Demographic Screen Help....

What are the more important stats in the Demographic screen? I am always near the bottom in the Approval and near the top in Literacy & Population. I can easily win at the King level w/ Diplo and Science Victories? Can anyone point me to a easy explanation for a cultural victory? It's my understanding if Brazil, France or a religious civ (that spreads like crazy) than it is not possible?? Thanks

Most important stat for high level play is military, not that you're on the top but just that you're not on the bottom. I'm not sure what's most important for lower level play.

Approval is who has the most happiness. Disregard this. You only really care about whether your happiness is positive or negative. You could note who has the lowest approval and try to stifle their growth with negative happiness through resource denial, but there's much, much higher priorities. Could also factor into ideological city flips, but not a concern on King.

Literacy is how many techs each civ has. More easily tracked with EUI and even more easily with infoaddict.

Population is total number of invisible people living in your empire, not total number of citizens+specialists in your empire. This means a civ can have higher population but lower number of citizens; i.e. a civilization with one city at size 11 will have a much higher population than a civilization with 12 size 1 cities. High population leads to high research, which is why if the human player leads in research, they'll often lead in population.

What you should really take from the demographics screen is this, and note what's capitalized:

population + LAND + literacy - MILIARY = how much the AI wants to kill you

americanlt said:

Can anyone point me to a easy explanation for a cultural victory? It's my understanding if Brazil, France or a religious civ (that spreads like crazy) than it is not possible?? Thanks

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Here's a couple of fairly thorough guides:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=523375
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=501996

If you want a short, simple explanation:
You win CV when your tourism is very high, and it overtakes everyone else's culture. Consider tourism offense, and culture is defense.

Early in the game, you can get culture from great works. Later in the game, hotels and airports give you tourism from wonders, tile improvements like historical sites, and more from great works. International Games and the Internet both double your tourism output. Having open borders, a trade route, and/or a shared religion also boost tourism.

Great musicians can give a large one-time tourism boost, but the amount is 10x your current tourism output, so I try to avoid generating them until I have a lot of tourism already going.

You can win cv peacefully by digging up a lot of artifacts, building wonders and whatnot, or you can win cv aggressively by attacking others and taking their wonders and artifacts. If you want to win cv and you see an ai with tons of culture (often Brazil or France), it's best to attack them and take all their wonders and great works.

Thanks. And what about the score?? I am rarely the highest. Usually the 2nd highest.

americanlt said:

Thanks. And what about the score?? I am rarely the highest. Usually the 2nd highest.

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Irrelevant. Score represents a ranking among the active players based on their amount of population, land, military, religion, wonders, technology and a few other attributes.
On Deity, I'm usually ranked 3rd or 4th... on the turn that I won the game. Occasionally 2nd, but only two or three times was I ranked first when I won.

The things that boost your score don't necessarily help you win, so as a figure it's pretty useless. For example wonders will inflate your score regardless of whether they're of any use to you or not.

americanlt said:

What are the more important stats in the Demographic screen? I am always near the bottom in the Approval and near the top in Literacy & Population. I can easily win at the King level w/ Diplo and Science Victories? Can anyone point me to a easy explanation for a cultural victory? It's my understanding if Brazil, France or a religious civ (that spreads like crazy) than it is not possible?? Thanks

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I can at least begin the discussion on the second part of your question.
On king you should be able to win a culture victory even over Brazil and France or a nation using religion/
The key will be to tech fast so that you get to the internet first but often you can win before that. So even if you will try for a culture win making sure you get a good science start is important. You will need to work the rationalism social policy tree (at least 3 policies into it) as well as the aesthetics tree. You need to focus on tourism to win. It is really a tourism victory. So build your guilds and wonders for great works. Try to get to archaeology first to get to as many sites as possible. Micromanage your great works in your buildings so that you get maximum culture out of them. Try to pass all the culture friendly decisions in the World Congress. Build hotels and airports.

liv said:

The key will be to tech fast so that you get to the internet first but often you can win before that.

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This spells it out pretty well. A trick that works pretty well on lower difficulty levels is to achieve some key technologies before the AI gets the culture tech that helps counter the tourism. The prime example is Archaeology and Refrigeration. While archaeology is a moderate tourism buff, I find the AI's culture defense really takes off once they acquire it and get some artifacts and landmarks up. Hotels give a massive boost to tourism which helps you progress against the increased culture. However, on lower levels if you can get your hotels before they can get archeologists, and then war-bribe them when they do get to the industrial era so they're making rifles instead of archaeologists, you can wrap the game up before even reaching the atomic era.
Hotels vs. landmarks/artifacts is like shooting at a bulletproof vest. Hotels before landmarks/artifacts is like shooting at a t-shirt.

This is one of the reasons why civs like Babylon and Korea are just about as good at tourism victories as Brazil and France (or any other victory condition for that matter.)

The things that matter on the demo screen are manufactured goods and crop yield. In reality, crop yield plus approval rating is a better way to gauge scientific competitiveness than is literacy rate. Manufactured goods is more important to consider when entering war than military is, though it is true the AI is foolish and doesn't use production well. Manufactured goods is also important because it tells you what buildings and wonders you can afford to denote production to. Early game, checking manufactured goods against GDP can tell what tiles your enemies are working in their capitals, and what kinds of things you can therefore afford to build. For example, if you are in a game with five others and have the highest production with 10 and the average at 6, then you know you're the only one working any production other than base. You can then cross reference this against GDP; if you are at 3 and the average is fairly higher, it can be assumed your enemies are working other tiles besides production.

And score is only important in the early game, to check who builds certain wonders, when others found their cities, who has a costal cap, etc. If your neighbor is lowest in military and production, it's an indicator as to what to focus on, as it is when your neighbor is highest on military and production.

Probably the significance of demographics ordered most important to least important are as follows:
Manufactured goods
Crop yield
Military
GDP
Land
Approval
Literacy
Population

Population and literacy are at the bottom because they are deceiving in that what they appear to measure is not what they actually measure; population does not tell actual population, and literacy has very little to do with measuring an opponent's actual practical science. Approval rating only has use in measuring when an opponent's growth will be curved, and land is not entirely relevant because typically if someone's actual size in terms of border growth is an issue then most likely you can see it from your own lands. Meanwhile, production, food, and gold reflect directly to the screen, and can be used to gauge how safe rushing wonders or settles is in comparison to opposing resource allocation. And military is just a temporary measurement of actual power, albeit a pretty important one to know when a sneak attack is coming.