Ok lets' hash this reply. First I'm going to confront you and say that you didn't win by culture but by warmongering. If you remove all highest culture civs from the map, ofc culture victory is going to work, even if you have subpar TPT. Realistically though, the SS I shown in the first few replies shows my great musicians doing over 10k tourism and late game GMs is the obvious key factor to both earliest turn to victory and dealing with culture runaway AIs.
I won my first CV as Nebu yesterday against a deity Shaka running away like Usain Bolt, he had 2000 score vs 1600 mine and 1400 of Seuliman, he killed Seuliman and got up to 2400.
He got the lead in teching because I had 10 cities and the 5% penalty per city is just too much.
Ok, how did you get 10 cities attempting a peaceful culture victory? Were they all founded cities? If so, how much did you crook the settings...
Ofc, if you reduce the number of AIs on the map to expand more, there are significantly less chances of multiple or even a single AI culture runaway that requires a hefty tourism bump. My strategy is generic to overcome that big issue of culture runaways AIs.
At first he was winning the CV, but then I did the following:
- become Congress host, World Religion (+50% tourism)
- OB, trade, diplomat in his capital
- beeline Radio, World Ideology
- bulbed 3 musicians for 3k tourism each
- OP order tenet that gives +34% tourism vs less happy civs
After this I catched up and surpassed him by a full tier.
He was now getting more tourism up to catch up, but I led a gigantic assault to hit capital and blew it up.
The concept behind the strat I proposed, is that you should win the game within only a few turns after teching the internet. You shouldn't need to catch up based on your TPT from the internet on. As such, the net tourism benefits from the GMs alone as explained 5-6 posts ago provided by the freedom tree significantly outweights the 2 tourism benefits in order. On top of that, most civs take order and thus they won't get their happiness hurt by your tourism pressure as you pressure...their ideology. So effectively achieving more happiness than a deity AI is quite difficult if you chose order...
Policies: Picked Liberty to collective because I needed to expand FAST due to nearby Austria before they started backstabbing.
Then back to Tradition+free garrisoned units for GPT/border expansion.
Full patronage. Yes, I wanted to OWN the congress.
2-3 mandatory rationalism policies.
You can own the congress without full patronage easily with freedom. Treaty Organization+Arsenal of Democracy make it a complete joke to retain CSs. You hardly need any gold anymore.
Then just Order.
Freedom is better for culture? Maybe. Listen up.
+production from Order tenet basically DOUBLED my production. I could spam all culture buildings, tons of units to lead the military game, EASY WONDERS.
Then I got the tenet that gives +34% tourism vs civs with less happiness.
That tenet is OP for CV, once it kicked in he fell a full tier of influence behind.
If the 2 production SPs nearly doubled your production, there is something wrong with how tall you grew your cities. Mines and Quaries should be doing roughly 4 HPT at this stage of the game and +1 per is a 25% improvement. So for the +3 grand total production per city to make it up to the extra 75% improvement to double your production, your city would've had to produce...like...4 hammers total each.
However, there is a value in order to pair both the slight science and production increases to help complete a few leftover wonders and to attain The Internet slightly earlier. Sadly, neither of these will give you the 5k increase to your 4 late game GMs of having the freedom +34% to broadcast towers (see post above). It would have to improve your science so much that you can achieve TI at least 10 turns earlier. Luckily, the New Deal tenet in freedom really offsets the science gain from order and the culture increase from landmarks also improve your base TPT and thus your GM strength.
The capital bonus TPT from a single landmarks' +4 culture is
4*(200%)*(284%) = 22.72 or roughly 225 more strength to each musician per capital landmark, about 150 for satellite cities. About 90 per other cities' landmark.
The +4 science per settled GS will come up roughly equal to the science gained from order put aside the 25% bonus from factories.
Wonders:
- Angkor + Hangin' (built late, everyone ignored them)
- Hagia (GE'd)
- Partenon, Colossus (conquered)
- Broadway (hardbuilt inside captured Vienna)
- Globe Theater (hardbuilt inside captured Washington).
I wanted to build more, and would definitely have gotten all the future wonders for myself due to crazy hammers, but I won before I was able to.
Things I did wrong:
1) Delayed building schools too long. Don't do this. Also no Observatory available, meh.
2) Built both Writer/Artist guild in capital. NEVER DO THIS. Just place every guild in one different city. It drains your capital too much, I only managed to save this mistake later by going Order.
Any leftover wonder that you can hard build without missing on infrastructure is worth doing as it will eventually turn into 3-4 culture and thus 22 or so base tourism in the capital. However, had you gone less wide and more tall from the start, you would've caught up much earlier in tech and been able to afford hard building other wonders sometime through renaissance.
TPT in the 300s is extremely low for end game deity CV so I really stand by my first paragraph when I say that you have effectively won by domination far more than culture. Your strategy was thus effectively good in your situation but definitely not a generic way to win culture peacefully...
I love the cultural system in BNW so this definitely helps.
. It is highly civ-bias dependant. For instance, I rarely need to restart a map as the Incans.