Cultural victory - tips!

Culture cost is not dependent on number of puppet cities.
 
The cost per policy is dependent on number of cities, no?

Only National Wonder hammer costs inflate with puppets. Military Caste is really the most sustaining culture policy for a wide empire in the game so I would not scoff at Honor.

Don't overrate Piety usefulness for culture. I have finished three Culture Victories in G&K (emperor, huge), one with four founded cities and a steady collection of puppets after Medieval, one with three founded cities and an even earlier collection of puppets, and one as OCC -- and had intensely disappointing experiences from Piety in all except the OCC one.

Piety doesn't synergize with 2-4 founded cities the way you might want it to. Partly because your Tradition happiness benefits center on the capital. Mandate of Heaven gets you zip unless you are playing OCC (In which case you will have 0 unhappiness the whole game). It took until 1960s to finish the other two games and that is pathetic compared to how quickly Rationalism gets you to a spaceship.

Patronage or Commerce, whichever is your preferred way to collect CS allies, can make up for the lack of Piety. Later, Rationalism (just opening it) will get you to Cristo and SoH a ton faster.

Of course you want to open and finish Freedom as soon as you can: slow policy collection in the early game will make Freedom policies less expensive. The trick to making Freedom productive on a puppet empire is that you need to micromanage your capital in the preceding 200 turns: make sure it is growing tall as possible, make sure it is planting GAs often.* Close Freedom to turn your monuments and Golden Ages into unstoppable forces and you can go back and finish the policy trees you skimmed on earlier.

*Don't let your other founded cities pop out unneeded Great Person types either. Keep an eye on the GP bars to make sure the Great Person you want is up next.

And, try to plant ALL your great-artist-point wonders in the SAME city (ie the capital). This makes it so you can chain-generate Great Artists as soon as you have museum.

Make a chart of the wonders by Great Person points. It helps clarify what your capital should build. Great Artist wonders are: H.Gardens, TerraCotta, Hagia, Alhambra, Sistine, FP, Leaning Tower, Taj Mahal, Louvre, SoH

-Hanging Gardens is earliest and gives you population to work specialist spots later. GET IT.

-Terra Cotta is good but don't let it interfere with the two after it. You need a good tech pathing and build order plan to get Hagia or Alhambra without a GE

-Hagia is often crucial for religion, I love it. It synergizes with a late start on Pottery (Did I mention you didn't open on Pottery? how else are you going to be first to Hanging Gardens?).

-Alhambra is 100 more hammers than Hagia and extremely hard to get first without a GE. I usually don't have a GE around for it.

-Sistine is completely crucial and usually gettable vs AI if you steer for Acoustics agressively.

-Leaning Tower looks VERY attractive when you are condensing GA points, because you flip it for a GE and then rush the next GA Wonder on the chart. Depending on how you pathed, you may be able to still make Sistine this way, otherwise don't pass up Taj Mahal, it is 2xGA point. The AI doesn't offer too much competition for Leaning Tower.

Obviously other wonders like Temple and C.Itza are super useful for culture gain, but unless you expect no competition from the AI, having a chart of Wonders by GP point makes it a lot easier to prioritize. (Temple is on the way to Hanging so I would say always get both).
 
Im not too experienced with cultural win but apart from the obvious wonders..
oracle, terracota, sydney, the christ redentor, sistine chapel going piety etc..

The other day I experienced the power of the City states mainly the culture ones. there was only 2, and as you reach a new era there bonus increases, I was getting like 50-100 culture from just 2 city states, and now that golden ages give +20% culture, I was in the 700-800 culture range easily. (I did win cultural that game)

I will say this from my experience, I can see siam being a very powerful civ when going cultural, even their university replacement gives culture. Maybe give them a try!

Also, in my game i didnt get sistine chapel, oracle, terracota or redentor, and won by turn 245 on quick settings, maybe had I focused on the right elements, I could have won around turn 200, since I wasnt really planning, I got my first culture city state ally by accident, and I was like "wow, im getting 12 culture" .. and also was in golden age so i was making a descent amount of culture!
 
You take it as a given that all cities will have build a world wonder?! What difficulty settings are we talking here?

Yes, pretty much so. It is fairly doable to build 4-5 wonders on Immortal when going for cultural victory. It is still possible to do Rationalism detour that you pointed out and finish slightly under 300 turns (standard, Pangaea for example), but that is never faster than taking Piety. RAs are powerful, and all you really need is Radio. Cristo usually shaves 10 or so turns of, hence, it's not really that decisive, imo.

Adept nations: Siam (City states), Persia (Golden ages), France (Early culture bonus), Ethiopia (fast Cathedrals), Austria (Coffee Houses), Aztec (Floating Gardens+early culture farming). Science oriented civs may also be good i imagine, although i never tried Babylon & Korea for culture.
 
-Getting your ass into the industrial era and complete Freedom as fast as possible with lot of landmarks into your capital is your first priority.

-Piety>Rationalism(this should be your 2nd completed tree)

Excepted for deity games. In these games, you want to destroy every civs that are attempting to win. Then you can think about winning culturally. If you don't do it, that's because you are playing a cheesy map like high sea level water maps. Expect the AI winning around 260-270. Just make sure to delay this timer. This is why Rationalism is better. You want to tech faster get stronger military techs and units and kick their asses first.

Either Tradition or Liberty are viable to start for culture games. Both have pros and cons but give overall same success. Try to aim for 1000+ cpt near the end for 270-280 turns games(can be lower if you finish Freedom pretty fast).
 
No chance for an 'honest' cultural victory on Deity, Tabarnak? :) I was really hoping it is possible on Pangaea, don't break my dream.
 
The cost per policy is dependent on number of cities, no? I would think with a wide empire, the culture increase from policy to policy would grow too steep to make the victory viable. I'm still playing King so perhaps at this difficulty level, the AI civs aren't creating large enough armies to crank culture via unit destruction.

In theory you could play small and quiet until industrial, and then finish a "cultural game" by going on a world wide city smashing spree.

If you Raze or Puppet cities, you incur no penalty to social policy costs.

On lower difficulties, it's possibly the fastest way to get a cultural victory, since each city you take will be between 20 and 100 ish culture. However I haven't really messed around with cultural victories or HOF games in a long time, so I wouldn't know what's truly faster.

On higher difficulties, I doubt you can get away with suddenly coming out swinging in the industrial era, or at least I don't think you could take cities fast enough to beat out the GP bonuses Freedom gets.
 
No chance for an 'honest' cultural victory on Deity, Tabarnak? :) I was really hoping it is possible on Pangaea, don't break my dream.

Alright i will be quiet for next days :lol:

Just tell me when your dream will be transformed into a nightmare :p
 
I should probably clarify:

You haven't played Montezuma until you've tried this strat. If you do it well, you end up sort of racing yourself to finish culture before you win a domination victory.

Lol the i have the greatest culture because everyone elses cities are smoking ruins victory
 
@ Le Roi Soloei: I'll try it I guess. It sounds very interesting. But I'll likely just go full warmonger and finish domination by that method. Skipping Piety and adopting Rationalism and Honor... this is too unique to pass up. I want to see when I can finish Utopia Project. But going for Autocracy is a bit... extreme. When's the optimal time to finish Rationalism? Honor? I'm also guessing you won't be getting any RAs either by being a warmonger so much unless you have Genghis Khan or somebody.

Freedom is unquestionably the better industrial age tree here. I was joking a bit by suggesting Autocracy. That would be just over the top, and I suspect you'd end up winning domination before you'd complete the dystopia project by going that route.

Rationalism should be opened as soon as it is available, because the opener is pretty good. After that, it depends on what you need. I find that finishing Honor in quick order is generally the best bet. The honor finisher is awesome if you're already planning to kill a bunch of units, and both of the end of line Honor policies are great.

Finish Rationalism when it will slingshot you to a new military tech that you want. I generally hold off and take Scientific Revolution last. As you said, being extremely warlike means not a lot of RAs, and I end up spending most of my (large) war chest on military, anyway. The killer policies in Rationalism for this strategy are Secularism and Free Thought (carpet over your puppets' tiles with trading posts), and you may want to open one or both of them before finishing Honor, depending on the situation. The others are ok, but are not a huge priority.

Other bits and pieces:

- build Alhambra. It is the perfect Wonder for this strategy.

- don't worry about religion. If you can, found a pantheon that either generates tile-based culture (Sacred Path is always a good one given Monty's start bias) or take Monument to the Gods for an early wonder boost, and then laugh when another religion replaces it because it's worthless after Classical, anyway.
 
In terms of the start, I go for Temple of Artemis - Pyramids - Hanging Gardens, and beeline the tech tree for the necessary techs to affect this. You should be able to always get the first two... hanging gardens requires a bit of luck.
The rationale: GE points.
Getting ToA and Pyramids early gives you the necessary GE points early enough that you can acquire the engineers to rush build the important culture wonders later. Having the engineers also enables you to spread the wonders across your cities to get the +33% culture modifier from the piety policy.
The other main thing to do in the opening phases is to settle your 3-4 cities asap. Don't OCC too long... it is better to quickly settle your cities. This can be hard to do in combination with building those early wonders, but is definitely possible!
 
A question that I have never been able to answer for myself: Do the national wonders meet the criteria for mandate of heaven? The text obviously reads world wonders, but I have never been able to answer for myself.

Being able to spread national wonders and thus spread the mandate of heaven bonus would obviously help improve the speed of culture games. And given how the new GP generation system stands, it can sometimes be difficult for culture civs to create a GE for each city needing a wonder for the SP bonus.
 
Going for cultural victory with Montezuma can be pretty amuzing, and is actually quite efficient when you get to the higher levels due to the number of enemy you will be facing and therefore the amount of culture you will suck from them. I'd say that the Aztecs are actually the easiest (and most fun) cultural civ starting at Immortal. Not sure about Emperor. There, it may still be France.

I'll suggest:

- Aztec
- Social policy progression: Tradition opener, Honor opener (you will get a lot of culture from killing Barbs in the early game), Legalism, followed by finishing Tradition and going down Honor until you reach Rationalism
- Tech: try to build the GL and then the Oracle. Terracotta Warriors comes a lot later than Stonehenge, which makes it not nearly as good. Do not prioritize, but grab it if it's there.
- Religion: whichever Pantheon belief best suits your start. The possibilities are too numerous to really discuss. Founder belief: World Church. This one is really underrated. Everybody loves Tithe, but World Church is basically the cultural equivalent. Follower Belief: Cathedrals. For the enhancer take one that spreads your religion faster, either initerant preachers or religious texts.

Do the obvious things like befriending cultural CSs, building Sistine Chapel, etc.

As Montezuma, you will want to conquer and puppet as much as you can. Simply the act of killing a lot of enemy units is extremely important for the Aztecs to keep the culture rolling in. Go forth and slaughter, spread your death cult over the whole world, build the dystopia project and swim in the blood of the unbelievers.

Inspired by this post, I tried your concept, on King difficulty though (I was a bit tired, so no Emperor for me). Standard sized fractal map, epic game speed. To cut the story short, i did win through domination victory in 1850s when I had completed only 4 social policy trees. All in all, i had 3 proper cities and countless puppets.

In my opinion, the culture boost through my Aztecian killing spree is only effective during the early stage of the game. And I was in war practically all the time. Second thing to note that after building my initial army, i did not use resources for military but for culture (luckily, I did not lose too many units). I got all the key cultural world wonders and was allied with most of the cultural city states. And so I'm a bit disappointed to myself, I guess that on higher difficulty levels one should get the cultural victory much earlier.

Maybe I did make some mistakes in choosing techs and social policies: I stuck too much on Honor tree instead of grabbing Rationalism ASAP. And then I stuck on Rationalism too long before switching to Freedom. Well, maybe i try again tomorrow...
 
Inspired by this post, I tried your concept, on King difficulty though (I was a bit tired, so no Emperor for me). Standard sized fractal map, epic game speed. To cut the story short, i did win through domination victory in 1850s when I had completed only 4 social policy trees. All in all, i had 3 proper cities and countless puppets.

In my opinion, the culture boost through my Aztecian killing spree is only effective during the early stage of the game. And I was in war practically all the time. Second thing to note that after building my initial army, i did not use resources for military but for culture (luckily, I did not lose too many units). I got all the key cultural world wonders and was allied with most of the cultural city states. And so I'm a bit disappointed by myself, I guess that on higher difficulty levels one should get the cultural victory much earlier.

Maybe I did make some mistakes in choosing techs and social policies: I stuck too much on Honor tree instead of grabbing Rationalism ASAP. And then I stuck on Rationalism too long before switching to Freedom. Well, maybe i try again tomorrow...

The Aztec UA works better the higher up the difficulty latter you go, because the AI will throw more and more units at you. At king, I'm not at all surprised that you'd win domination first. What you did with building a core army and then investing mostly in culture is the right way to do. The idea is to hit the midgame with a highly upgraded army with fast healing that can basically stay in constant contact with enemy forces and continually reap culture from doing so.

Getting the size and composition of this force right is tricky. You want to be small enough that the AI will DOW you (preserving your good relations with other AIs until you're ready to bite them), but big and highly promoted enough that you can grind through his units when he does. Ideally, you want a brutally bloody two-front defensive war through all of history. You want relatively few seige units because taking cities isn't your priority. You want relatively more cavalry type units which are good for helping you find and finish off the enemy.

You don't necessarily need to conquer a single other civ (though having a few puppets will help with science and gold, and a bit with culture), but remaining in constant contact is a must. If you simply overwhelm the AI, you have probably invested too much in military and won't be able to go fast enough through culture. Also, you may end up losing the race against yourself for domination victory, though at Immortal this is less likely because the AI can really pump out units.

This is never going to be the fastest way to a cultural victory, and at the lower levels you're probably almost always going to win domination first, but at least at Immortal, it is a viable way to win by culture and also protect yourself against the AI beating you with a spaceship or something. At Deity, I dunno. Deity is too much work for my taste regardless of the victory condition.

As far as the policies go, here is my relatively complete list of priorities:

Tradition
Legalism
Honor
...finish Tradition
...Honor until Rationalism opens (prioritize Discipline/Military Caste)
...Rationalism until Freedom opens (prioritize Secularism and Free Thought)
Freedom as soon as it opens and go straight through and finish it
...go back and work on Honor and Rationalism (timing the Rationalism finisher to slingshot you to a tech you need).
...take Liberty as your final policy

Simply not going straight down Freedom as soon as it opened likely explains a lot of your slowness in this case.

One thing I haven't experimented with yet is finishing Liberty (5th tree) before Honor or even before Rationalism. The free GP from the Liberty finisher is potentially extremely useful, but unfortunately not as your last policy.
 
The Aztec UA works better the higher up the difficulty latter you go, because the AI will throw more and more units at you. At king, I'm not at all surprised that you'd win domination first. What you did with building a core army and then investing mostly in culture is the right way to do. The idea is to hit the midgame with a highly upgraded army with fast healing that can basically stay in constant contact with enemy forces and continually reap culture from doing so.

Getting the size and composition of this force right is tricky. You want to be small enough that the AI will DOW you (preserving your good relations with other AIs until you're ready to bite them), but big and highly promoted enough that you can grind through his units when he does. Ideally, you want a brutally bloody two-front defensive war through all of history. You want relatively few seige units because taking cities isn't your priority. You want relatively more cavalry type units which are good for helping you find and finish off the enemy.

You don't necessarily need to conquer a single other civ (though having a few puppets will help with science and gold, and a bit with culture), but remaining in constant contact is a must. If you simply overwhelm the AI, you have probably invested too much in military and won't be able to go fast enough through culture. Also, you may end up losing the race against yourself for domination victory, though at Immortal this is less likely because the AI can really pump out units.

This is never going to be the fastest way to a cultural victory, and at the lower levels you're probably almost always going to win domination first, but at least at Immortal, it is a viable way to win by culture and also protect yourself against the AI beating you with a spaceship or something. At Deity, I dunno. Deity is too much work for my taste regardless of the victory condition.

As far as the policies go, here is my relatively complete list of priorities:

Tradition
Legalism
Honor
...finish Tradition
...Honor until Rationalism opens (prioritize Discipline/Military Caste)
...Rationalism until Freedom opens (prioritize Secularism and Free Thought)
Freedom as soon as it opens and go straight through and finish it
...go back and work on Honor and Rationalism (timing the Rationalism finisher to slingshot you to a tech you need).
...take Liberty as your final policy

Simply not going straight down Freedom as soon as it opened likely explains a lot of your slowness in this case.

One thing I haven't experimented with yet is finishing Liberty (5th tree) before Honor or even before Rationalism. The free GP from the Liberty finisher is potentially extremely useful, but unfortunately not as your last policy.

Thanks for your tips, much appreciated. I dont want to derail this thread by describing my game more in detail, so only two questions/comments:

First, for example, you get +20 culture by killing a melee unit at the industrial era if i remember right. For modern era, it was 25 (again, if somebody knows the exact numbers, please correct). In any case, you need thousands of culture for each social policy by this time, and so you would need to massacre countless units to make use of Aztects UA later in the game. I'm Emperor level player but still I imagine that you'd need to have pretty warlike neighbours to achieve such high killing frequency.

Second, why liberalism and not patronage/commerce (to get more cultural city states allied)? Is it because of "free" golden age and great person?
 
you wanna go tradition, piety, freedom as fast as possible. My personal strat is to get national college before expanding. the commerce/patronage final ones are less important and the decision there is more situation(honor can be subed in if your fighting alot) Religion is important and I usually try to get stonehenge early and get a solid culture or growth related pantheon belief. Temple of Artemis is also really handy especially if you can stack it with fertility rights. I usually get these victories with two or three cities. I would only go for this VC if you have some really bomb city locations. I have found that the civ is not the most important aspect of this win (the wonder you build are) but obviously ghandi/france/siam/etc. helps. The really essential wonders are Sistine Chapel, cristo redentor, Sidney Opera house. Other than those the minor cultural wonders/defensive wonders/and happiness wonders are good. High happiness is essential because half of it is rolled into culture from piety, so this makes keeping a few choice city states close even more important. The key is to not over extend, focus on keeping up in tech so you can snag relevant wonders.
 
@le roi I'm not sure deviating from a tradition hardline is the best call, the growth benefits from tradition for a small empire are so massive that I think they totally eclipse any potential benefit from honor. If you were playing raging barbs I could potentially see throwing a single point in [honor] before taking aristocracy and oligarchy as the middle of tradition is where the really meaty benefits are but then again you might need oligarchy if the barbs prove to great for your defenses
 
I'm curious how you guys rate Petra in culture games since no one has mentioned it here yet (I think). The 6 culture after archaeology and the free Amphitheater seem somewhat nice to me, especially with Sistine Chapel and Alhambra.
 
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