. I also should of spread the religions much earlier as this delayed my cathedrals.

I certainly wasnt going to research scientific research no matter how many civs wanted to trade it with me. Room for improvement me thinks. It was fun game anyway. Hmmm i doubt this would of worked on monarch without a focus on the goal ahead.

I've almost pulled cultural victory off on emp two times now, thanks!

I play Noble and would like to go for a cultural win. I much prefer Epic speed. Is cultural still fairly doable at this speed and at this level?

I don't know about Epic speed, but I managed to win my very first Noble game today with a cultural victory. I played a sloppy start and was I stuck on an island with Tokoguwa. I managed to build nine cities but I was never able to build a big enough military to challenge Tokoguwa, and he wouldn't ever trade techs with me, so I started falling behind in techs.

Mid-game I other civs exploring found me and I was able to finally trade some techs to catch up and luckily 4 religions spread to my cities. So, I managed to build a couple wonders and cathedrals in my 3 mains cities and pulled off a cultural victory as the AI was finished building casings. Great strategies posted here, I might try again on Noble to refine my early game a little before I try anything on Prince. :D

Hey, excellent strategy...

I tried (just about as I could) followin tightly.

The settings were, Elizabeth, China (mixed leaders, chose china for Pavillion and to a less extent, cho-ko-nu), standard size, pangea, everything else defaults on Noble.

It was my first victory on noble (and first time NOT getting crushed since BTS)...

Won in 1944, went to the "accept all demands, gave everyone help (unless help in war) using techs (while i've got them) and happyness resources as gifts" and it really worked...

There were 7 civs, and i got no religion until 6 of them were hinduist (seemed safe as the other was 5 civs apart from me)...

In BTS some things will be different:

a) Apostollic palace... if you don't make it, and the one who has it, is from another religion... you're dead (Jihad's coming for you)
(this time, one of the hinduist build it)

b) But... someone passed some decission on "assing that city to"... once for one of the other civs (failed) and twice for me...
(build 2 settlers with chop rushing, got lucky with iron and got a barb city with one swordsman... then, some hundred years later, got the "working citys" by those AP flips and everything went well)

c) There's something you cannot control, and that are the "events". If you have bad luck, and you have an "unnaproved marriage" failing with your neighbour... that's probably war again...

d) it never reached to the point, but i tend to believe that corps (that the other civs will eventually create) might be a problem (money flying out of your window) ... so "rush to victory" to prevent it.. (or close external markets, but that's not good either)

e) some things should be rethinked (or recalculated) with the new techs and stuff (i'm to lazy right now to do the math/stats)...

anyway... thanks for the article, it's really good, and "stands the test of expansions" (for most of what i read, it seems to be written for the original, because it never says anything about Great Generals appearing (though is obvious because of the "hippie" (all peace) behavior..

f) (almost forgot) Great Spies... you "start" with 4 Espionage points per turn, and somehow, you will get stuck with one of them... the only good thing I though I could do with it, was starting a golden age (first one in BTS is only 1 GP)... i wouldn't know what to do if a second appeared..

thanks again.... looking forward for your "adjustments" for BTS... :king:

Wouldn't using SE for this instead of CE, and generating culture with Artists and Great Artists work better though?

With SE you are not required to become a sitting duck when you turn on the "culture switch" - all but 3 of the top cities can still continue producing scientists (and even your 3 cultural cities will still generate some science if you are running Representation).

Not to mention, at higher levels SE is generally more efficient, as it is not affected by inflation the same way CE is.

At higher levels SE is not affected by inflation the same way CE is.
What does that mean?

Wodan

I think you underestimate Industrious a bit. Even if it only allows 1 extra early wonder for 6 culture/turn, that doubles to 12 after 1000 years, and with free speech and 3 cathedrals, that's 42 culture per turn at the end. Just one extra early wonder can easily produce 8-10% of a city's culture for a game.

Also, Sistine chapel is a huge gain. Even without the specialist bonus, that's 15 base culture in your 3 cities from the religious buildings.

My favorite for culture is Huayna Capac. Ind and Fin both help a lot.

Very nice post.

After reading it, I have used this strategy several times and it works great. The last couple of times I decided to go cultural late and actually did better for my victory date, one game hitting 1802ad on Monarch (but I think I was on Epic speed so that probably explains why it was so early). I has two cities with over 1000culture/turn in my last game. And it was about 65 turns from flipping the switch to winning with all the Great Artists I had stored up or generated. I had 6 religions to work with in this game, captured a city with that founded two religions in the BCs :P

1) I progressed farther into the tech tree before I flip the 100% culture switch. Namely, I go to Radio to get the extra 50% culture in each big 3 city from Eiffel Tower and the Broadway, RocknRoll +50%s.

2) One of my culture cities is always my NE/NP GP farm city. Which will pretty much always win the race with all the Artists specialists they will have when I flip the switch. And it can make a lot of Great Artists when it first comes online.

So the nice thing is you can figure out you can't win Space Race and still get your act together to win Culturally, as long as you build the religious infrastructure along the way (best to do that with Organized Religion active obviously). The religious infrastructue helps you anyway, and otherwise yo basically play the game like you might for a dominatin or space race victory until you get to liberalism. Then you can decide if you will win the Space Race, or if it is even worth it to try, when you can probably win culturally faster.

Hello, I've been using your guide to try to win my first cultural game and it worked very well.
I've been playing a shadow game of the first 'cultural victory challenge' (noble). It's 1620 I have 3 cities with more than 50.000 culture points in the victory screen since 2 turns ago. However, I don't get the victory yet. Does anyone know why?
Thanks in advance

Hello, I've been using your guide to try to win my first cultural game and it worked very well.
I've been playing a shadow game of the first 'cultural victory challenge' (noble). It's 1620 I have 3 cities with more than 50.000 culture points in the victory screen since 2 turns ago. However, I don't get the victory yet. Does anyone know why?
Thanks in advance
The amount of points you need to qualify as a "legendary" city increases on the longer game speeds. Are you playing on Epic or Marathon?

Go into one of your 3 cities, look at the lower left, and it'll tell you how many points you need to achieve Legendary status.

Wodan

ps the guide should say this. ;)

Yes, you're right. The game was epic and 75.000 culture points are required for that speed. Thanks for all.

Right now im playing for a cultural victory on prince. Huge map, random settings and it spit out 4 large continents with 1-3 civs each Montezuma and myself on one island, Shaka, Mansa, and Catherine on another, Huayna Alone(hes a real pain in the ass now because he managed to get a near perfect location in terms of resources and food which allowed him to get a huge civ since he was alone on his continent and ghandi spawned with ragnar. And ragnar spawned with ghandi

Poor choice in leadership for me though i guess, i should have went for phi/org but i instead opted for agg/org which has worked out fairly well for me even though i havent popped as many great artists as ive wanted. However i started on the same continent as montezuma so i was glad i had the agg trait and quickly destroyed him before he got to warmongering actually i destroyed him when his civ was only 2 pop in ~3700BC and it led to me having 2 early cities on opposite sides of my continent which forced me to build across to meet the two and i moved my palace to the middle for a lower maintenance cost(this proved to be a wise choice as even though i have the organized trait it netted me 6g/turn which turned out to be roughly 20 beakers/turn.

As expected Shaka took out Catherine around 1500 BC and started warring with mansa on and off which has ended in a stalemate more or less, and the downfall of his civilization which i will explain later.

Although Ragnar took out Ghandi early, which didnt surprise me at all he didnt expand much and much of his island was settled in the 1300's by Huayna. Huayna's empire really boomed at ~1300 which put some major pressure on me to not switch over to culture as soon as i hit the mid/late 1500's like i wanted. In order for me to keep enough of a military lead i had to grab a few more military techs so i could hold him off via navy before he could land on my continent since war was more or less inevitable since shaka is a war monger and has the same religion and the favorite civic of Huayna thus im going to take a diplomatic hit with him for being at war with shaka.

At this point im glad that i was somewhat unlucky with GP's and popped two scientists and a merchant--I lightbulbed the scientists to get an early tech lead which has made staying ahead, militarily, of people with access to me such as shaka and GK fairly easy. Its now ~1720 and im flipping the slider between 30% research and 60% culture and 90% culture to keep a solid military lead in terms of naval strength since im more limited in number than shaka/huayna on the mainland. What im mostly worried about is the fact that ive switched 2 remaining cultural centers to producing straight out culture (one is at ~110,000/150,000 with 1600ish culture/turn the other at about 70,000/150,000 and only producing around 950 Culture/turn) and im not near enough to the great artists to close the gap between the two cities for as early a victory as id hoped(im now looking at ~1850ish instead of 1775-1800ish).

ersonally i think if i played a phi/org and spawned with ghandi/huayna i may have gotten a better game and won at 1725 or so and i could have probably used ghandi as a meat shield vs most of the civs. another interesting outcome would have been using monte/shaka as an attack dog vs huayna which could have let me get a better lead on him since monte/shaka always have massive militaries even though they tech so poorly.

I feel like im leaving out Mansa in the explanation but him and shaka have been at war for ~300 years now and neither seems to want to give up anytime soon. Even though hes furious and i keep refusing to help him @ war or give him techs i dont see him surviving for much longer as ragnar has declared war and started to push him back pretty far at this point. Ragnar is pleased with me and ill probably use him as an attack dog vs Shaka before he gets the chance to rebuild his military. Ragnar also has a much larger and more advanced civ than shaka so im pretty sure that a worn out shaka wont stand a chance.

Huayna will most likely hold out on declaring war until i start warring with shaka so instead i think i may just gift ragnar techs for a military lead and hold off of war since i dont take a diplomatic hit for trading with ragnar since huayna is only going to be cautious of him when he declares war on shaka.

On a side note usually get beat to rock n roll/hollywood if i get broadway so i let huayna get them and i took rock/hollywood and the eiffel tower before sliding my culture up to 90%.

I just played GOTM 35 (Monarch, Normal speed, Std map, Elizabeth) with a strategy posted in the forums. A runthrough of the game with lessons learned is posted in the GOTM 35 final spoiler thread. (Will post links when the game closes).

This should be safe to discuss here:

Maxit, it looks like you only got 2 religions. One suggestion is to try to get at least one of the AI religions to spread to you. It's much easier to get a CV with 3, 4, or even 5 religions than with only 2.

:blush: Whoops, sorry about the post. Regarding religions in this strategy, it is important to follow the guidelines and open borders to the AI. Just another mistake to learn from.