I've clawed my way back into this game by picking on and vassalizing the weak. Now it's looking like Huayna Capac has turned off his research and is beelining for a culture win. The real problem is that he still has the largest army in the world (albeit a little out of date), and his vassal, Monty, is teching away like crazy still.

So what's the best way to avoid losing this game? Is there any easy way to tell how much time I to remedy matters (game speed is Epic) before Capac's top 3 cities go legendary?

Do I have time to launch a space race? Or do I need to build an enormous invasion fleet? My first instinct was to do an amphibious hit-and-raze on one of Capac's top 3 culture cities, but none of them are coastal... :(

Some screenshots for colour:

http://www.civfanatics.com/gallery/files/1/2/0/4/1/2/vic_conditions.jpg
http://www.civfanatics.com/gallery/files/1/2/0/4/1/2/capac_power.jpg
http://www.civfanatics.com/gallery/files/1/2/0/4/1/2/capac_culture.jpg
http://www.civfanatics.com/gallery/files/1/2/0/4/1/2/where_i_need_to_be.jpg

I like the message you left him ;)


You could use a super fast cavalry strike to take out cuzco. Depending on where you land your troops you could take it in three turns. Run 100% wealth for a few turns and upgrade everything to cavalry and fill as many transports as you can and Cuzco will fall. You won't be able to keep up the war or hold the city though so just raze it and sue for peace.

Legendary is 75,000 culture on epic.

You have plenty of time to launch a spaceship and win.

You buddies with Hammurabi, by any chance?

He's cautious but has open borders if that's what you're getting at. And he (Hammurabi) won't declare war even if 6Kman declares I checked.

A hit and run attack isn't going to be enough. He's got some other big cities with towns that probably aren't too far outside the top 3. Your best chance is to go for space and try to bribe as many AIs as possible into war with HC.

Check the victory screen next turn to see how much closer he is to winning, and check the events log to see how many Great Artists he's spawned. That should give you some idea of how long you've got.

You have 6 turns to Industrialism and tanks, 6 as well to flight (with radio). Either should be enough to roll an alliance block with machine guns at best. Both should be overkill.

If you want serious overkill:
1. Start a war with someone you can get some easy wins with to promote your highest cav to commando (Both SB and Elizabeth are viable) with artillery vs rifles/coats.
2a. Tech fission and rocketry.
2b. Stockpile cash.
3a. Build railroads into HC's capital from Babylon.
3b. Build Manhattan.
4. Swap to US.
5. Rush buy nukes.
6. Use you nukes.
7. Run in your commando cav on the new rails and kill his cap.

Frankly though you have sufficient tech lead to just roll him until monty breaks free.

Or attack Hammi from the sea, Vassalize him, then attack HC and hold Corihblahblah as a base while you deal with the rest of HC's culture cities.

If you raze Cuzco, you will knock him so far back, he will never make it in time.

His top three cities are 55k 30k and 27k. Nothing is even close to Cuzco. I bet the top three will be something like 30k 27k and 23k if Cuzco is gone. So if you really want to stop him thats all you need to do. Suicide mission to raze cuzco.

However he does need all three cities to be at 75k, and thats 23k city still have a ways to go so you have PLENTY of time. Just declare a good old fashioned war on him and beat him up a little.

It actually makes more sense to razz ANY culture city - he can't win without all 3 - it doesn't matter if cuzco goes legendary if his 27k city is gone and the next best one is 10kish.

Just war on him. Hell, you could even take one of his culture cities then force capitulation ftw. AIs that go culture are pretty weak usually, unless they're pure runaway and at that point you wouldn't beat them to space, either. IMO it's not a wise victory condition to go for against humans, and you're a human ;).

Dave is right, unless all those cities are making 3k cpt.

It actually makes more sense to razz ANY culture city - he can't win without all 3 - it doesn't matter if cuzco goes legendary if his 27k city is gone and the next best one is 10kish.

Just war on him. Hell, you could even take one of his culture cities then force capitulation ftw. AIs that go culture are pretty weak usually, unless they're pure runaway and at that point you wouldn't beat them to space, either. IMO it's not a wise victory condition to go for against humans, and you're a human ;).

No, I once had the same problem, me going for space and HC trying to sneak in a culture win. I organized a devasting (on both sides) suicide strike on his third culture city (the closest) and managed to raze it before my assault got destroyed.

It set him back quite a while but he was still able to get a culture win a few turns before I launched my spaceship, and of course by that time I lacked the military power or desire to strike again.

So razing one will not nessecarily stop him, expecially if he's been sliding up the culture slider for a while.

This is of course obvious. You send big stacks and you raze the cities. Razing one is probably sufficient, but as Josh points out, might not be, and why the hell would you have such a half assed war as to only raze one city.

Do a scorched earth through his empire.......

Another option might be to use spies to sabotage the towns in his big three cities. Of course, this strategy could only stall him and give you a little more time for the space race victory or to bring your militray into position. This strategy, though, has been nerfed by the patches. I loved the original BTS when you could completely destroy a fully grown town with one spy. Not just downgrade it to a village, completely destroy it.

I was in a situation like this once where Ghandi was within 50 turns of winning a culture victory. I sabotaged all his culture cities to give me time to roll in my tanks and capture one of his three cities, and then finished the game with a space race victory. I believe I was playing Noble at the time.

Use spies to sabotage the cathedrals in his cultural cities. The base cost for the mission is 6 EPs per hammer destroyed but you can get some good discounts so that cost might be only half that or less.

Try using 5 or more carriers full of fighters to raid the towns and other resources in the cultural cities, if they're close enough to the coast. Air attacks can reduce his towns by one level per hit and a village is only half as good as a town and a hamlet is nearly useless. If some of the fighters get shot down send in some more.

I've found myself in this situation a few times and what I found worked really well was to churn out a bunch of spies and use them to put one of the culture cities in revolt perpetually. Cities in revolt don't get any culture, so a successful mission each turn stops the culture victory, with the added bonus of making the city mostly worthless in all other aspects as well.

You build up a lot of diplomatic penalties for caught spies though, and its quite costly EP-wise, but it gets the job done!

When looking at the powergraph, I'm confused, as there are 3 yellowish colors (I'm colorblind), one representing you, the others representing Monty and Huayna. Who has the highest, med, and lowest of the 3?

Anyway, simply build up a lot of forces, unload them onto Hammurabi's territory (DO NOT PISS HIM OFF) and go from there and raze the culture cities.

Mansa tried to Sneak a culture win in. He had 2 of the culture cities on the coast (lucky). I made a lot of marines and razed them both.
I eventually killed him (he had a huge empire) just in time to hurriedly build my spaceship to beat Julius before he launched his!

I once spiked a HC cultural win by having a couple of cities spam spys and transported them over to his capital (which was about 4000 from legendary status). I put his capital into revolt constantly while I played out my win (UN or spaceship, can't remember).

There was tons of micro involved and I felt like a bit of a git, but I had just spent ages warring over my continent and winning, which doesn't happen very often, so I ran my evil plan to victory anyway.

You need plenty of spies and transports, enough to dump 4 spies onto his city every other turn. Then when you put it into revolt it does not gain culture that turn. Focus your espionage on HC and raise the espionage level to make sure you have enough espionage points.

Three approaches, all already mentioned

1) Dave and Rolo are correct, you should be able to get to space before HC wins culturally.
2) Go raze a few of the legondary coastal cities understanding that the difference between #3 and #6 maynot be that great. If you get tansk and HC has turned off his science, welll..... :trouble:
3) Harass him with spies. My experince the the Mao II RPC was that this does not work that well. It's tedious and may not slow him enough.

But seriously, just beeline the SpaceShip

If you're going to take the espionage route, I would suggest focusing on his weakest of the three. First take down the security bureau, then any cathedrals he has, then monasteries (as an added bonus, he can't get those back). Like others have said, you're in for massive diplo hits. If he's still putting in a lot of culture, use remaining espionage to continually force city revolt, although hopefully without cathedrals and monasteries you'll have crippled the city enough.

Thanks for the advice, everyone. I was kind of loathe to build a hundred or so units to have a good shot at taking down Cuzco. But having taken a closer look, it's going to take about 140 turns for Huayna to get all 3 cities to legendary (assuming the rate of culture increase stays the same, which it probably won't, and assuming there aren't any other cities just below the top 3 culturewise, adding culture at a faster rate. Which I have no way of knowing).

I'm leery of the space race in this situation... 140 turns seems like a long time, but I need a lot of techs, and if I commit to the space race and it appears I'm going to lose, it's too late for me to try anything else. Whereas if I fail to dominate Huayna, I can always raze cities and then regroup to try a space race later. So, domination it shall be.

So at this point, my tentative plan is to build a lot (60+) of tanks/marines/artillery/MGs (to negate the collateral damage) and a few fighters and bombers for stack softening, and drop them onto Huayna's western cities which are lightly defended. If the defenses improve, I'll go through Hammy's cities via open borders. Once I have a foothold, I can reinforce faster than HC can (see below) and eventually take down the culture cities.

I just finished Pentagon, and on the production note, I just realized that the Rathauses make domestic corporation spamming ridiculously easy. At -75% maintenance cost, Mining Inc is only costing me 3-4 gold/city while adding 15 hammers, and earning me 12 gold in the HQ after modifiers. I'm seriously thinking of grabbing all the metals I can, adding 30 base hammers/city and cranking out a huge army in no time flat.

I'll let you know how it goes...

Switching his civic away from free speech (via spies) will slow down his culture gain by quite a chunk, and the anarchy he gets from trying to switch back again will assist your cause even further

3) Harass him with spies. My experince the the Mao II RPC was that this does not work that well. It's tedious and may not slow him enough.

It does work and can stop a cities cultural development dead in its tracks your are right about the tediousness (tedium?) though and I've only done it when the target didn't DoW in response, despite spy failures.