r_rolo1
King of myself
Again, i couldn't disagree more.Optimal behavior varies. In a cultural game, you have a minimum threshold of number of cities that you need to achieve. Anything beyond that is superfluous. You need a few late game techs and not much else, those techs result directly from the standard Deity beeline anyway, and you pick up sufficient military techs along the way. So expansion is not really a priority; the marginal impact on completion time is minimal, because you don't really feel the effects of +pop -> +research all that much.
For any other victory condition, expansion to the limit of your ability to finance it (and still keep the research bar moving) is always highly desirable. Domination requires doing so. Spaceship requires keeping the Science bar moving, and appropriate expansion through conquest (no lengthy wars against hardcore unit-spammers) will always increase research speed. Diplomatic wins require votes; conquering citizens directly increases your vote count, and there are ways to game who you target to improve your diplomatic relations as needed in the process of expansion.
I can't speak to anything after vanilla, as I didn't play it. But that doesn't really matter here, since comparing Civ4 + xpacs to Civ5 is a blatantly unfair comparison. We should be comparing vanilla to vanilla.
The optimal way of winning by culture in civ IV ( even on vanilla ) is to become big, have lots of cottages, pluck up the slider and run artists in the cities you want as the 3 big. It may not be the faster way of winning, but it is surely the best in terems of speed/security. More cities = more money for the slider
Said in other words, it is not as diferent of the other VC. People only got used to the minimalist aproach ( that is quite a gamble, you must reckon ) and thinked that culture has a diferent philosophy behind ... like if you couldn't win on any VC with only one city ( except domination in vanilla in anything above duel maps ... but , after vassals you can also win by domination with just one city up to standart maps maybe ).
BTW I'm quite convinced that we actually can win by culture with a boatload of cities in civ V as well. Probably will dedicate one game later to try to slash that sacred cow