Tachii
Procrastinator
Culture cost is not dependent on number of puppet cities.
Culture cost is not dependent on number of puppet cities.
The cost per policy is dependent on number of cities, no?
You take it as a given that all cities will have build a world wonder?! What difficulty settings are we talking here?
The cost per policy is dependent on number of cities, no? I would think with a wide empire, the culture increase from policy to policy would grow too steep to make the victory viable. I'm still playing King so perhaps at this difficulty level, the AI civs aren't creating large enough armies to crank culture via unit destruction.
No chance for an 'honest' cultural victory on Deity, Tabarnak? I was really hoping it is possible on Pangaea, don't break my dream.
I should probably clarify:
You haven't played Montezuma until you've tried this strat. If you do it well, you end up sort of racing yourself to finish culture before you win a domination victory.
More like "I have the greatest culture: the culture of bloody sacrifices to my dark gods"Lol the i have the greatest culture because everyone elses cities are smoking ruins victory
@ Le Roi Soloei: I'll try it I guess. It sounds very interesting. But I'll likely just go full warmonger and finish domination by that method. Skipping Piety and adopting Rationalism and Honor... this is too unique to pass up. I want to see when I can finish Utopia Project. But going for Autocracy is a bit... extreme. When's the optimal time to finish Rationalism? Honor? I'm also guessing you won't be getting any RAs either by being a warmonger so much unless you have Genghis Khan or somebody.
Going for cultural victory with Montezuma can be pretty amuzing, and is actually quite efficient when you get to the higher levels due to the number of enemy you will be facing and therefore the amount of culture you will suck from them. I'd say that the Aztecs are actually the easiest (and most fun) cultural civ starting at Immortal. Not sure about Emperor. There, it may still be France.
I'll suggest:
- Aztec
- Social policy progression: Tradition opener, Honor opener (you will get a lot of culture from killing Barbs in the early game), Legalism, followed by finishing Tradition and going down Honor until you reach Rationalism
- Tech: try to build the GL and then the Oracle. Terracotta Warriors comes a lot later than Stonehenge, which makes it not nearly as good. Do not prioritize, but grab it if it's there.
- Religion: whichever Pantheon belief best suits your start. The possibilities are too numerous to really discuss. Founder belief: World Church. This one is really underrated. Everybody loves Tithe, but World Church is basically the cultural equivalent. Follower Belief: Cathedrals. For the enhancer take one that spreads your religion faster, either initerant preachers or religious texts.
Do the obvious things like befriending cultural CSs, building Sistine Chapel, etc.
As Montezuma, you will want to conquer and puppet as much as you can. Simply the act of killing a lot of enemy units is extremely important for the Aztecs to keep the culture rolling in. Go forth and slaughter, spread your death cult over the whole world, build the dystopia project and swim in the blood of the unbelievers.
Inspired by this post, I tried your concept, on King difficulty though (I was a bit tired, so no Emperor for me). Standard sized fractal map, epic game speed. To cut the story short, i did win through domination victory in 1850s when I had completed only 4 social policy trees. All in all, i had 3 proper cities and countless puppets.
In my opinion, the culture boost through my Aztecian killing spree is only effective during the early stage of the game. And I was in war practically all the time. Second thing to note that after building my initial army, i did not use resources for military but for culture (luckily, I did not lose too many units). I got all the key cultural world wonders and was allied with most of the cultural city states. And so I'm a bit disappointed by myself, I guess that on higher difficulty levels one should get the cultural victory much earlier.
Maybe I did make some mistakes in choosing techs and social policies: I stuck too much on Honor tree instead of grabbing Rationalism ASAP. And then I stuck on Rationalism too long before switching to Freedom. Well, maybe i try again tomorrow...
The Aztec UA works better the higher up the difficulty latter you go, because the AI will throw more and more units at you. At king, I'm not at all surprised that you'd win domination first. What you did with building a core army and then investing mostly in culture is the right way to do. The idea is to hit the midgame with a highly upgraded army with fast healing that can basically stay in constant contact with enemy forces and continually reap culture from doing so.
Getting the size and composition of this force right is tricky. You want to be small enough that the AI will DOW you (preserving your good relations with other AIs until you're ready to bite them), but big and highly promoted enough that you can grind through his units when he does. Ideally, you want a brutally bloody two-front defensive war through all of history. You want relatively few seige units because taking cities isn't your priority. You want relatively more cavalry type units which are good for helping you find and finish off the enemy.
You don't necessarily need to conquer a single other civ (though having a few puppets will help with science and gold, and a bit with culture), but remaining in constant contact is a must. If you simply overwhelm the AI, you have probably invested too much in military and won't be able to go fast enough through culture. Also, you may end up losing the race against yourself for domination victory, though at Immortal this is less likely because the AI can really pump out units.
This is never going to be the fastest way to a cultural victory, and at the lower levels you're probably almost always going to win domination first, but at least at Immortal, it is a viable way to win by culture and also protect yourself against the AI beating you with a spaceship or something. At Deity, I dunno. Deity is too much work for my taste regardless of the victory condition.
As far as the policies go, here is my relatively complete list of priorities:
Tradition
Legalism
Honor
...finish Tradition
...Honor until Rationalism opens (prioritize Discipline/Military Caste)
...Rationalism until Freedom opens (prioritize Secularism and Free Thought)
Freedom as soon as it opens and go straight through and finish it
...go back and work on Honor and Rationalism (timing the Rationalism finisher to slingshot you to a tech you need).
...take Liberty as your final policy
Simply not going straight down Freedom as soon as it opened likely explains a lot of your slowness in this case.
One thing I haven't experimented with yet is finishing Liberty (5th tree) before Honor or even before Rationalism. The free GP from the Liberty finisher is potentially extremely useful, but unfortunately not as your last policy.