Opinions on Tourism when not chasing a Cultural Victory

Being in South America, I only started playing BNW yesterday, so I'm still early in my first game with it.

Now, one thing that is bothering me a little bit, is the question of how useful Tourism is if you aren't specifically chasing a culture victory.

At first, Tourism looked like a completely binary "resource" for me - either you have enough to win the game, or you don't. But that would be a terrible mechanic. Thankfully, after reading a bit more on it, I noticed that it also gives penalties for other civilizations of different ideologies that are under your influence. If there's something else about it, I missed it.

But I ask for opinions of those that already played the end-game: how relevant is Tourism for civs that are not chasing a cultural victory?

If you don't have it, you're more or less a spectator in the ideological battles that define the end-game. To some extent you can protect yourself against adverse ideological effects just with culture, but if you aren't contributing to influencing other civs with your ideology you'll probably still be at the mercy of others', just to a lesser extent.

I develop it even if I'm going for say, Domination just to have another way to win if need be.

This question has popped up many times before but I think it is put on its head - because people are forgetting two things:

- almost every single thing that gives you tourism also gives you culture - so getting a great work of art from someone is useful even if you don't have much use for tourism for example - because you still get culture out of it,

- almost every single action creating a great work of art has a non-tourism-generating alternative that is useful in other way (with a possible exception of a Great Musician - but a Great Artist can give you a golden age and a Great Writer can give you a huge culture boost; and using an Archeologist on a site in your borders can give you a landmark if you do not care for tourism).

To me, actively focusing on tourism is like building space ship parts - it won't give you much benefit outside of the chosen victory - but you can benefit from other things along the way.

If you don't have it, you're more or less a spectator in the ideological battles that define the end-game.

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Or you can burn those the end-game defining, full-of-culture-and-tourism cities to the ground, hang their artists along the roads and make a radioactive waste out of their capital. That's gonna make the silly AI to reconsider who's a spectator here

Martinus, how do you benefit from building ship parts, aside from Science Victory? Was it changed it BNW?

CornPlanter said:

Or you can burn those the end-game defining, full-of-culture-and-tourism cities to the ground, hang their artists along the roads and make a radioactive waste out of their capital. That's gonna make the silly AI to reconsider who's a spectator here

Martinus, how do you benefit from building ship parts, aside from Science Victory? Was it changed it BNW?

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He means like focusing on tourism doesn't really benefit you outside of going for a cultural victory, but the culture and the ideology influence help all aspects of the game. Just as when you're discovering new technology for the space ship parts, you get other new things too that can help war and other things.

If you're not going for a cultural victory, you don't need it - just forego Airports and Hotels. You can, however, help becoming the dominant ideology with a few other civs to heavily crash the happiness of others, so that is definitely useful.

One thing though. Hotels and Airports are not actually that expensive to build in your capital. Most of your wonders will be in your capital. You can put your great works there as well.

So, it's also very low cost to have some tourism when not chasing a cultural victory, even if the only benefit is more protection against unhappiness.

I think I'm coming around to "having a little" tourism, if you have a couple of world wonders, to build Hermitage there, put all your great works there, and get an edge on the ideological battle. The AI these days sometimes goes into unhappiness by itself for mismanagement, so you can add to the pressure, which slows them down (less competition for CSs, less production to world fair etc, less military units), even if those civs aren't really the ones that'll win the game, they do make it harder for you to, so might as well knock them down a peg using 5 turns of production.

I went for a diplo victory in my last Venice game - and tourism saved my ass.

Alexander had blobbed from the very beginning, so he started with a significant advantage in the medieval era. Later he annihiliated China and attacked Carthago - and oh boy did he have a lot of up-to-date units! All in all he had roughly twice my score (1500 vs. 800) and roughly 300 more than the second AI.

By that time I had been able to fill a lot of my wonders with theme bonus stuff and beelined towards radio. It looked like Dido's empire would soon collapse, but somehow Alexanders attack bogged down, despite a dozen of Great War Bombers.

The next time I checked his homeland, I saw a lot of pillaged improvements -wondered about that and checked the culture screen: As it turned out he had adoped autocracy a while ago - and thanks to the fact that I had a diplomat, open borders and a trade route, my tourism had send him into a "Wave of Revolutionary Unrest" that resulted in -60 happiness and brought him down to -20 total.

So his giant army was basicially useless - I quickly passed "Standing Army Tax" via the next world congress and soon his economy was in ruins. In the end I was able to snatch every single city state from his control thanks to my +400 income per turn. I even got a new puppet city as one of his cities revolted and joined my empire.

I doubt I would have survived that game without tourism...
...so: Tourism can be very useful, even outside of a cultural victory!

GAGA extrem : I love the way you tell the tale of that game. Must have been great.


So, back to the OP...
As GAGA explained, tourism can deeply harm a large, threatening but uncultured empire... Also, having a good cultural influence on other civs can drive them into choosing your ideology (in my last and first BNW game, as Brazil, all civs on which I had a large influence chose my ideology), and in the end it improves your relation and snowballs later. In World Congress you can have this ideology elected as world ideology, which in turn pisses off the outsiders (more attraction towards world ideology) and grants you more votes.

But perhaps the true question is : is tourism useful for brutal ways to victory ?

Once you are the dominant military power and if you haven't neglected culture... Then you shouldn't bother about what the others have for an ideology, you'll knock them down if they do not cooperate. Apart from domination, you normally have a large science asset, and gold generation : so you can target science or diplo victories.

Tourism is definitely a better way to go about culture than the old system, but I agree that it's simply not useful enough - at least in high-level single-player play - for other victory conditions. AI cities never flipped for me, even en route to a culture loss (about 10 turns shy) on Emperor. And forget about city-flipping on Immortal and Deity.

Now, in multiplayer, where unhappiness actually hurts other players, it's probably a different story. I intend to do some "investigative work" on that soon.

Tourism matters and you can't ignore it.

Ie, let's say you ignored tourism, but no one else did. If you aren't in the 'main' ideology, everyone who did go tourism 'a little' before the Industrial Era will have built up some 'pressure' on you. Even if they only got to 'exotic' (first level) and you never got there, they will be giving you a happiness hit. For every single opponent that does that, you will be hurt until your people hate you too much to ignore it. No matter what VC you intend, having rebels and below 0 unhappiness will hurt you due to the scaled gpt and hammer losses, not to mention pop growth.

MadDjinn said:

Tourism matters and you can't ignore it.

Ie, let's say you ignored tourism, but no one else did. If you aren't in the 'main' ideology, everyone who did go tourism 'a little' before the Industrial Era will have built up some 'pressure' on you. Even if they only got to 'exotic' (first level) and you never got there, they will be giving you a happiness hit. For every single opponent that does that, you will be hurt until your people hate you too much to ignore it. No matter what VC you intend, having rebels and below 0 unhappiness will hurt you due to the scaled gpt and hammer losses, not to mention pop growth.

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But isn't it culture that you need, not Tourism? Of course, the two tend to go hand in hand, but culture is defensive, correct? My problem is that Tourism doesn't seem to matter, although culture does matter more now.

I'm sure you're right, being one of the premier strategy LP'ers. But I'm curious why you need Tourism.

MadDjinn said:

Tourism matters and you can't ignore it.

Ie, let's say you ignored tourism, but no one else did. If you aren't in the 'main' ideology, everyone who did go tourism 'a little' before the Industrial Era will have built up some 'pressure' on you. Even if they only got to 'exotic' (first level) and you never got there, they will be giving you a happiness hit. For every single opponent that does that, you will be hurt until your people hate you too much to ignore it. No matter what VC you intend, having rebels and below 0 unhappiness will hurt you due to the scaled gpt and hammer losses, not to mention pop growth.

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This really needs to be emphasized: Tourism influence level is *also* defense against other civs' Tourism against you. Civs with a different Ideology and any level of influence over you will cause unhappiness, but they won't if you have the same level of influence over them. (The devs didn't really make this clear pre-release by calling normal culture "defensive culture", I see a lot of confusion over it.)

For example, in my last game I was the first to pick an Ideology and I chose Freedom; a few turns later Monty gets Order and my happiness plummets by 9, even though his culture was only "exotic" in my empire. Once I got up to "exotic" over him by focusing my Tourism towards him (obtained his open borders, sent him an ITR and dropped a Diplomat in his capital) on him, my Ideological happiness issues disappeared.

Edit: Forgot to mention that each civ of a different Ideology exerting pressure on you will add to your unhappiness - ie, the unhappiness stacks, so it's important to at least match every other civ's influence level.

*Ignore Tourism at your own peril!*

Seek said:

This really needs to be emphasized: Tourism influence level is *also* defense against other civs' Tourism against you. Civs with a different Ideology and any level of influence over you will cause unhappiness, but they won't if you have the same level of influence over them. (The devs didn't really make this clear pre-release by calling normal culture "defensive culture", I see a lot of confusion over it.)

For example, in my last game I was the first to pick an Ideology and I chose Freedom; a few turns later Monty gets Order and my happiness plummets by 9, even though his culture was only "exotic" in my empire. Once I got up to "exotic" over him by focusing my Tourism towards him (obtained his open borders, sent him an ITR and dropped a Diplomat in his capital) on him, my Ideological happiness issues disappeared.

Edit: Forgot to mention that each civ of a different Ideology exerting pressure on you will add to your unhappiness - ie, the unhappiness stacks, so it's important to at least match every other civ's influence level.

*Ignore Tourism at your own peril!*

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Thank you for clearing that up. It makes a lot of sense.

The devs didn't really make this clear pre-release by calling normal culture "defensive culture", I see a lot of confusion about it so I thought I'd share.

The central point is this: Civs with a different Ideology and any level of influence over you will cause unhappiness, but they won't if you have the same level of influence over them.

This really needs to be emphasized. Tourism influence level is *also* defense against other civs' Tourism against you in addition to normal culture.

For example, in my last game I was the first to pick an Ideology and I chose Freedom; a few turns later Monty gets Order and my happiness plummets by 9, even though his culture was only "exotic" in my empire. Once I got up to "exotic" over him by focusing my Tourism towards him (obtained his open borders, sent him an ITR and dropped a Diplomat in his capital) on him, my Ideological happiness issues disappeared.

Also worth noting is that each civ of a different Ideology exerting pressure on you will add to your unhappiness - ie, the unhappiness stacks, so it's important to at least match every other civ's influence level.

*Ignore Tourism at your own peril!*
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(Note, crossposted this with another thread here.)
Moderator Action: Threads merged.

This assumes that the opponents are also not ignoring tourism.

I'm quoting myself. I just posted this in a thread titled "Are you happy with tourism" like 10 minutes ago.

I_qua_I said:

I also think there is a lot of room for improvement with tourism. I'd like to see it become relevant in the early game. It doesn't necessarily have to do with the culture victory but I find it pretty disappointing that I can start generating some tourism from the classical era onward and it not really doing anything until the final stages of the game (where it gets amplified by hotels and other modifiers).

I'd like to see culture flipping much earlier than it currently happens. It might be worthwhile to be able to invest your tourism output in the conversion of a single (nearby?) city (you choose the city). There can be limits placed on the range of cities you can target that increases with each era. The defending player can build cultural building in that city to stave off the flipping so it's not completely one-sided. Individual cities that have accumulated a lot of foreign influence by being targeted by another civ's tourism could also be more susceptible to the targeting civ's spies' tech stealing or maybe the targeting civ receives a combat bonus against that city (if s/he didn't want to wait for a completely peaceful flip).

Cultural combat so to speak. Just as a civ can be distracted by military advances so should we have to worry about more peaceful take-overs. Tourism seems like it could fill this role quite nicely.

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Not to mention you can flip enemy cities with tourism and pressure.

Tourism should be renamed polite terrorism.