ideology unhappiness is impossible and horrible

You don't need armies for every game. You don't always have insane tourism pushers. Even if you do, you still have methods for dealing with them. So I still don't see your point.

VainoValkea said:

You don't need armies for every game. You don't always have insane tourism pushers. Even if you do, you still have methods for dealing with them. So I still don't see your point.

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Instead of just repeating that you don't see my point, could you respond to my question?

steveg: There is no 'good enough' measure for Culture, as it depends on who else is in the game, and what they focus on.

Very similarly to how there is no 'good enough' measure for Military, as it depends on who else is in the game, and what they focus on.

The reason people may not be answering your question (at least, to your satisfaction) is because they disagree with the implied assumptions of that question.

You mean this one?

steveg700 said:

So how much effort should you have to expect to dedicate in every game?

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Shouldn't that be obvious, really? Enough not to get trampled upon by the others. So exactly the same as with the military, science and CS fronts.

steveg700 said:

Military's a good example, actually. You need some military units, but how little you need is based on how much risk you're willing to assume. Maybe you'll stockpile gold to build on the fly. Masybe you'll build walls and such. Maybe you'll bribe your neighbors into leaving you alone or making defensive pacts or declaring war on each other. Maybe you'll deter aggerssors with lots of CS alliances. You have to devise solutions, or just assume a heavier risk.

But there is no element of risk here. You just get hammered, with happiness. Finis. And as far as I can tell, the amount of culture you'd have to be generating is quite high. Not only that, but as more civ's tip towards the dominant ideology, the unhappiness ramps up for anyone trying to hold their ground.

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As with anything in Civ5 ; a lot of specific answers on how much you need will have an 'it depends' answer.

More broadly, I think it is safe to say that the tourism mechanic is a new and major inflection point. Yes, you can sort of plan for it for most of the early game until Archaeology; but Archaeology forward is new ballgame. Treat Archaeology as Turn 0 and you're achievements up to the Industrial age in terms of getting an artist or two, or a tourist wonder in the classical/medieval/renaissance as a bonus from a goodie hut.

Archaeology requires you to build a whole new class of units. Like settlers, workers and improving tiles, you NEED to build several archaeologists and having the museum slots for your artifacts to dig up sites before the AI gets to it.

As there are also specific diplomatic penalties for digging in someone's borders, you want to dig as early as possible, preferabbly in nearby open spaces next to your rival/neighbours cultural borders to grab those first before their culture overtakes those tiles. I always prioritize digging those sites before digging in my own territory.

Digging up artifacts allows you to place them in museums. This is where the theming bonuses come into play, allowing you to increase up to 100% the Tourism points you get from the artifacts and artworks you've been collecting by pairing/mixing and matching them. This is also why you want to build lots of archeologists; to have as many artifacts to mix and match as possible so hopefully all your museums gets a theming bonus. But 90% of your tourism can easily be coming form your capital, which will usually have the most slots for great works of art/artifacts/music and writing.

After Archaeology, ideologies also come into play, which adds another 25% GP generation bonus *all ideologies have this, so pick this to start*; ontop of existing bonuses. This is when reassigning specialists to your Guilds to produce GArtists/Writers/Musicians slots becomes priority. This is where you pump out 2-3 of each Great Arist/Musicians/Writers for your World Wonders (Globe Theatre/Broadway etc. and their theming bonus) but even if you don't hit those wonders, you still want to have those for your National Wonders. Keep in mind Artists/Musicians/Writers do not share the same GP bar as the rest of your great persons. They also don't share the same GP bar between each of them, so it's not that hard to get at least 2 of each (very likely many more) if you assign specialists to their guilds during Industrial/Modern/Atomic eras to round out your great works. You also don't need to assign specialists to all guilds at once, you can rotate your specialists as needed depending on your priorities. Broadway Wonder for example requries 3 great msuical works from the same period, so if you get that wonder, you need to save your bonus musician and generate 2 more musiciams and use them in the same era. I find modern era usually works best as it's long with a lot of expensive techs to research.

Oxford gets a theming bonus for having writers from different civilizations; Hermitage also gets a bonus for having 3 works of art *not artifacts* placed in it from different timeperiods and from 3 different civilizations.


There are several wonders, improvements such as Hotels, and social policy/ideology bonuses that specifically buffs tourism. So you can be pumping up 30, 60 then 100 then 200 tourism just from the multipliers. It seems daunting at first, but with upwards of several hundred % multiupliers on a base tourism of (2 points) it's very easy to achieve cultural 'mass' so that even if you're not winning the tourism game and will not win culturally, you're not going to get penalized for having a different ideology than the culture leader. It doesn't hurt to play the diplomatic game smartly and watch what ideologies your neighbours are choosing, or even turn the table and use your influence to penalize other Civs nearby, but that's the meta-level game you should be working on anyways.


It's definitely not too late to start planning your tourism strategy when you get access to Archaeology. The point is to treat Archaeology as BIG inflection point, it's a new turn 0.

You can still be on auto-pilot in terms of running wars and your economy, but there's definitely a new layer to worry about. That is why I think you're having so much trouble. If you insist on playing like you have in the past, then yes, you will run into trouble.

steveg700 said:

Well, let me ask this: at one point is it "your fault" for not generating enough? What should be standard issue? Building museums in every city? Building all the guilds ASAP? Fast-tracking archaeology and building archaologists pronto?

How much of a strategy that you aren't trying to do are you required to do just to defend yoruself?

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If there was one single answer to that question, this game would have no replay value.

Look. Playing the 4-city tradition opener every time, stealing one CS worker every time, teching to your first lux, then archery, then your second lux and then beelining education was pretty much a formula that would work 8% of the time in G&K, and we're all very sorry that you can't look online for a guaranteed series of steps that amounts to a to-do list for playing BNW yet. There isn't a single answer to how much culture, science or military you need because it's going to be subject to who you end up next to, what your terrain is like and whether you get a poop draw for resources. Probably once some really great players have hammered on BNW for awhile someone will come out with something that will give you a better target for how much is a good number to win.

However, you don't need a strategy guide to tell you that that number sure ain't zero.

And besides, culture game still is fairly expendable if you don't plan winning that way. Unlike science (where falling behind is hard to recover) you can simply focus on happiness buildings and luxuries instead to ward off cultural unhappiness. Or take the diplomatic path and join the preferred ideology, or in a more aggressive fashion, have your own ideology elected the world ideology in the WC. You don't have to expend lots and lots of resources in the culture game to do this.

VainoValkea said:

Shouldn't that be obvious, really? Enough not to get trampled upon by the others. So exactly the same as with the military, science and CS fronts.

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Well, that was certainly an obvious answer, as far it goes (which is not far at all).

Ulthwithian said:

steveg: There is no 'good enough' measure for Culture, as it depends on who else is in the game, and what they focus on.

Very similarly to how there is no 'good enough' measure for Military, as it depends on who else is in the game, and what they focus on.

The reason people may not be answering your question (at least, to your satisfaction) is because they disagree with the implied assumptions of that question.

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The reason people are not responding is because it demands some specific considration, rather than the flippant and reductive dismissals that have become this forum's hallmark of late. Yes, there are lots amped-up Chicken Littles running about after thee expansion, but the result is not to continue to assert "everything's fine" and "deal with it" with equal adamancy.

To say my question about minimal cultural effort can't be answered because "there is no average game of Civ" strikes me as equivocal. When I remarked on Polisurgist's straw man, I got replies indicating that people were able to relate to what he was referring to settling forests and hills, prioritizing production, and making Steel a priority tech, Sure, each game is differnt, yet people knew exactly where Polisurgist was coming from, didn't they? That's because one game isn't really so terribly different from another that they don't lend themselves to a general strategy. You probably know what techs and buildings to prioritize (and which not to) in most games.

Pop quiz! What is the order of priority here: universites, armories, workshops? Your mouth might say "oh well, it all depends..." but your brain knows better.

If anyone posts that the game is broken because of such-and-such, there's no shortage of people telling them they should have researched X before &, or built ___ before the medieval era. And they're probably assuming a standard-sized map and number of civ's. Can we not do the same here?

Moreover, I suspect most folks can opine as to what they find to be a reaonsable or unreasonable expectation of what it takes just to keep their head above water. If you found yourself building a museum in every city, would that be a comon occurence, or a rare event? How do you feel about archaeology in most of your games? Is sending archaeologists out to find artifacts is a necessary or elective proedure?

The existence of variations from game to the next aren't so grave that you can't play the averages. The popularity of strategies like four-city-tradition attests to that.

Polisurgist said:

If there was one single answer to that question, this game would have no replay value.

Look. Playing the 4-city tradition opener every time, stealing one CS worker every time, teching to your first lux, then archery, then your second lux and then beelining education was pretty much a formula that would work 8% of the time in G&K, and we're all very sorry that you can't look online for a guaranteed series of steps that amounts to a to-do list for playing BNW yet. There isn't a single answer to how much culture, science or military you need because it's going to be subject to who you end up next to, what your terrain is like and whether you get a poop draw for resources. Probably once some really great players have hammered on BNW for awhile someone will come out with something that will give you a better target for how much is a good number to win.

However, you don't need a strategy guide to tell you that that number sure ain't zero.

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You sure you didn't mean 80% isntead of 8?

I don't need or want the strategy invented for me. I actually build my workers and settlers despite the consensus that this is anathema, a recourse solely for the mad, the foolish, or the desperate. What do I want to relate is that I've been in enough games now where I allocated resources like religious beliefs and social policies and CS relations specifically to give me enough culture to shield me from a tourmonger, and it still wasn't nearly enough. Maybe there's actually a reason to be concerned, and maybe there's not, but that's something that's only resolved through discussion.

France is the worse with this new mechanic. Paris getting +50% tourism out put is brutal, in the end my only recourse was to Conquer all their high tourism out put/wonder cities so that Freedom can truly ring. Mind you the difference between out tourism productions was between 5-10 (and I built Uffizi and Hermitage with the faith bonus of +5,+5) and that difference was enough to send me -7Happiness. After he was shellacked by artillery though, I came out on top with the tourism and a couple of his Great Works

steveg700 said:

Well, that was certainly an obvious answer, as far it goes (which is not far at all).

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But it's the only right answer. Everything else depends on the game you're currently playing, and on how you intend to overcome that cultural pressure. So it's the same as for the military element, and for the science, and economy, and for diplomacy. I can't tell you beforehand how many soldiers or universities you're going to need in a Civ game. Does that ruin the military and science game for you? Or make them impossible and horrible?

I don't think it will. Civ is a game of balancing your resources and adapting to your opponents' strategy. If you didn't have to devote resources to things outside your primary goal, it would be a boring and a stupid game with no decisions, only no-brainers.

Steveg700 ; I wrote a rather meaty post right above yours pointing out what's happening in-game, explaining the mechanics of it and emphasizing it's an inflection point in the game and in a sense everyone starts from a more or less even playing field again and you gotta build up your tourism. But you went ahead and ranted below my post anyways making aspersions about people ignoring you and or being flippant.

I'm not sure why anyone would want to keep on the discussion if you're just going to rant, There is or was a thread for that.

The system works great. I think a lot of the complaint is people DON'T understand how it works. You just can't ignore the culture game and get a free pass with the ideology. Culture is mostly Defense to Ideological pressure and Tourism is Offense to Ideology pressure (though it does have some defense). Dont completely neglect tourism either if you dont plan on a culture game. Just having some tourism can at least get you to the 10% if not the 30% culture level and lowering the ideological pressure by 1 or 2 marks. If you can at least get to a 30% level with the civs, really the pressure isn't much then.

steveg: I take your meaning.

I would think that a comparable effort to that of military or science should be the standard.

So if you need to build, say, 3 units for each of your cities to defend yourself in the typical game, then take that production total, and apply it tculture buildings and other cultural benefits, and that should suffice for you.

If we are not allowed to say, 'everything depends,' then I hope you cannot say that the above is not sufficient. At this point, we are all talking about low sample sizes, and I at least am speaking in theoretical terms. One game will not change the theory of this.

What I do in my games is that I check the culture tab every now and then to see if someone else is already producing tourism. The more tourism my rivals are producing, the more I try to crank out myself. Forgoing archaeological digs and artist guilds when William or Gustav Adolf has a rising influence on you is the culture equivalent to not having an army to defend you against your friendly neighborhood Genghis Khan.

steveg700 said:

You sure you didn't mean 80% isntead of 8?

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Well, I'm sure I could write a strategy guide that only wins 8% of the time too

It's just plain going to be easier to identify what's a clearly bad idea than to give an exact accounting of what the good ideas are. I don't have to be able to give you a precise number of how much tourism will keep you safe in order to tell you that that number is probably greater than what the OP clearly wants to have (pretty damn close to zero).

Polisurgist said:

Well, I'm sure I could write a strategy guide that only wins 8% of the time too

It's just plain going to be easier to identify what's a clearly bad idea than to give an exact accounting of what the good ideas are. I don't have to be able to give you a precise number of how much tourism will keep you safe in order to tell you that that number is probably greater than what the OP clearly wants to have (pretty damn close to zero).

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i usually have 30-70 tourism in my games, with around 150+ culture, but i dont usually focus in culture as a primary, but i feel that now, unless i am winning culture and focusing on it, there is no way i can just stop the tide of influence, its an all or nothing game now, and thats just bad

adecoy95 said:

i usually have 30-70 tourism in my games, with around 150+ culture, but i dont usually focus in culture as a primary, but i feel that now, unless i am winning culture and focusing on it, there is no way i can just stop the tide of influence, its an all or nothing game now, and thats just bad

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The options you have have been repeated many times now. There are quite a few.

Get more culture, get it sooner. Block their tourism modifiers. (no open borders, no trade, no shared religion if possible)
Get more happiness so the pressure won't hit you as hard.
Get delegates and vote your ideology to be the world ideology.
Pick the ideology that's used by the tourism giant, or switch to it if need be.
Destroy the tourism giant.


Seriously, of all the power gaps in Civ, I think this one has the most diverse set of options for mitigating the ill effects.

As people have already said: If you are behind in tech, you know which ideologies the heavy culture civs are using, if you are ahead in tech, you can get the good culture buildings/wonders before them anyway. It really isn't a problem at all...

And if you really don't care what their ideologies are, then that is your choice, but you gotta suffer the consequences as with every other choice you make in the game!

Polisurgist said:

Well, I'm sure I could write a strategy guide that only wins 8% of the time too

It's just plain going to be easier to identify what's a clearly bad idea than to give an exact accounting of what the good ideas are. I don't have to be able to give you a precise number of how much tourism will keep you safe in order to tell you that that number is probably greater than what the OP clearly wants to have (pretty damn close to zero).

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True, I'm not in the OP's extreme camp. I do think that there's something amiss though. I gotta take a minute when I get home to load that game back up so I can snap some screenshots. Perhaps once I provide screenshots I will be able to present the case in the light I desire, and perhaps you guys can help me come up with some answers that will answer those questions I posed (which I think are important ones to consider).

Ulthwithian said:

steveg: I take your meaning.

I would think that a comparable effort to that of military or science should be the standard.

So if you need to build, say, 3 units for each of your cities to defend yourself in the typical game, then take that production total, and apply it tculture buildings and other cultural benefits, and that should suffice for you.

If we are not allowed to say, 'everything depends,' then I hope you cannot say that the above is not sufficient. At this point, we are all talking about low sample sizes, and I at least am speaking in theoretical terms. One game will not change the theory of this.

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Exactly. This is a work in progress. I asked the questions in the hopes that they steer folks back into discussing the possibility that something's out-of-whack rather than merely a case of unrealistic expectations and overreactions. I don't mind having to maintain a good level of culture, as it's undeniably handy for any strategy in the game, but I really don't see the need for museums and broadcast towers in every city or having to beeline archaeology and start spamming Dr. Jones across the map.