Tired of domination one after another, I decided to try to win culture victory, without any cottage.


Quick game, on Pangea, standard map. Emperor or Immortal level, don't make much difference anyway. Choose those most peace-loving guy as opponents.

No cottage means finacial is not a great trait anymore. So I choose Gandhi: philosophical = more GAs, spiritual = cheap temple, and you can change state religion every 5 turns to keep everyone from getting too mad at you while still get bonus from OR / Pacifism.

Basic idea is to run as many artists as possible in every city. So, getting Pyramid is a must, beakers from artists makes up most of the research. Sistine Chapel is also critical for obivious reason. Parthenon is nice. Get Statue of Zeus and Mausoleum of Maussollos. And it is possible to get all these because no cottage often means more farms and better production.

Place cities to get food to support at least 5 artists and also some hill for production in the early game. Only 3 cities needed, all GA farms. Most of time I end up having only three cities.

Diplo: open border with every one. The chosen peace-loving guys won't attack you if you get them all pleased. Give everything when asked. Change your state religion when asked: it's anarchy free and you can change it back 5 turns.

Tech: agriculture->BW->wheel->pottery->writing->alphabet->aesthetics->drama
->mathematics->music->Col->philosophy, hope to trade for fishing, AH, masonry, meditation, poly, currency, priesthood, IW, sailing, calender, if not you can research it yourself if needed. Artists should be working by now. Tech slowly to liberalism(AI always get there first by lightbulbing) and nationalism, while cities building temples.

If everything goes well winning at 1400-1600AD is easy. Problems may be:
1) every city is GA farm, so as the city built pyramid. Getting 2 engineer is typical, 3 still acceptable(2 to rush wonders, 1 to start your only Golden Age), 4 or more will delay your finish date, but you can still win.
2) Annoying sudden AP diplo defeat!! 1 out of 2 games I've tried ended up like this. AIs likes each other so much when some of them are running free religion so the different religion demerit no longer exists. What to make things worse is that AP owner is often the only candidate so everyone vote for him. Could anyone tell me how to stop it?

Any suggestions?

maybe you can use spies to change the AI's civics and/or religion to get them to like each other less when the AP's been built and everybody has the religion. that's a heck of a lot easier with spiritual than without!

Find the AP city and destroy it.

maybe you can use spies to change the AI's civics and/or religion to get them to like each other less when the AP's been built and everybody has the religion. that's a heck of a lot easier with spiritual than without!

But I don't have enough EPs to do it.. And diplo penalty 'spy causing trouble' may really causes trouble!

Find the AP city and destroy it.

Destroy the city? only if I am playing for conquest..
I only build a warrior for each city through the whole game. And AIs have big tech-lead, especially the millitary related ones. If there is no jungle area I would not even bother to get Iron Working!

Well you could stop selecting hippy leaders and let it randomise it. Then you'd get a few more wars between them and have it a little more interesting.

Besides that, change your tech path a little to pickup theology kinda early (not nessesarily first) and build the AP yourself. Just before you finish building it, change your religion to one that none of the AIs have or at least one they dont have as their state religion.

If you're turning production into culture, I'm surprised you didn't go for iron working. Those mines can help when you are changing hammers into purple music notes..