CULTURAL Victory!

Space Race, Space Race, I'm tired of Space Race victories!

I was determined to win through culture, and found a cultural victory is nowhere near as easy as it was in Civ III. You must use artist specialists, crippling three of your cities for some 300 years to do nothing but art (and buy them all the culture-generating wonders you can, then set them to build culture when there are no more culture-generating buildings/wonders/projects to build).

I was open to a diplo victory, but unfortunately started being too loose with my technologies (I was waaaay ahead) and eventually Washington started getting into the space race and nearly won. I quickly assembled a strike team (I did not maintain much of a military) to take out their capital, hoping that would destroy their spaceship. It didn't, but they didn't build any more of their spaceship, I guess because they were focused too much on retailiation. I knocked Washington's #2 score down a bit (me being #1 of course!), and the other AIs suddenly leapt at the opportunity, with 3 or 4 lower-ranked AIs taking him on until one of them supplanted him for the #2 spot.

It started really getting down to the timer, and I crammed ... I took my sci down to 10% (I coulda done 0, I suppose, as I was just doing future techs) and 80% culture. My score was paltry, probably because it took me until 2014 to win by culture.

75,000 culture x 3 cities is a lot of work! My last city I wound up pumping out over 550 culture/turn doing all I could. I was hoping I'd get another GA to help fight, but it didn't happen.

As a side effect, of course, I got about 10 cities from various AIs in culture flips, heh. Whomever said its impossible to get large AI cities to culture flip didn't try very hard, my very first game -- even though I lost -- I got size 15+ cities flipping left and right through solid culture.

Anyhoo ... I've tried to skim the titles, I heard several others trying to do a cultural victory ..... am I the first to succeed?

Try spreading as much religions as possible in your cities and build their temples to construct those cathedrals, mosques and all the other +50% culture buildings in your three legendary cities. If you get early or even midgame great artists let them settle down in those citites instead of making great works. Together with the freedom of speech civic I got a +350% culture bonus in my weakest legendary city. A settled great artist alone gave me 14 * 4.5 = 63 culture per turn. The base value of 14 is due to having the sixtine chapel, which also seems to be one of the more important wonders to achieve cultural victory.

The strongest culture rate was above 800/turn with only 10% of my treasury and no production going into culture.

I think those religious big temple buildings are the key to a cultural victory. With them it's much easier to achieve a cultural victory in Civ IV than a 20K in Civ III. Although I have to admit, that this was only noble difficulty and I had no problem to build nearly every culture generating wonder except the Oracle.

edit: Needless to say, that you should prefer getting great artists and perhaps great engineers (I guess engineers could prove more valuable on higher difficulties) before any other type of great person.

Yeah, I've won two cultural victories, both on the Earth map provided (nice map!). One was as China -- I won in 1932 with a score around 10,000 (Prince). The other was with Egypt. I won in 1815 with a score around 15,000 (Monarch). As the other poster mentioned, the big trick is to spread religion around as much as possible, build temples and then use those to build cathedrals in all of your cities. To maximize this you want at least 12 cities, so that each can have a temple, thus giving you three cathedrals for each religion.

I'm starting a game now on the Earth18 map that was linked to from the front page (same map but with all 18 civilizations). I'm playing as the Arabs.

-- The Hypnotoad

It depends on the mapsize how many temples per cathedral you need. Standard is three, on tiny it's two. I don't know the exact values for each size.

I want to try to get a cultural victory next game, but how many cultural points does a city need to be legendary on standard map size and standard speed? (It is only dependent on game speed, isn't it?)

My cultural victory was on standard speed... I think the Pangea map may have been just one step down from Huge though... needed 50000 culture points in three cities. Took 3 temples to make the 'cathedral' building for each religion. You should be careful with National Wonder building as those can be very very handy too... managed to get all three cities to 50000 within 3 turns of each other around 1930. (this was on Noble, no idea if diff. level changes culture needed)