Cultural victory best strategy in Brave New World

kjades

Chieftain
Joined
Jul 20, 2012
Messages
98
Hi, I know it might sound rather a vague question, but I'd like to know what, in your opinion, the best strategy to adopt to achieve a cultural victory is.
I mean, include all the possible factors (excluding which civilization to choose, that's optional), focusing especially on the research sequence and wonders not to miss.
Clearly general tips/hints are also welcome.

For example, how many cities do u think should one following cultural victory build?
The fact that Tradition tree's bonuses are all set for "the first 4 cities" would suggest that's the answer, isn't it?

Moreover, how do you deal with the fact that in order to build wonders you have to be quick to research them, and with only a small amount of cities (as required by cultural victory) you do not have a great science output? I make up for it building all the possible science buildings I can, including national scientific wonders, even though it might end up weighing a little on my finances.

Thx peepz!;)
 
Cultural victory doesn't correlate too much with tall approach anymore, so going tradition isn't always the best option. There's build with religion where you go for faith buildings (pagodas, cathedrals..) and piety reformation with +2 tourism per bought faith building that achieves quickest victories. Byzantium is very good for this, just google these forums.

One thing to know is that culture vic is not meant to be played just peacefully in BNW. If you get culture happy AI in your game you will probably have to kill him with your army to win.
 
Cultural victory doesn't correlate too much with tall approach anymore, so going tradition isn't always the best option. There's build with religion where you go for faith buildings (pagodas, cathedrals..) and piety reformation with +2 tourism per bought faith building that achieves quickest victories. Byzantium is very good for this, just google these forums.

One thing to know is that culture vic is not meant to be played just peacefully in BNW. If you get culture happy AI in your game you will probably have to kill him with your army to win.

Disagreed. Peaceful CV is very capital-centric and requires extreme tall. It is entirely doable peacefully. You typically handle AI culture runaways with late game Great Musicians.

The ICS/Sacred sites strategy is fun but only viable at lower difficulties and doesn't exactly provide a natural game flow. It is very gimmicky and likely to be fixed in future patches. If all you want is to get a CV achievement, go for it. It's by far the easiest approach but it won't teach you much about CV.

There have been a few threads around discussing CV in BnW. My best pointer to the OP is to think "science" until modern era. Outteching your opponents is how you eventually manage to hard build a few extra wonders. In doubt, don't produce any great musician from guild until The Internet and thus focus only on GA/GW slots wonders. Particularly GA ones because you can fill them with relics from archeology. Besides that you basically want a food heavy capital+1-3 cities so that at least 2 cities can handle working 2 guild slots and 2 university slots.
 
The ICS/Sacred sites strategy is fun but only viable at lower difficulties and doesn't exactly provide a natural game flow. It is very gimmicky and likely to be fixed in future patches.

Large map. Deity. 220 turns. If u know how to win faster, tell me plz.

P.S. It will be fixed as I think as well as universities for 160 faith.
 
Large map. Deity. 220 turns. If u know how to win faster, tell me plz.

P.S. It will be fixed as I think as well as universities for 160 faith.

I like the look of this strategy and am glad to hear that its possible earlyish on difficult levels. Could you please post a couple of sentences summarising other advice you'd have for it? e.g. which Civ you chose and what the most important turning points were.
 
The best strategy is focusing on science and a bit of religion from turn 0 and getting to the cultural wonder techs first. Building all the guilds except musician guilds as early as possible so you can start generating great writers/artists early. Opening Aesthetics early is another must, as is completing it sharpish too. Once you have reached plastics click on Internet and -click on Radar(and have built airports in all cities with great works. Have the musicians guild built and staffed ~5 turns before radar so you can pop your first musician just after Radar. Faith buy as many musicians and musician bomb the cultural leader for a cheesy and early CV.
 
I like the look of this strategy and am glad to hear that its possible earlyish on difficult levels. Could you please post a couple of sentences summarising other advice you'd have for it? e.g. which Civ you chose and what the most important turning points were.

I smell gimmicks all over. Sure ICS sacred sites CAN work on deity... (if you pick a large map and delete all the CS or smthg so you actually have more space... but generally on standard conditions with the normal # of CS and civs, you won't get away with it; you simply do not have enough space to do so)
 
I smell gimmicks all over. Sure ICS sacred sites CAN work on deity... (if you pick a large map and delete all the CS or smthg so you actually have more space... but generally on standard conditions with the normal # of CS and civs, you won't get away with it; you simply do not have enough space to do so)

I build 21 cities as Ottomans for fun. I stayed on peace whole game.This was on large map and standard number of CS and Civs.
 
The real bottleneck in cultural victory is great work production.
So open Aesthetics as soon as you complete the first tree (whichever you choose). You'll also want the free Great Artist from that tree along with double theming bonuses and increased tourism bonuses.

The bigger bonuses are from theming which benefit an empire that can devote the best production city (usually capital) to those world wonders no matter what size the rest of the empire is.

But a couple of those are national wonders, (Oxford & Hermitage), so you don't want to self found so many cities that you can't build Hermitage in a reasonable timeframe.

Getting a tech lead is important to allow being first in the world to world wonders and so you want to keep up with science as well.
 
I believe the best strategy is to aim for world religion while pursuing trade routes, open borders etc. Of course you need some theme wonders, but a fair number of cities running museums is about as good. You have to explore and then pass world religion at the right time. Then its whack a mole to beat down the culture leaders.
 
I believe the best strategy is to aim for world religion while pursuing trade routes, open borders etc. Of course you need some theme wonders, but a fair number of cities running museums is about as good. You have to explore and then pass world religion at the right time. Then its whack a mole to beat down the culture leaders.

All proposing a world religion does is make every AI that founded a religion very angry at you, even before the vote in which they all vote it down.
When they get angry, they'll close their borders and reroute their trade routes away from you.
(Not to mention the massive number of Great Prophets that you'd need just to keep those that didn't found a religion within your religion given that all AIs with a religion spam Great Prophets)

Instead, the first proposal should be Arts funding, most of the AI flavors prefer this to science anyway so it will get you some friends who will open mutual borders for free (when human is going after cultural victory, it doesn't really matter that the AI is also getting a tourism bonus from a smaller base)

Most of the AIs also love Worlds Fair & Olympics, so those can be proposed second and third. (Olympics will double tourism for the person in first place)
The end game is National Visitor Center & the Internet)
 
Three Approaches;

Tall Peaceful 4city Tradition/Aesthetics/Rationalism/Freedom or Order get a few wonders( I like Oracle, Broadway, and The Hermitage which is a National Wonder to theme) and use all of your GWAM for works but stay on the Science beeline start banking faith to unleash 3 great musicians once you get to the internet. You'll want to win the World's Fair to burn through all the policies in Aesthetics to faith buy those GMusicians. Preferred Civ France

Slightly Aggressive 6 City Approach Tradition/Exploration/Rationalism to Secularism/Freedom or Order. Open 4 city Tradition but expand a few more times prior to turn 100 so that you have 5-6 coastal cities. Get your writer and artist guilds up on a timely basis and burn them to get through Exploration as far as you can until the Renaissance. Start working on your Galleass to upgrade to Frigates quickly. Time your GW and GA pops to coincide with the benefits of the world's fair. Find a Civ or 2 that have coastal Capitals that have theming wonders, I recently played one where Babylon built a ton of wonders such that I didn't need to build Museums in my other cities. Snipe them with your frigates and settle down use you frigates to patrol your sea trade routes and tech towards archeology an then the internet. Once you are in the information age you can build your Musician's guild and pop Musicians to influence hold overs.

Aggressive DOM/CV
 
About world religion: if you spread aggressively early you'll convert the non religious civs who are likely to be early game war mongers, (Genghis, Alex, Monte) make one of them host and it's not unlikely that they'll propose it for you.
 
I play on Immortal (Fractal/Standard) and could get quick victories around T230ish without resorting to the Religion reformation belief.

It all comes down to how fast you can generate early science and how good your early land is. I myself play with Spain, and you can guess in these T230 victories, I had a Natural Wonder I could settle on my second or third cities to truly speed up the victories. Also, if you started off with Jungles, reroll. If you started off with warmonger civs that ONLY borders you, reroll. Basically in these two instances you're forced to delay building your cultural buildings in hope to even compete in the same game with the AI.
 
About world religion: if you spread aggressively early you'll convert the non religious civs who are likely to be early game war mongers, (Genghis, Alex, Monte) make one of them host and it's not unlikely that they'll propose it for you.

That's just it, even if you convert the non religious civs early, then by the time you can make one of them host (requires world congress to advance one era since the first host is determined by first with Printing Press +all contacts) the AIs that also founded a religion have spammed their own GP to convert them out of your religion and into each one of theirs even if they founded their religion 30+ turns after you did bringing them all back to no single religion has a majority of cities in their empires.
 
World religion is pretty nice for the tall/wonder approach, especially as France where all your tourism will be coming from the capital. Even if you don't spread your religion at all you can always ensure passage by buying 3 AI votes (or doing it later with help of city state votes).

If you're going for a wider/archaeology based strategy with relatively low tourism in your capital, then it wouldn't be worth it.
 
Top Bottom