How do I get better culture per turn in early game?

consentient

Domination!
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I'm slowly learning how to better my science and military to establish a decent position and 'catch up' a bit when I play on Immortal. If I choose a faith-heavy civ I do a lot better, but one thing that always suffers is culture. I guess the only thing to do is use gold to bribe the culture CS and build stuff after Drama & Poetry, but that obviously means cutting out other stuff. What should I do and when to ensure that I don't have poor culture at T100?
 
For turn 100, Tradition opener for greatly reduced cost of cultural tile acquisition and Legalism under Tradition for 4 free monuments.
Also, towards the end of that time period build a Writing Guild, run both spots and time an Amphitheater to complete shortly before the first GW is born.
 
Cultural generating pantheons/religion can help a lot early on. Some scale up better than others as time progresses and you can build the buildings or gain tiles / tile improvements they rely on.

Even god-king has its merits when obtained super early.
 
Build the oracle. That helps a lot.
For religion I almost always pick Pagodas as a belief, that's essentially a free extra monument. Working writers guild early is another essential.
Depending on your strategy an early wonder that provides engineer points can be used to provide a free renaissance wonder like Sistine Chapel.

Otherwise as people say CityStates are your best choice.
 
The Parthenon is best for early culture hands down. Combine with Representation which BTW is only 3 picks in for more policies overall.
 
I like early culture.

My no-special civ tricks:

Do cultural city state quests.

Build monument asap.

Early shrine for a culture pantheon, faith+culture ones is best i think.

Culture natural wonder. Settle asap!


Edit: Oh! Honor + kill barbs. Raging barbs is great. Often finishes the tree about turn 60



I do tend to favour civs with extra early culture like Songhai:s temples (if building temples anyway 2+ culture is awesome!)

Sweden/honor/give away GG to culture city state.

Japan fishboats and atolls if you are lucky enough to get some.

Edit: Aztecs honor = double culture/ barbkill. You plow through the first policy tree as if it were butter!
 
The Parthenon is best for early culture hands down. Combine with Representation which BTW is only 3 picks in for more policies overall.

Parthenon does give more culture (6) compared to the Oracle (3) but the Oracle gives a free social policy which is a huge benefit (you can dip into Patronage to support your control of Culture citystates) and also provides a Great Scientist Point.
Extra benefits to Science always help culture in the long-term so Oracle is clearly superior.

Also AIs favor Parthenon over the Oracle so that's another reason to ignore it at Immortal level.

Regarding the Writers Guild the challenge is to sacrifice 2 citizens from working food tiles so make sure you have food ships feeding the Capital. Hanging Gardens is an option but I would only build it if I didn't have fresh water and wasn't playing a Dom game.
All the National Wonders also provide a bit of extra culture so if you're playing a Tall empire you certainly want them as early as possible.
 
There's a pantheon which gives +1 culture to Shrines and Temples. Later the Shrines and Temples can yield +1:c5culture: +1:c5faith: +1:c5happy:. I think there's also something you can take which gives them gold as well.
 
I tend to play a lot of cultural games on Immortal... Contrary to what a lot of folks say here, I will work the Tradition, Liberty and Piety trees together..The order will vary, but, in gneral... I adopt Tradition first... My second policy will often be to adopt Piety - especially if I can get it before finishing my first shrine. More often than not my third will give me the faith bonus on my shrine from the Piety tree, followed by getting my free monuments. (I generally build a monument in my capitol first, so I like to time this with my second city.) Thereafter, I push through the Lliberty Tree.... Depending on need, I may pick one or two policies up from Tradition (i.e. for happiness) before finihsing liberty.... This tends to lead to an empire very strong in culture... Other than that: I will almost always build a scout first, followed by a monument. (With Shoshone, I'll build two pathfinders if I have a lot of land). As soon as I have the gold, I'll buy a second scout. I love getting faith and culture from ruins.....

Wonders: I'll sometimes take a shot at Pyramids and often at the Oracle. However, I generally don't go after any others until the Medieval Era.
 
Your biggest source of culture in games will be running the Guilds and their specialist slots (esp Writers/Artists).

Before guilds come online, you only have a few other options left to you:
-Run one of the few culture pantheons that are useful early (i.e. not Sacred Path unless your start is truly bananas)
-Build the Oracle (other wonders don't give a lot of culture, Oracle gives a lot)
-Get a point of Honor and farm raging barbs (I assume you've got Tradition already for the best passive early culture)
-Play Poland
-Find Skilldorado
 
Is culture that crutial on the early game? Specially if I'm going Tradiiton, I usually don't really care about it until late Medieval or early Renaissance - I might hard-build a Monument in my capital before Legalism and that's it. I want to finish Tradition reasonably early, but at the same time I want to get the least possible number of policies before opening Rationalism.
 
Well culture is important early game if you want to join the race for the best reformation beliefs.
 
From the other thread you started, the main thing you want to do differently is Tradition instead of Liberty. I find that for CV on Emperor and higher I need a Civ with cultural bonuses. I would love to see a CV guide that works on Immortal or Deity with any civ, but I suspect a CV really requires UA or UB. The hard GotM archives seem to validate this as the winners all get their CV by grinding their opponents to irrelevance. They pause what should be a DV for a CV.
 
From the other thread you started, the main thing you want to do differently is Tradition instead of Liberty. I find that for CV on Emperor and higher I need a Civ with cultural bonuses. I would love to see a CV guide that works on Immortal or Deity with any civ, but I suspect a CV really requires UA or UB.

There is always Deau's guide:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=501996

To be honest, though, most cultural bonuses are really minor - with the possible exception of Brazil who has an absolutely amazing UA/UI for CV; but it's possible to win CV without being Brazil.
 
From the other thread you started, the main thing you want to do differently is Tradition instead of Liberty. I find that for CV on Emperor and higher I need a Civ with cultural bonuses. I would love to see a CV guide that works on Immortal or Deity with any civ, but I suspect a CV really requires UA or UB. The hard GotM archives seem to validate this as the winners all get their CV by grinding their opponents to irrelevance. They pause what should be a DV for a CV.

CV on Immortal is doable with absolutely every civ in the game.
On deity, the most important thing is not what civ you are playing, but who your opponents are.
 
Best way that no one strangely enough has mentioned, is to stay small and tall, then open aesthetics and pick 50% happiness converted to culture.

Works pretty good at that point when you are generally sitting at around 20-30 happiness from lux trades/circus maximus/monarchy SP if you went tradition, which you should have done for any CV game. Guilds require food to run and generally I would not recommend staffing them until you are size 20 or so (since you are working university slots already and you need the hammers to wonderwhore).
 
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