Hi,

I've seen some posts (not all, of course) where people have said that they disliked the cultural win. Well, I had won with space race, diplomacy, domination, and conquest, so I decided to try the cultural approach. I expected to find it boring, but it was very fun.

Maybe I just played badly (well... there's no maybe about it, I am not a good player yet), but I found it quite challenging. It took me awhile to find a strategy that would work.

I played the Dutch on an Arch. map. I tried a number of different approaches that all involved defensive strategies (no offense), but I just couldn't make it work. In the game I just won, I built a sizable nation across some of the larger islands, and was doing well, but my Sitting Bull was on some of the same large islands, and he was strong and militant.

I had already decided I might need to go offensive and at least weaken him when the game offered me a quest where I had to capture some resources in his territory (that's a horridly stupid quest, by the way, see later post). The year was 1700-ish and I had 100 turns to win the quest. I decided to go for it. I spent the first 70 of those turns bee-lining for some tech advantage.

After a couple false starts and delays, I succeeded in crippling and vassalizing him. Then I turned to focusing fully on my three cultural cities.

My capital was doing fine, but the second two were not very far along at all. I focused on getting two corporations (Sushi and Jewlers) and every improvement or building I could into these last two cities.

It was an interesting balancing act. This is why I loved the game:

1. I had to be careful with my diplomacy because there was a lot of war going on around me. Hard to stay on everybody's good side
2. Had to figure out some hard negotiations because I needed more resources for the companies to produce more culture. I was trading oil for fish for the first time in my life.
3. I had to continue building up a strong enough military to keep people from invading me
4. I was pushing my culture slider up, and up. I had to trade off keeping just abrest of the neighboring warmongers while still focusing on culture.
5. I was changing out some of the tiles surrounding my culture cities for improved efficiency, but this was problematic too: if I killed off too much food, I couldn't support all of my artists; if I killed off too much trade, my raw culture production went down; if I killed off too much production, I struggled to build the new wonders and buildings

All-in-all, it was the most balancing I ever had to do in civ. I worried about things I have never worried about before. Again, I suppose it could just be because I suck :) but even if that is true, it was a fun mode for sucky players like myself!

And hey! I think the video after the cultural win is fun too :)

--SJN

The cultural win is a lot of fun, and I find it pretty challenging as well. There are a couple weak areas of my game play that are really exposed by going for this one.

One is not building enough cities. I often don't expand as much as I should and focus on a small, tight empire of quality cities. In a cultural effort, the three (usually) best cities are given over to producing culture, which has little to no impact on other areas of the game. Military production and science have to come from somewhere else. Cities also mean temples, which mean cathedrals in great enough numbers. If you have multiple religions, and want one of each cathedral in each legendary city, that's a LOT of temples. I invariably get burned on this one.

The second is an unwillingness to give up research. I use the tech tree as a game clock more than the turn counter. My wins come late because I can't bring myself to turn all commerce over to culture.

I agree cultural is fun. And more often than not, I have an early war so I can have room to expand to nine cities if I'm going for a cultural win. Then I just make sure I have 3 religions to spread around, and start building wonders and enough military to keep everyone else from overrunning my empire!