I'm having big problems in deity continent games where asoka is alone on his continent.

It seems every time he just spins out of control and without fail will win a cultural victory (3 cities) before anyone else has a chance in hell of even completing a space ship,never mind getting it off the ground!

I've even tried my SSE/WE to steal almost every possible wonder from him, and yet he STILL wins the cultural.

I understand some maps are harder than others, but when the generator basicaly makes you lost before you even started, something needs to be fixed by firaxis.

Is there any exploit against this that I may have over-looked?

World Builder!

Well, the solution to cultural victory is invariably to attack the other civ and raze their best cultural cities. Even if holding them is impractical, a suicide run to burn the cities is often possible. If one or more of his top three are cultural, this is often quite easy even at deity level.

I've never used world builder as it seems to be a tool mostly for cheating by many. Though I suppose it has some testing/educational use.

India civs are always up in the tech leaders, so that may not be so easy attacking and razing one of the cities, especially considering I'd have to build a whole fleet with deity mods against me. But maybe if I roll back to a previous save and do some experimenting, it may just work in time.

I'll use the World Builder later to examine in detail if razing just one of his cities can really stop it. Obviously I can't raze a whole continent against the game leader.

Alright I just used World Builder for the first time. Guess I have a lot to learn with it because I couldn't even figure out how to get an inside DETAILED view of a city. Double clicking on the city bars do nothing but add stuff.

Of the three cities which hit legondary status, only one is on the shoreline, making it POSSIBLE to attack directly by boats before a hoard of units rush over to defend. And unfortunately I am in no range to use air units either.

Would be nice if I could salvage this last game..

If your using Worldbuilder, then you might as well just sink his "Top 3" in Map Mode.

Razing one of his top 3 cultural cities would at the very least give you some more time to work with. So you just need a pile of units/ships and hit that coastal city. Even if you have inferior units, if you have enough of them, with enough siege, you can take the city down.

In theory, you should never lose cultural to an AI.

Hmmm...If the cities are defended by Machine Guns, SAMs, etc, i suggest pulling an artillery rush combined with tanks. Artillery get bonuses killing Seige units, so those are effective against the Guns. Tank rushes in 3 waves are a good way to take out an enemy in the Modern Era. Simply do a suicide bomber run to kill a couple units, then rush in with a 3 pointed tank assault, heading straight for those cities, with transports rushing in new units until the cities fall.

If you want to study the AI, use worldbuilder to produce some great spies, infiltrate and observe in normal game.

Cultural wins are the new deity AI topstrategy. Going to war is not always an option, so I'm working on other counters atm.

Damn, did I forget to mention this was Normal speed also? There is no way now I can get units on the other side of the world and take that city with odds in my favour.

If you went back to a save when you just teched up to galleons, could you build galleons and go take out one of the top culture cities?

The problem with that, is I'd give up my own lead, as well as leave my back door open. Grrrr.. and even then it's just a gambit.

I am going to try to defy the un ban on nuclear weapons, and try to get allies to participate in a nuke war.

I am out of options otherwise...

...A nuke war? Not a good option. All of Asoka's friends will take you out, while you'll lose major points with allies for the defying. Plus, if you defy, there's not a guarantee that others will. Try using spies. Find what he's building and what wonders there are and sabotage, etc.

Is espionage an option?
If yes, you should destroy his broadcast towers and theaters, this will not only reduce his culture output directly, but also reduce the number of artist he can hire => less great artists + less artist culture.
Additionally unhappy- and unhealthyness for a couple of turns can save you some time for spaceship building.
The drawbacks of this idea are: it will cost you some EPs & hammers for the spys, he will rebuild his buildings and you will suffer some diplomatic penaltys if he catches some of your ninjas. And well it only helps you getting some extra time, it wont stop him forever.

Another thought: does he have any culture corp? If yes, perhaps you should work on getting them yourself to deny him the access.

hmm perhaps you could even use the UN : if he generates lots of GA with pacifism, forcing free religion might be an option...

That's a good idea. A very friggin' good idea.

If you want to study the AI, use worldbuilder to produce some great spies, infiltrate and observe in normal game.

Cultural wins are the new deity AI topstrategy. Going to war is not always an option, so I'm working on other counters atm.

Ive noticed that doing this may cause the AI to devote more of its commerce to espionage also(AI apparently likes to be atleast even with you in spy points). So most likely if you do this the AI's will be researching slightly slower than usual.

You could just edit your config file with chiptole (the best mexican restraunt ever) and then hit ctr+z ig... it reveals everything its the test mode to run and debug crap

Is espionage an option?
If yes, you should destroy his broadcast towers and theaters, this will not only reduce his culture output directly, but also reduce the number of artist he can hire => less great artists + less artist culture.
Additionally unhappy- and unhealthyness for a couple of turns can save you some time for spaceship building.
The drawbacks of this idea are: it will cost you some EPs & hammers for the spys, he will rebuild his buildings and you will suffer some diplomatic penaltys if he catches some of your ninjas. And well it only helps you getting some extra time, it wont stop him forever.

Another thought: does he have any culture corp? If yes, perhaps you should work on getting them yourself to deny him the access.

hmm perhaps you could even use the UN : if he generates lots of GA with pacifism, forcing free religion might be an option...

He is using free religion on his own right now...

I only built the corp for luxouries. Since I really hate great artists, I figured what the hell and made it. I had options to take 2 other corps, but decided not to. I don't really care for corps at all.

Right now, I am experimenting by a full out nuclear war. I am far ahead in tech, because he is pouring everything into culture funding. This means I can nuke till doomsday (no pun intended). The fallout makes all his tiles non-workable, and i've nuked BOTH his settled contnents many times over now. And I'm still doing it.

Right now I have -20 relation penalties for (you nuked my friend), and it caused another war against me, but I ended up nuking him too! lol.

Maybe if I win this one I'll post my walkthrough solution if someone's interrested.

^^ Please do, it's going to be interesting to see a "prevent cultural loss by nuking your opponents" stategy :)

If you want to study the AI, use worldbuilder to produce some great spies, infiltrate and observe in normal game.

If you want to study the AI, set "cheatcode = chipotle" in CivilizationIV.ini and press CTRL-Z when you start the game. This does the following:

- reveals map and resources, removes fog of war
- reveals all AI units and cities (I guess this is part of the above)
- allows you to access any AI city (doubleclick as you would with your own cities)
- shows all AIs with all information in the scoreboard. That is, their research and whatever CAN be shown in the scoreboard.
- allows you to access any and all other information. Eg. when you go to Science screen you have a dropdown menu to change leader, thus accessing science screen of any AI
- mousing over the map gives extra information with shift pressed, as well as other information alt pressed. Maybe something more with control or combinations, don't remember. This includes eg.
1) "best improvement" (what automated worker or AI worker would build there),
2) found values including notes of "best found spot" (would be founded onto by AI or would be marked as blue circle for player),
3) AI strategies when mousing over AI territory (eg. Dagger, Cultural, GetBetterUnits, whatever)
4) tile pressures, eg. "cultural pressure" (may cause nearest city to build cultural building if automated or AI city), "danger value" (may cause AI to move troops towards the area to protect it, or garrison nearby cities further)


You can find out a lot about how the AIs work. I used to do this quite a lot during BetterAI development in order to understand wtf was going on. There're loads more debug screens you can access (with which you can do stuff that just might blow up your computer, and I didn't understand but a small fraction of it all - not that I'd be a game developer so not really expecting to either), but I think some information Blake's BetterAI provided isn't available in BTS.

I'd suggest anyone who finds AI to behave in weird way should do:
1) save the game when you suspect weirdness or AI stupidity (the unexpected kind, not the expected kind)
then, when you've done playing whether to win, loss, or abandonment of game,
2) set chipotle,
3) load the suspect saves one by one,
4) press CTRL-Z,
5) inspect what you suspected of weirdness,
6) play a few turns looking for symptoms or problems
7) when you find something you can't explain, take the saves that show the problems and write a report on appropriate forum with saves attached describing whatever you think needs describing

Not that I'd go to all that trouble, but hey - maybe someone will :) There are lots of players, so even if just a few people going to the trouble we might find experienced modders interested in tackling the issue (and maybe even The Return Of Blake [cross fingers, knock on wood]).

1:23 am and I am back again. I got that nuking idea to work after all. Phew... I was getting worried there as I didn't see any other possible solution to that mess.

In any case, it worked on my Immortal game, and if only I could figure out all the nooks & crannies of BtS, then it SHOULD work on deity as well.

I also disproved a couple other myths again, so maybe I should do a writeup like the good old days. Then again, no one likes being told they were wrong, so maybe I shouldn't...

I cannot see anything strange here! Asoka is winning cultural victory in Deity when in isolation. So what? It is Deity after all and obviously he was left alone to win.

chiptole (the best mexican restraunt ever) ...

:lol:

I've had better Mexican food at the El Paso airport .

^^ Please do, it's going to be interesting to see a "prevent cultural loss by nuking your opponents" stategy :)

I think I may have stumbled upon some sort of mickey-mouse nuke-economy here :P I'll most likely have to do a lot more pioneering in this area because I feel with the new changes in BtS it will become a necessity for my strategy.

It will possibly take 2 days for my write-up, but here's a sneak peek for now.

Note:: India has about a -100 rating on me for nuking! 86 are just for me nuking him alone, with another additional 6 for nuking a couple of his buddies.

I wasn't aware penalties could rise this high, and I assume it could be a bug as Firaxis didn't expect so many nukes to go off in a game?

I really did run into a LOT of global warming because of it.

http://www.highpoly3d.com/civ/proof6/nuke_penalty.JPG

In theory, you should never lose cultural to an AI.

The AI victory that always breathes down my neck is space race. I've never lost a cultural. Sometimes a "time" on pure points...

AIs just effortlessly snap up techs at the higher levels, and trading gets you nowhere as they'll only trade a 400 beaker tech for a 200 beaker tech, which in the long run only accelerates THEIR progress, not yours.

I only play on immortal, but I've had some near misses with cultural victory attempts, But never will I let one of those peace loving pansies steal the win from me. No I've never made a space ship(ok well i made 1 but only 1 in hundreds of games), and have absolutely no idea why a cultural victory even exists, but by that last screenshot You did almost the right thing.

A cultural victory is by far the easiest to shut down, razing only 1 city secures defeat(often capitulation) of the afformentioned civ. Your opportunity awaits when victory is just within the grasp of whichever waste of space is attempting culture domination. The Ai cultural strategy relies heavily on the slider which is great as the strongest unit the AI will have when nearing victory is infantry,if not rifles/sams. By this time if you have any kind of economy at all, you will be out teching them, and hopefully will have significantly higher production.

Keep checking the victory screen and as soon as you see a legendary, mount a naval based land invasion. I prefer modern armor/mobile artilery/with a few mobile sams. You can negate air support for the most part, as the mobiles are more than enough for this kind of enemy. In fact you really only NEED around 30 units in most cases to twart the victory, it wont win the war but it will stop you from losing the game Better yet bring 70 and raze all the cultural cities, or what I would do is bring 400 and raze everything on the continent. but you still dont need a nuke.

Nukes should only be used against AI trying for a space victory, and not in moderation either. Fight fire with fire, If they want to build a rocket to alpha centauri, build 100 rockets to them.

My most common win (in Warlords and vanilla, have yet to win at all in BtS) is space race. I do the normal "get military, grab terrain" thing in the early game, and then I refine the economy and tweak the science so that while the AIs are racing to space, and they usually have a bit of a lead on me, I make it to Robotics first, pop the Space Elevator with a few Engineers, and with aluminum (grabbed with infantry and artillery if I don't already have it), start to leapfrog past their space ship building. The last pieces of the space ship are mostly about timing: you do a turn-count of each component, and sometimes it's best to do a series of them in the top-production city, and sometimes to spread it out to mid-production cities and build in parallel. In Warlords on Prince I was getting space race wins about 3/4 of the time, but the other 1/4 was always an AI space race win (or rarely, pure points victory for them, as a smaller high-tech society is gonna have less land mass than a big bad military empire, which can mean less points).

BTS though... I am quite literally sorry I ever bought that expansion. Just when I was beginning to like Civ4, it's got me back to hating it.

obsolete, do you mind posting the saves from before you started building up for the nuke war and after you completed your nuke war? I'd be interested in seeing what sort of situation you were in and how much damage the nukes ended up doing.

And none of the other AI were able to send nukes at you?

shyuhe, I did get counter nuked by Joao, but only maybe once or twice, then I decided not to bother hitting him much, and he also didn't bother hitting me either after that.

I am doing a writeup of the whole mission in another thread, labeled SSE / WE. And you just reminded me I need to also post some saves. Actually I don't think I have any saves for just before and just after, but I do have an ending screen shot I'll repost showing the effects of city sizes from efficient nuking.

http://www.highpoly3d.com/civ/proof6/special_feature.JPG

I did some more thinking after, and I realize that the thing NOT to do, is try to amphib attack a city too early. You should wait, until much later when you have a tech advantage, and THEN attack the city and raze it just before it goes legendary. Not only will it be much easier, but you can also hit it with a NUKE just before you amphib against it with marines. That is something I didn't do, but had the option to do.

Nevertheless, nukes do destroy buildings as well, so just nuking alone can be sufficient enough. You won't remove culture from wonders, but you DO have changes to destroy all other culture creating buildings. As well as chop down population to remove running artists, and destroy nearby cottages which slow down culture funneling as well.

Actually, I found a save just at the point of completion for the manhattan project if you want.

Manhattan Project (http://www.highpoly3d.com/civ/proof6/Manhatton.CivBeyondSwordSave)