What did I do wrong? Egypt ICS/Sacred Sites Early Culture Victory [KING]

HarmfulBus404

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To be clear: I was hoping for a sub-T200 victory here, and while I'll still probably win the game I'm wondering how some of you are able to get victories at absurd turns like 150, and on higher difficulties too!

Oh and I should mention before I start... This was a team game between a buddy and I, and three other AI teams. I have done this before single player though, and had similar results.

I knew I wanted to go ICS early cultural going into it.

It was literally a dream of a start. First city right in a desert with gold and lots of hills, and coastal. Lots of luxes and a Natural Wonder nearby. I was second to found a pantheon, but got Desert Folklore and Stonehenge which ensured me my choice of beliefs (founded + enhanced first) and absolute religious dominance throughout the game. At T206 now I'm churning out over 200 faith per turn, it's a bit absurd actually. I have more faith than I can spend, I've resorted to buying great prophets a few times just to build holy sites. I also picked up ceremonial burial (lots of cities = lots of happiness) and defender of the faith, in case I get invaded. I also got Oracle and Pyramids. Liberty -> Piety -> Aesthetics all fully filled.

Hiawatha has been wonder whoring the entire game and beating me by a few hundred points, but my army is even with his or stronger and my teammate also has a decent army. Right now he is the only cultural runaway - even with aesthetics fully filled out (+15% tourism), open borders, and a trade route (80% modifier total) my influence is still either falling or rising slowly - everyone else I am influential over.

Right now our plan is to just go decimate Hiawatha militarily and then I will have the cultural victory.

The problem is that I literally have nowhere else to expand to. I need more tourism (obviously) but that means more cities. I've had close to 40 positive happiness the entire game, I could settle 10 more cities and be fine, but there's no more land and I can't build more pagodas/mosques. I even conquered England (3 cities) and a city-state or two, and I don't have enough tourism. I'm faith-buying great artists/musicians/writers as fast as I can but they are starting to get ridiculously expensive (3k+ faith) It seems like I'm "plateauing" in terms of tourism output.

So the question is, how could I have won this game more quickly? Should I have just DOWed Hiawatha earlier when I saw that he was accumulating lots of culture?

I've also tried this strategy with Byzantium, even getting all three sacred sites buildings, and I always end up with a cultural runaway (or two). How do you stop this?

I can post screens if necessary.
 
Did you get autocracy/futurism? That's a good finisher for piety ICS. Don't build any guilds till you get futurism, then spam away those great peoples. Finish off with a culture nuke.

Also; can you post a screenshot of your empire?
 
What I'd do if I were you is spam as many musicians as you can (guilds/faith buying) and culture bomb Hiawatha. Writers and Artists would be a bit useful at this point in the game, but save your faith for the musicians, because that's what's going to get you influential faster than anything.
You could have also went for wonders--thus stunting Hiawatha's culture. You do have that 20% wonder bonus after all.
 
i recently did one of these on King/Continents with Dido and finished at t190. At the time I had 78 tourism, all of which came from sacred sites and open borders/trade route bonuses. i could have had much more if i had gotten the cities down sooner. i was a bit slow in finding spots. i also lost one to Pocatello but he razed it so I settle another in the same area but i lost like 20 turns in the whole thing.

what is your tourism? do you have open borders (25%) and trade routes (25%) going with everyone? i check the tourism screen to see how far back i am and plan accordingly by buying open borders, even if they'll only accept a lux and gpt, and sending cargo ships (4) to as many AI as i can.
 
WTF? I have 88 tourism and trade routes and open borders with Hiawatha, +80% total modifier, and he still is outpacing me by a lot. Did I just get unlucky with a very strong cultural AI?
 
Here is a screenshot of the heart of my empire
 

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WTF? I have 88 tourism and trade routes and open borders with Hiawatha, +80% total modifier, and he still is outpacing me by a lot. Did I just get unlucky with a very strong cultural AI?

Well, 80 tourism on T140, and on T210 are very different things :) At this point your tourism is simply not enough.
Show the culture influence screen pls.
 
yeah, it does take some planning to get tourism going early. i had 78 by t180 but i was building that up before unlocking SS. i looked at your screenshot and i counted about 15 cities but they were all pretty tall growth too. my cap was at 5 along with 3 other cities, then i had about 10 cities at 3 pop and the rest were 1 and 2 pop. the low pop let me get a couple golden ages naturally by keeping my happiness up. (it was already an issue with not many luxes for me to claim.) plus, I took monasteries/mosques instead of mosque/pagoda. at 120 faith, i had them in the cities making tourism slightly earlier. but after t150 i had a surplus always and could buy the buildings at the same time as soon as my city got my religion. also, low pops, 1 or 2, let them convert pretty quickly. i had Religious texts but only got 25% pressure bonus as i never needed to get to Printing Press. i also had too much faith and couldnt prevent 2 of my prophets from popping but i used one for settling and another for faster spreading. it might seem not worth it to spread when youre only gaining 1-3 turns on the tourism from natural pressure spreading but they add up in the long run.

my religion is in a screenshot. religious texts, and SS of course are the ones you cant see. i also bought the culture CS but there was just 1 that i found (2 CSs i never found). there were oddly about 4 militaristic CS, 6 mercantiles (which really helped with some happy issues) and only 2 maritime and 1 faith CS. my opponents were Austria, Rome, Indonesia, Pocatello, Hiawatha, China, and Spain. Only China and Austria got a lot of wonders. Rome was the hardest to get open borders with and I never got a trade route to them based on the map. but luckily they didnt go for much culture anyway. China was the final civ to convert. She had the most culture to overcome at 3100 or so.

some screenshots:
dido1.jpg dido2.jpg dido3.jpgdido4.jpgdido5.jpgdido6.jpg
 
if you do SS, you want to reach reformation fast and build cities like there is no tomorrow. It seems that your tourism fest started way too late.

make sure you do liberty free setter policy - and reformation. With oracle, you should be able to reach reformation at least t110. If you got a religion with 2 religious buildings, now it is over - just spam cities. If you start spamming around t100, there should be lots of open spaces.

Don't build stuffs like libraries. Your expos will build monument, shrine, and temple. Maybe first expo can build granary. Get units/market if you have something to build.

There shouldn't be a culture runaway if you do it properly. And even if there is one, with superior production you should be able to kill them easily.

Lastly, if you are choosing aesthetics, you are doing something wrong. In most cases, you don't even have time to finish liberty.

Take a look at gauntlet this month if you need an example.
 
WTF? I have 88 tourism and trade routes and open borders with Hiawatha, +80% total modifier, and he still is outpacing me by a lot. Did I just get unlucky with a very strong cultural AI?

of course AI can... even at king difficulty, AI can build at least 200 cpt easily by t200 ...
 
Why did you pick Desert Folklore? Unless you are going for a cultural victory, going for a faith producing pantheon just isn't worth it. God-King, God of Craftsmen, or the Wonder One (can never remember the name) are all significantly superior for production-light, tall civs such as Egypt.
 
Why did you pick Desert Folklore? Unless you are going for a cultural victory, going for a faith producing pantheon just isn't worth it. God-King, God of Craftsmen, or the Wonder One (can never remember the name) are all significantly superior for production-light, tall civs such as Egypt.

lol ?
 
I think you should have focused more on building tourist Wonders.

If Hiawatha themes the Uffizi with aesthetics that would generate 12 tourism, triple that of your average SS city. As others say, the tourism benefit from SS runs out quite fast so you should certainly have some Wonders and also beeline Archaeology to steal dig sites from your opponents.

You should have the Sistine Chapel as culture defends against tourism you certainly don't want this one in the hands of your enemy. Also as it boosts culture per city it really helps to offset the culture penalty for going wide.
 
Why did you pick Desert Folklore? Unless you are going for a cultural victory, going for a faith producing pantheon just isn't worth it. God-King, God of Craftsmen, or the Wonder One (can never remember the name) are all significantly superior for production-light, tall civs such as Egypt.

You are silly. Ignoring for a fact that faith is important enough to make Desert Folklore basically the best pantheon in the game if you can swing it, this is talking about Sacred Sites ICS. His empire is neither production-light nor tall (it is, in fact, about as not tall as you can get).

SS ICS just doesn't transition well into a normal CV.

This is an unfortunate truth. Unless your capital somehow spits out wonders and settlers at the same time, SS ICS hits a point where if you haven't won yet, you'll have a hard time going the rest of the way. Sacred Sites tourism doesn't scale as fast in the very late game as a CV fuelled by hotels and visitor center.

Unfortunately normal CV asks you to run specialist slots and build wonders - both things are hard to do when ICSing.
 
I have a some questions for the SS/ICS CV experts. I have been messing around with this strategy using Ethiopia on a standard pangaea map/Emperor difficulty just to test things out. I cooked the map a little bit by setting low sea level and reduced the CS by 2, in order to provide a bit more land mass. I also re-rolled for a decent faith pantheon start (e.g., DF). But I used random AI opponents.

I have been trying the Collective Rule first then Reformation strategy and have failed 4 times in a row before T100. In 3 of 4 attempts the AI chose SS first and in the fourth I was beat to Oracle (I didn't bother to continue since 3 AI civs went full Piety). In every game there were at least 2 AI civs that went full Piety. I didn't have any problem getting an early religion and early enhancement, with DF, World Church, Pagodas, Mosques/Monasteries and Religious Texts. In most every game I found an early culture ruin. My strategy was to wait until Collective Rule (cap usually pop 4 or 5 at this point) then crank out 3 expo cities to block off territory and build stele, shrine, temple in them ASAP while starting to fill them with religious buildings.

Questions:
- Should I push out more than 3 additional cities prior to Reformation? In my cap I have been building SH, Pyramids and Oracle no problem. but I could skip Pyramids to build a few more settlers. I figured 4 cities is enough to start since it takes a while to fill them with the 2 religious buildings anyway. And I want to keep culture costs low as possible at the start.
- Is allying a cultural CS essential to get to Reformation fast enough?
- Am I just unlucky to have at least 2-3 AI civs going full Piety focus in every game? Makes it less than 50% chance to have SS still available when you finally get there.

It just seems to me like everything has to align perfectly in order to pull off this strategy.
 
Pyramids isn't very useful for this strategy. Skip masonry for faster philosophy instead. 4 cities is enough yes.

Allying cultural CS helps a lot yes. It's not mandatory.

Yes you were kind of unlucky. However you can also simply go piety right away or after republic, should give you a T80ish reformation instead of 90-100. The higher in levels you go the more likely an AI will pick it early. When that happens there's nothing you can do about it... SS is a cheesy strat.

However if you're not into quiting a game when that fails, transitioning into a normal game will be easier since you should know an AI got it at a time you are still at 4 cities. If that happens try to pick jesuit education instead and go for a wide game. Liberty+Piety certainly isnt the best start for a normal game but it should give you enough tools to still win a game. Your first priorities will be to make the NC and get aqueducts in that case.
 
Actually got effed over on the Egypt game when my partner wasn't as strong as he claimed to be, and we were stalled out by Hiawatha's superior technology/units. Abandoned the game when we realized we didn't have a shot at winning.

Restarted with Byzantium, I plan to focus on getting to reformation faster and then spamming cities afterwards. What do you think of building a lot of settlers prior to getting reformation, but having them camp out near my capital (not founding cities so as to avoid culture penalty) and then sending them out immediately after getting SS? Would this work?
 
Finally got this to work with Ethiopia/Emperor. It took me 222 turns to win though because it was a figure 8 shaped pangaea with a blocking civ in the middle and I couldn't get over to the other side to meet the other civs until late. So I ended up having to overcome over 10k culture of Austria. Took me 30 cities and I had to convert her to my religion and settle near her for a trade route. It was like the old ICS strategy in G&K - fun to do once but too gimmicky for my taste.

The funny thing was that even in this game the first 3 civs I met (my immediate neighbors) all went full Piety. I can understand the Mayans, but Morocco and America? I just beat them all to Reformation by a few turns (I think I got it on T107) even though my early game was close to perfect. I did the Collective Rule first strategy and built SH and Oracle but skipped Pyramids this time.
 
Actually got effed over on the Egypt game when my partner wasn't as strong as he claimed to be, and we were stalled out by Hiawatha's superior technology/units. Abandoned the game when we realized we didn't have a shot at winning.

Restarted with Byzantium, I plan to focus on getting to reformation faster and then spamming cities afterwards. What do you think of building a lot of settlers prior to getting reformation, but having them camp out near my capital (not founding cities so as to avoid culture penalty) and then sending them out immediately after getting SS? Would this work?

Тhats not good idea. You need the cities, so you can get good religion spread and to increase FPT asap. And with getting Pagodas you increase the CPT. You will probably get reformation a bit faster, but that will bring other problems so I don't think its worth it.
 
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