Okay, so like many others I am struggling to get any win on the Deity small culture gauntlet.

With alot of advice, I have been able to get Music first regularly and get TSC but I still am falling short in the end so I started thinking about other possible strategies.

So my question is: Is it worth the investment of all the research and scientists to beeline for music and then build TSC for the additional culture per religious buildings or just pass on this and beeline for CoL and run as many artist specialists as possible (maybe trying for the parthenon too)?

Any advice would be appreciated.

The Parthenon (Asthetics) is on the way to Music.

If you get to Music first you get a free GA which is very useful on this type of game.

The Sistine Chapel Gives you +15 base culture in the cities with Cathedrials and +10 base culture in all others for your state religion religion (assuming you built all the buildings) and +2 Culture for all of your specialists (Scientists early and Artists Late).

Drama is an essential tech to get and is also a prereq for Philosophy which is a prereq for Liberalism which enables Free Speech.

All of these reasons are good reasons to beeline Music.

The only question that I have is if your cities are ready to have more than 2 specialists this early in the game? I find that with the low happy cap in the early game and cities that have not yet matured, it would be difficult to run more than two scientists (from Library) or two artists (from Theater). You are probably building Libraries for the +2 Culture and +25% research and Theaters for the +3 Culture and happiness bonus from cranking up the culture slilder.

So IMHO, Music and the Sistine Chapel are valuable to beeline (in BTS of course).

Play with AI that don't favor music.

Play with more AI so they compete for space and are slower researching.

I don't know which path is best. I don't go after Music, but CoL-CS. With Castes you can hire specialists to pop your borders, to get the Academy without needing a Library first, even to pop a GA if you are culture pressed.

I have no problems trading for Aes+Lite+Drama+Music.
Specially if I play with AI that research fast, favor Music and have a lot of space due to low waters and minimum number of AIs. :lol:

I gave it a go with CoL. My tech path was Wheel, Pottery, Writing, Alphabet (trade for several techs), Asthetics (trade for several more), CoL, Civil Service, Paper, Education.

This is where Mansa Musa won a Religious Victory in about 600 AD. I popped two GS and a GM (by accident, one of my cities auto assigned merchants). The GM joined my capitol and the GS built an Academy. The second GS was going to bulb as soon as Education was finished (one turn away).

I'm going to try this method again later. I think that I am losing the Liberalism race because I am wasting time teching Literature, Music, and Drama when I can trade for them (or wait for the AI to gift them to my backward civ). Going for CoL and essentially beelining Liberalism seems like it would be faster. It sure is a tough sell giving up the free GA and the Sistine Chapel though.

Who are the AI that favor / don't favor music?