Poland opener for Tourism Victory

So I decided to run Poland first when the game comes out, and to immediately try the new VC.
I know I want aesthetics asap, because that seems a must for a TV, however I am not completely certain yet what the best policy opener will be.
Note that I will be playing on immortal or even Deity, so most of my timings are based on those difficulty levels.

The general idea is beelining for Drama and poetry, not only is it the cheapest classical
era tech (has the least prerequisites), it also enables amphitheatres.
Once you unlock the classical era, you immediately get a policy point to put into aesthetics, and the next culture pop you get will allow you to get Cultural Centers (Monuments, Amphitheaters, Opera Houses, Museums and Broadcast Towers are built 50% faster).

The question now however is what to first pick, tradition or liberty.
Tradition has obvious advantages, but I am afraid it will be clunky.
Without any ruin pops, will I be able to reach Drama & poetry before I get a 3rd culture pop? Will it be possible before I get a 2nd culture pop?
If the latter is true, it would be fantastic, because it allows me to just get the tradition opener, then go into aesthetics, and the moment I have 4 cities with 50% cheaper monuments I can pick legalism to transform them all into amphi's. Or maybe even better, I beeline with a NC fueled economy towards Accoustics and get instant opera houses in all my cities.

The problem arises however if I can never get D&P before the 3rd culture pop.
If I go tradition, I will be forced to take Aristocracy (because olicharchy is near useless unless you get very agressive AI's). Aristocracy tends to be a bit of a waste however, because most important wonders will be unattainable at higher difficulty levels.

Now the other possibilties would be piety or liberty.
Piety would allow to get a religion oriented to generate culture, and since my planned tech path would always include pottery it barely requires any investment to build a shrine and go for it.
The big plus also is that piety is much stronger than it used to be, especially the reformation beliefs.
The problem however is that on deity religions are very unreliable and often not worth the investment unless you have a religion oriented civ.

Liberty is the last possibility.
The main benefit of going liberty is that I can abandon the tree at any time and not feel bad about it.
Citizenship is powerfull now, especially since you can not milk AI's anymore for gold as easily earlygame. The same reasoning goes up for collective rule.
Also going wide is not a bad choice for a TV, since they reduced the culture penalty for the number of cities you have. More cities, more culture = more tourism output. And with culture centers it is much easier to hardbuild culture buildings in smaller cities.

So I wanted some thoughts and ideas on this from the community.

Go Liberty to collective rule, then get the 3 important policies in piety. get a huge religion and own the map. mosques and pagodas. then finish all 3 policy trees of piety, Liberty and astectics.

The 5 culture per city from Liberty opener and mosques + pagodas wil really help you get off to a good start. Maybe pick up military caste for another 2 culture per city if you really go for culture. 1 of the reformation beliefs can also give you 4 early tourism per city.
If you are Lucky as Spain With a Natural Wonder and piety you might win a Cultural victory before the renesainse.

You could slow your early culture by going Piety first and using that to get your religion going. Then you might be able to hit Drama before the 2nd or 3rd generated policy. If you can manage to get Messenger of the Gods pantheon and a 2nd or even 3rd city quickly, that could help speed the tech rate to achieve your goal. If you happen to get a 2nd policy before Drama, you could take the Piety policy that increase the faith from shrines and temples, so you'll be more likely to actually found a religion, because with 4 cities and those 2 Piety policies, you'll be generating 8 faith per turn from just the shrines.

I'd probably try Piety first.. Enough to get religion going, then aesthetics/ liberty/ piety.

You have to go :

Liberty
aesthetics
ideology

thats the way to go. For the new culture victory in my opinion the more cities the more great works and great work slots.
So you need to expand The free great person from the finisher can be a free great artist for early tourisme . aestetics give huge bonusses to tourisme and like madjinn said you need to finisih it if you want a culture victory.

With a free social policy every era I can see poland becoming verry strong

apocalypse105 said:

You have to go :

Liberty
aesthetics
ideology

thats the way to go. For the new culture victory in my opinion the more cities the more great works and great work slots.
So you need to expand The free great person from the finisher can be a free great artist for early tourisme . aestetics give huge bonusses to tourisme and like madjinn said you need to finisih it if you want a culture victory.

With a free social policy every era I can see poland becoming verry strong

Click to expand...

Maybe it'd be worth limiting your growth until you fill up aesthetics to avoid the culture penalty. Then once it's filled, that's when you expand more.

Just to note, Optics or HBR requires the least amount of beakers to get to Classical, and each would allow for TR bonuses. Coastal cap with sea luxes would be ideal here of course.

D&P sounds like a better plan though - get at least one settler out while holding off on building monuments 'til you reach d&p, then use Legalism to get free Amphitheaters and power through Aesthetics (happiness will be an issue of course with this strat). So Piety sounds best for the first sp with Trad opener for second (or if you rex hard enough just get the trad opener). I'm not certain beelining directly to classical is ideal though, you'll probably need a couple luxury techs thrown in.

My thoughts:

Open Tradition
Open Piety (to build your Shrine faster)
Open Liberty
->finish Piety and Liberty in any order
Blaze through Aesthetics

For science, definitely right to D&P - you'll also be able to get the Writer's Guild after that.
Then get Guilds, then Acoustics.

Tyrvos said:

Maybe it'd be worth limiting your growth until you fill up aesthetics to avoid the culture penalty. Then once it's filled, that's when you expand more.

Click to expand...

There is no culture penalty, only a policy increased cost penalty per number of cities (which was decreased in BNW).

You no longer need to have as many policies as possible to win a cultural victory (though that helps) and more cities equals more culture.

The problem is that culture now is only meant to defend against a cultural victory. To win a cultural victory you need tourism.

Teching fast is a lot more important now to get to those hotels and particularly to internet. You also want to boost your Great Musicians output because they'll be instrumental to become influential with the most culturally advanced civs.

Killlbray said:

There is no culture penalty, only a policy increased cost penalty per number of cities (which was decreased in BNW).

You no longer need to have as many policies as possible to win a cultural victory (though that helps) and more cities equals more culture.

The problem is that culture now is only meant to defend against a cultural victory. To win a cultural victory you need tourism.

Teching fast is a lot more important now to get to those hotels and particularly to internet. You also want to boost your Great Musicians output because they'll be instrumental to become influential with the most culturally advanced civs.

Click to expand...

Sorry, the increased policy cost was what i was referring to with culture penalty. I wasn't clear with that.

Culture victory isn't about getting all the policies anymore, but filling up that aesthetics tree would help culture focus immensely.

There's now a science penalty for the more cities you have, so we'll have to see if you still need many cities to get that science edge. Although I totally agree with more cities helping with the great people production.

Culture will still be important for a winning a cultural victory. You need to make sure you aren't getting influenced, and from what I've read there are buildings that increase your tourism based off of a percentage of your culture. I'm just saying that it would would probably pay off, culturally, to fill up that culture policy tree before expanding too much. I'm not saying stay small the whole game.

Tyrvos said:

Sorry, the increased policy cost was what i was referring to with culture penalty. I wasn't clear with that.

Culture victory isn't about getting all the policies anymore, but filling up that aesthetics tree would help culture focus immensely.

There's now a science penalty for the more cities you have, so we'll have to see if you still need many cities to get that science edge. Although I totally agree with more cities helping with the great people production.

Culture will still be important for a winning a cultural victory. You need to make sure you aren't getting influenced, and from what I've read there are buildings that increase your tourism based off of a percentage of your culture. I'm just saying that it would would probably pay off, culturally, to fill up that culture policy tree before expanding too much. I'm not saying stay small the whole game.

Click to expand...

Yes I agree with that.

Regarding culture and tourism, however not all culture gets converted into tourism. The culture from buildings for example does not.

Theming bonuses of artifacts and great works seem to play a major role, and also of huge relevance are the landmarks and any improvement that yield culture (which is why Polynesia is particularly strong culturally now).

MadDjinn said that it is better to convert archeological sites to landmarks for that purpose, so being wide isn't a bad idea. You also don't want to be too pacifist either especially in the early game. You need to increase the chance to get archeological sites within your borders.

Killlbray said:

Yes I agree with that.

Regarding culture and tourism, however not all culture gets converted into tourism. The culture from buildings for example does not.

Theming bonuses of artifacts and great works seem to play a major role, and also of huge relevance are the landmarks and any improvement that yield culture (which is why Polynesia is particularly strong culturally now).

MadDjinn said that it is better to convert archeological sites to landmarks for that purpose, so being wide isn't a bad idea. You also don't want to be too pacifist either especially in the early game. You need to increase the chance to get archeological sites within your borders.

Click to expand...

I wasn't really taking the archaeological sites into account. That with the great people does give wide a strong advantage. Hopefully both strategies will be viable though, sense having to always go wide, or tall, in order to win culturally would get boring.

I think you're forgetting about Polands free SPs per era. You don't need to time hitting the Classical Era quite so fast as the moment you get there, you'll get a policy. Same for when you hit Medieval, etc.

So if you're going that route, and even are attempting a religion, go philosophy first, then to Theocracy (with all relavant other early techs as needed).

That'll get you two fast picks in Aesthetics. Though, that's actually wasteful early game. Better to clear Tradition first (free aqueducts = more pop growth faster without even touching Engineering early game) and just deal with Opera houses/etc later via the Aesthetics policy.

You can finish Tradition 2 policies faster if you go for Theocracy fast, 3 policies earlier if you build the oracle along the way. That's more policies towards Aesthetics or other SP trees.

Expand as needed.

Also, don't rush into Aesthetics. It's not actually worth it to skip the early game policies due to being required to actually build the guilds. If you don't have a guild, nor the specialists to run it, then the opener is useless. Amphitheatres aren't that expensive, so rushing into faster build time isn't great either since Opera houses come much later. Not to mention that the moment you hit the Renaissance, you can just pop that policy as Poland.

Plus, you actually need places to put the Great Works. So rushing production of Gwam's without somewhere for them to go isn't a good idea either.

For a wider VC style, then definitely speed through Liberty and Piety if you want it. Again it's not really worth going Aesthetics super fast. Definitely get it if going for a culture VC, preferably before the Industrial Era, but it's not going to break you for not doing it fast (unlike before with the speed SP grab plan). The culture VC truely kicks off in the Industrial Era via Archaeology and Ideologies.


edit: also keep in mind that you need to adjust build orders to include multiple trade units. You can easily speed for a lot of national wonders/guilds, but if you're broke, you're further behind that before.

apocalypse105 said:

You have to go :

Liberty
aesthetics
ideology

thats the way to go. For the new culture victory in my opinion the more cities the more great works and great work slots.
So you need to expand The free great person from the finisher can be a free great artist for early tourisme . aestetics give huge bonusses to tourisme and like madjinn said you need to finisih it if you want a culture victory.

With a free social policy every era I can see poland becoming verry strong

Click to expand...

It is much more powerful to concentrate your great works in one city than to spread them around your empire, mainly because of various wonders and national wonders which offer city tourism multipliers. And I once calculated that with all buildings (including wonders) that give great work slots built in one city, you will have 33 slots - i.e. much more than what seems like the number of great works people had in most playthroughs.

Incidentally, don't forget Exploration - it's also important for a tourism victory, as the finisher shows hidden artifact sites.

Martinus said:

Incidentally, don't forget Exploration - it's also important for a tourism victory, as the finisher shows hidden artifact sites.

Click to expand...

I don't know how worthwhile that is. You'd need to spend a lot of policies just for that, and only to see artifact in other lands? You'll even get a negative diplo hit for excavating them in other territories.

Considering you're Poland and going for a Culture victory though, you HAVE a lot of policies to spend. Don't forget it gives the strongest Culture wonder out there as well: the Louvre - I'd always open it if going for a CV at least, and it seems worth going through on a map with a lot of water.