Byzantium Sacred Sites Culture Victory Guide (T170 pangaea all standard)

I assume with this strategy you have to play without barbarians? Or i'm too stupid and its implied you have to adapt build order? Since you cant spam settlers before you get at least 2 archers. Or how you defend and try to chop forest when there are 3 barb warriors surround you capitol?

I think he implied it, if he did not explicitely mention it.

imo, it is actually easier with barb and much easier with raging barbs, as 1. AIs lose lots of settlers and workers so you can relatively expand faster, 2. lots of barb quests and worker returns so easier to ally CS.
 
I am getting really frustrated with this strategy. I have tried multiple times and I can never get Reformation fast enough, and if I don't start expanding early I get cut off by other civs. Any tips?
 
Just got a T130 Victory as Spain, Standard, Pangaea, Emperor, Barbarians on.

I had to roll a few times, but I eventually got a Mt. Uluru decently close by start. (11 tiles away from my capital.) I actually wasn't the first one to find it, but I later found a Grand Mesa that I WAS the first one to find, giving me the ability to just buy a settler. I used my second settler from Liberty to settle next to Grand Mesa. Combined with One-with-Nature I was rolling in the faith early game. The rest of the game was just a matter of filling in the space wherever I can and sending caravans to civs with the higher culture.

I guess I was lucky that there weren't any warmongering civs around. I made Washington and Hiawatha a bit wary when I settled next to Uluru, but they didn't really did much about it.

Was a fun strategy, definitely!
 
I just finished a Byz game using essentially this. I even took a page from the vanilla ai. There was a small string of 5 islands right off the coast of my starting area, so I dropped a city in each. Venice ranaway for too long and I had to drop a musical invasion on him, but I had so much faith per turn it didn't even make a dent.
 
Can't get it to work.

I played 6 games today on king as Byzantium and either ended up in a terrible spot that didn't provide decent faith or I had strong opposition (Celts, Ethiopia) that took the faith buildings shortly after I had founded my pantheon. I Then I tried again as Egypt and I was able to get 2 buildings, but wasn't able to create enough tourism. Only became influential on 1 CIV (and had a runaway with too large culture output anyway), so I basicially ended up playing a 12-city-science game. With 12k faith around turn 250 and nothing to buy with it... T_T
...it also seems quite hard to defend against the AI. In the egypt game I lost 3 cities to a combined attack of Shaka, Monty and Sejong. No idea how I could have avoided that one.

Guess IF you can get it to work its awesome, but its much more of a gambit than my regular 3 city tradition games...
:/

However, at least I noticed how amazing Egypt is for ICS. Having those size 2 cities with free maintenance tombs is INSANE.
 
something to add to the guide

when you get the great musician and if you know that's enough to win your game just sell a city next to your capitol to the civ you want to send to for a quicker win
 
There's another way to deal with a cultural runaway that doesn't involve musical invasion.
It generally involves lots of artillery. :lol:
 
I tried this multiple times today with Byzantium, Ethiopia and Egypt. Followed your instructions to the letter with the exception of modifying early techs to grab luxes. Observations:

1. Couldn't pull this off. Best attempt I had 68 tourism and it was nowhere near gaining me the culture victory @ T180
2. On Emperor, AI often expands so fast I dont understand how can you get to spam 22 cities.
3. Even if I manage to settle a lot of cities (my best was 17), this pisses off AI majorly and they refuse all attempts to bribe open borders.
4. How do I make this work?
 
The recent patch made the AI less willing to grant open borders when you are seeking a culture victory. Loss of the +34% tourism modifier for open borders takes a real bite out of this strategy.
 
The recent patch made the AI less willing to grant open borders when you are seeking a culture victory. Loss of the +34% tourism modifier for open borders takes a real bite out of this strategy.

Yep, and your neighbors are more likely to dogpile you as well, generally as you've built out too may cities for their liking,. required to take advantage of the linear scaling factor.
 
This strategy sounds really interesting. It's going to be completely different to anything I've tried previously. Just got to finish playing this Zulu domination game (which is turning out to be quite challenging on Emperor as early warmongering is much more difficult now, as others have already pointed out).
At least 60% of the recent games I've had, Ethiopia have been present too and they have been a complete pain by missionary/prophet spamming everywhere. I hope he's there when I try this strategy (OK, maybe not the first time I try) so I can see if it's possible to take him on his own terms.
Eat this religion Haile Selassie!
 
If you can get enough spare luxuries you might be able to get Open Borders (at least I'm finding that I can). But yes, expanding quickly brings up a big red flag with the AI.

My one attempt at this strategy (pre-patch, mind you) got me a T191 CV with Byzantium on King (unfortunately I'd accidentally set the map to Continents which slowed down my win) - Desert Folklore, Mosques, Pagodas and Monasteries. I imagine if I were to play it again post-patch I'd end up winning even later due to the difficulty of getting Open Borders (although I did have a lot of spare Incense).
 
Fun to play!

Got to 169 CV with Ethiopia on Immortal, Pangaea Small :)

Spoiler :


Got a bit lucky with wonders there :cool:

Kept units to block Maya from forward settling me

Went strait piety, freedom is not needed at all as you need key blocking cities right away, and later there's nothing special to produce...

Maybe it would be better with Monarchy and Oligarchy for more gold (for CS and war bribery)

Beliefs:

Spoiler :



Policies:

Spoiler :


Build first 5 'blocking' cities, and got Reformation about 70-80.
Got to 17 in the end...
Should have let them all grow to 3 pop for more gold, eh (buildings cover 3 pop)

A bit of unhappiness problems at very end but nothing special

Church property beats Tithe by far (never gonna have 8 pop cites, right? :blush:)
Spoiler :

Should have allied more cultural CS, especially Celt allies - she got to 4644 :)
Also should have established trade with Celts WAY earlier - I was assuming that England was the main problem, but as she had no religion and was much closer, so that was easy

Spoiler :
 
I tried this several times, but kept running into problems. Usually getting faith buildings isn't an issue if I pick something like Stone Circles or Earth Mother and there's tons of these resources around. A bigger problem is that every time there's a civ with huge culture (I got Brazil one time and Morocco another) that's not even halfway to Influential status, while all the other civs are already Influential. So annoying.

Also I find expanding really hard (AIs grab all the good spots very fast, defending so many cities is hard, AI gets angry if you build too many), but then again I usually play small, tall empires so I'm probably doing it wrong...
 
sacred sites with only going tall doesnt work well because sacred sites is tourism per city. if u try to mix tall culture wins with sacred sites you should still consinder more then 4 cities and to get tier 3 in aesthetics. but this is nearly impossible to do on immortal and still be alive. (mixing piety n aesthetics)
 
Yeah, I get that. I was playing (or trying to) play wide for this strategy. It's just that, I never do that normally, so it was difficult to adapt to a completely different playstyle.
 
Very fun tactic that brings the best out of Piety! :D

Made it on my third try on Emperor. Probably would have been successful in the others as well but I underestimated the AI's hate for expansion since its something I don't normaly do...

So this third time I built tons of units to intimidate my neighbours and apart from an early dow from Napoleon it turned out to be a very friendly game.

Spoiler :


The desert-start did help. Got three faith-buildings. Could probably be done a lot earlier then turn 170 but i'm happy with it. Never beaten the game under 250 turns before.

Now i'll try it on Immortal!

Include the start if someone would like a nice desert folklore to play with.
 

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Finally manged to do it(t146) on King, Pangaea, Standard, and Small
 

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Found Lake Victoria and Uluru in a game with Spain yesterday (Standard Pangea, King). Restarted and hiked over to Lake Victoria with my settler and to Uluru with my warrior. My empire was founded on turn 6 and I had a sacred sites CV on turn 105 with "only" 5 cities :D (Went straight down the piety tree instead of taking liberty.) Cheese? What cheese? :p
 
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