Deau
Emperor
Hi all,
First, I want to apologize if this reads as a Wall-of-text. I needed to put my ideas out to the world to both get feedback and to read it myself. I will try to iterate on this guide over the next few weeks unless someone else comes up with a better guide. I have been somewhat busy since release but I have mostly focused on culture victory games. This thread will present an overall guide, at this point still seriously up for discussion more than anything, as well as some topics I would like to discuss/share to try and find solutions around.
Setup: CV is extremely capital-centric but does not have significant drawbacks to going wider, for so long as you can eventually take a slight tech lead around renaissance to hit some game-breaking wonders. My first attempt setup was 2-city as Morocco, which failed miserably for a point I will discuss below (I bailed as diplo at T282). The second game, went 3-city as Shoshone and resulted in a T271 victory which, due to the shear nature of my game, could've probably ended around T245 since no AI had really put out any worthwhile culture.
My first comment is that this victory type is hardly achievable without at least a solid capital city. Mostly because you would optimally want to run all 3 guilds there as you would have both a garden and the national epic. If you can get a second city with solid growth and average or weak hammers, you can always consider that city as your guild hub and just purchase/skip other infrastructure.
What's important to understand about CV, is that the amount of tourism output by super late game Great Musician concerts (after The Internet) is so godly OP that you will want to both focus science all along AND try to hoard roughly 5000 faith from industrial until the internet. In my last game, I purchased 3 GM and timed a GM pop the turn I teched The Internet. They were each worth a whooping 10500 tourism. At that time, my total tourism pressure to most neighbor was roughly 16k.
Wonder Priority:
Pisa(hard built) > Louvre > Uffizi > Broadway. All of these should be achievable at the current AI tech pace on deity. Use Pisa's GE to catch Uffizi. The reason why Louvre and Uffizi are preferred is because they can host Artifacts which are fairly easy to obtain, unlike GAMW. Broadway is one exception because it is quite achievable, since it will always be your first tech in modern era, to pop a natural GM shortly after teching and then another one quite later but before hitting atomic era.
In general, you should also have no issue hard building PT over 20-25 turns in a satellite city after opening Rationalism since the AI seems to just never take rationalism...
Other wonders
I recommend not to bother at all with the Parthenon, if anything, the Oracle will boost your game more at this point in time and help you achieve other techs for far more important wonders earlier. The Sistine Chapel is also great to hard build, quite more than the globe theater because it can host artifacts. However, due to tech path discussed below, Globe Theater can be a viable hard build. Eiffel tower is worth hard building and even GE rush if you happen to have one pop around that time or expect to achieve more than the 5k faith by Internet and can faith purchase a GE.
Tech order:
Pottery (writing) -> AH+Sailing or Mining depending on AI proximity and whether you have a worker and mining lux -> other lux tech -> currency if you have a petra worth start, philosophy
otherwise. From there it's a succession of beelines
Education
Printing Press
Architechture
Scientific Theory
Archeology*
*Upon learning Archeology, you basically want to shift all of your cities to spam building archeologists. You can steal one artifact per neighbor with little diplo consequence. 2 Will likely drop you a notch so its safe to do 2 on AIs that are far away and not in a DoF as you don't want to lose RA partners. It is a great time to use those ancient/classical era units to move atop neutral/CS/within your own territory sites to cover them from enemy AIs stealing your artifacts. It can even be done in Open Border territories to ensure you can at least steal 1 from each neighbor. You will want to pick, from outside your territory, 2 per city for museums, at least 2 for the louvre and then however many "arts" slots you have left and won't fill with Great Artists before the end of the game. Anything within 3 tiles of any of your city should be converted to a landmark unless you are at risk not to achieve The Louvre's bonus without it.
Afterwards comes another wave of Beelines that is quite similar to that of Science victory.
Radio
Refrigeration
Plastics
Radar
Satellites if you are almost guaranteed to be able to build hubble as the techs pays itself off AND you deny another AI from launching.
The Internet
How to use the World Congress:
The most potent hard to achieve proposal is for your religion to be world religion. However, it comes with much diplo penalty and is quite hard to achieve. As such, you will want to delay it as one of your last 2 proposals, once CSs are worth at least one vote and you own many of them. For safety, especially if the AI alternate proposal is "" (aka AI will rather deny your religion than enact the other pick), you will want to trade GPT or lump gold for 3 votes to any/all possible AIs where you have a Diplomat.
A very easy proposal that should be done as your first possible pick, is the GAMW+33% with -33% GE/GS/GM (Art Funding). This has a double effect of slowing the pace of the game, effectively increasing the time you can spare to hard build wonders, as well as reduce the number of GE-rushed wonders etc. etc. and it is, at least up to my current experience, extremely easy to achieve. More often than not, all AIs will be favorable to both that and the reverse proposal because they see it as a bonus regardless on their strategy.
Internaltional Projects. World's fair is ok but there are plenty of infrastructure and wonders during renaissance/industrial/early modern not to intentionally propose it. On top of it, if you only run OCC/2city, if you happen to get it up at the same time as the International games, it will allow you to focus 100% on international game and hopefully steal 1st place.
However, the real strength of the International Games is if you can delay it such that the 20 turns bonus still applies once you have researched The Internet. This is somewhat out of your control to achieve but leaving other go-to bonus proposals to AIs (e.g. not proposing world fair early) will help you get the most out of the 20 turns buff.
Cultural Heritage Site as well as Historical Landmarks are better off delayed until after Airports, possibly even skipped as they are, early in the game, only helping all AIs runaway in culture making it significantly more difficult for you to great-musician "bulb" through their absurd culture. This was a mistake I had done in my morocco game where Ghandi had 80k culture and Pacal had 70k around turn 300 or so making it absolutely impossible for me to bulb through both of them.
World Ideology. While this appears designed for CV, it really isn't. Trying to force the world to all convert to Freedom will generally only lead to spam DoWs and no AIs effectively adopting Freedom. This in turn means no open border bonus, no trade route bonus, no diplomat bonus aka it plays completely against culture victory. This is far more a thing for wide warmongerer empires hoping to convert a few extra cities by the shear raw pressure. I'm afraid they may need to tune this proposal to make it worthwhile for anything that getting DoWed across the board or getting easy DoFs with people minded alike.
SP Plan
Full tradition
Patronage left side to scholasticism, don't bother with consulates unless there are many faith CSs and you are far below 50 FPT mark to reasonably achieve 5k faith between industrial and the internet.
Aesthetic open+cultural centers. Delay everything else until you have at least 6 Freedom tenets.
Exploration Opener - The Louvre is simply a MUST (this was written as typical Pangaea game, it may be worth investing more into the tree for watery maps obviously)
Rationalism Opener + Secularism. Since you are growing many tall cities and will be working many specialists, secularism is very strong. However, since the revamp of the tree, it would only be worth investing more than those 2 points if you have outstanding culture flow. My T271 victory I ended up with 750 CPT and didn't spare 2 rationalism SP. I would generally consider 2-3 points in Piety early or Consulates over spending more in rationalism.
Tenets - Order is somewhat situational but here's my current generic approach
Freedom
T1 Avant Garde > Civil Society > most others
T2 New Deal > Arsenal of democracy > Universal Sufferage
T3 Media Culture > Treaty Organization
If the game is expected to be short and you have decent gold/existing CS alliances, you will only need 6 tenets. However, Treaty Organization is extremely powerful and it becomes your go-to solution (easy diplomacy victory) if you are stuck with 2 crazy culture runaway AIs that you can't GM bulb through. The sad thing is that this will more often than not lead to an earlier turn to victory than culture
. But hey, it's always fun to see a size 23 city from a neutral civ across the map convert to you from their unhappiness. If only they had realized that 23 turns of a useless city in the super late game with a 5% science backfire actually slows you up. I sold it for 110gpt to a DoFed friend that was not at war with him.
While Aesthetics yells for CV, it is honestly not necessary to fill the tree until the very late game. You only need to open it and possible get the production increase so that all your cities can benefit from it for opera house and maybe even amphitheaters since there's no point building those too early in satellite cities.
Religion
As stated, you will need roughly 5k faith between industrial and the internet. Anything well above that is outstanding because it means either extra GE rushes or, possibly if you can reach 120+ FPT, you can achieve 10k faith for 4musicians and 1 GE. This is actually achievable from another AIs' religion. Sadly however, you need to have a religion for the World Congress proposal of +50% tourism in your capital, as such, the best religion picks are along the lines of:
FPT Pantheon
Pilgrimage
Cathedrals (for extra artifacts slots)
Religious Arts or Divine Inspiration. If you can't achieve at least 50FPT with everything else, DI should be prefered over RA.
Mosques>Pagodas or Monasteries>Religious Communities
RT>IP>RU - RU is somewhat situational, but if you are surrounded by many CSs and have extremely aggressive other AIs on the map, going RU will generally provide better pilgrimage benefits than both RT and IP. This is because you are basically guaranteed to retain the 2FPT from pilgrimage for all the nearby CSs whereas the other2 could very well be out pressured by crazy spreaders. Also, "erratics" spreaders hit civs but not CSs making RU a great pick. (like in my last game, Ashurbanipal hit 5th religion and spammed about 10 GPs throughout and was target-spreading holy cities and some 2nd/3rd cities from other civs without any actual spreading strategy just negating the city from their religion for 30 or so turns).
Should you, for whatever reason, go full piety (can be potent at lower difficulties where the tourism from the reformation bonus is really strong), then Messiah becomes a great alternative as each holy site will produce 7 culture in the late game with the appropriate world congress proposal. It is an actual somewhat viable alternate approach. The downside is that it doesn't give you nearly as many alternative victory condition availible against multiple runaway culture AIs as there can be on higher difficulties.
Culture Specialist Allocation. There is one important mistake to avoid here. Don't work the GM slot 24/7 upon building. You will want only 1-2 musicians pre modern era and time a GM shortly after teching Radio. This is in order to achieve the Broadway Theming Bonus. With the free GM it provides being in modern, it is important that you can produce enough GPP from start to end of modern era to generate 2 great musicians. You will also want to be able to time the next GM after Broadway theming bonus is achieved immediately after teching the Internet (1 turn after as the great person spawns before the tech in the turn-order). I find the safest spot is to only build one GM pre modern. However, with the appropriate Enact (+33%), SP+Tenet+Garden+National Epic, 2 GM pre radio is very easy to achieve and allow to time the 5th with The Internet without having to remove the specialists well ahead.
Special considerations for CV:
It isn't exactly possible to control culture spamming AIs from doing so other than merely purchasing their culture CSs. This means that it is possible, in a given game, for multiple "runaway cultural AIs" to coexist. This is extremely rough to counter within reasonable turn-to-victory. As such, it is really recommended to have an alternate game plan. Because of the mix of 2 tenets, Diplomacy victory is the obvious easy alternative. However, achieving so many SPs and Tenets, in the current frame where rationalism isn't prohibited to culture victory, actually allows for a change of plans around Teching Plastics which, at this point, you've really only delayed tech order by archeology and are still on par for a good turn-to-victory science. The gold-purchase spaceship part T3 tenet will also allow you to recuperate another 3-5 turns, obviously depending on your capital's production output. Not only that, but even domination is still availible. Mostly because the current deity AI is a joke and should be lagged behind 5% in tech at least so you can rape the world with bombers and cavs. This is not necessarily so much an option with watery maps though.
TODO:
Present base TPT scaling in the late game. Discuss the strength and weight of Great Musicians (10*base TPT at spawn). Come up with some rough mats of how much stronger say just 2 late games faith GM are over a non-FPT oriented religion strategy (no pilgrimage/DI) for the low-difficulty reformation bonus oriented strategy.
*I have skipped the build order opener. It will very likely fall into the typical 1-4 city tradition opener. However, as I am still iterating on this and Budweiser hasn't updated his guide yet, I might add a section with my personal approach later once I have iterated on it enough to be confident that it's generic enough.
*edit fixed copy/paste alignment errors
*edit added TODO
*edit added Shoshone OP initial save
First, I want to apologize if this reads as a Wall-of-text. I needed to put my ideas out to the world to both get feedback and to read it myself. I will try to iterate on this guide over the next few weeks unless someone else comes up with a better guide. I have been somewhat busy since release but I have mostly focused on culture victory games. This thread will present an overall guide, at this point still seriously up for discussion more than anything, as well as some topics I would like to discuss/share to try and find solutions around.
Setup: CV is extremely capital-centric but does not have significant drawbacks to going wider, for so long as you can eventually take a slight tech lead around renaissance to hit some game-breaking wonders. My first attempt setup was 2-city as Morocco, which failed miserably for a point I will discuss below (I bailed as diplo at T282). The second game, went 3-city as Shoshone and resulted in a T271 victory which, due to the shear nature of my game, could've probably ended around T245 since no AI had really put out any worthwhile culture.
My first comment is that this victory type is hardly achievable without at least a solid capital city. Mostly because you would optimally want to run all 3 guilds there as you would have both a garden and the national epic. If you can get a second city with solid growth and average or weak hammers, you can always consider that city as your guild hub and just purchase/skip other infrastructure.
What's important to understand about CV, is that the amount of tourism output by super late game Great Musician concerts (after The Internet) is so godly OP that you will want to both focus science all along AND try to hoard roughly 5000 faith from industrial until the internet. In my last game, I purchased 3 GM and timed a GM pop the turn I teched The Internet. They were each worth a whooping 10500 tourism. At that time, my total tourism pressure to most neighbor was roughly 16k.
Wonder Priority:
Pisa(hard built) > Louvre > Uffizi > Broadway. All of these should be achievable at the current AI tech pace on deity. Use Pisa's GE to catch Uffizi. The reason why Louvre and Uffizi are preferred is because they can host Artifacts which are fairly easy to obtain, unlike GAMW. Broadway is one exception because it is quite achievable, since it will always be your first tech in modern era, to pop a natural GM shortly after teching and then another one quite later but before hitting atomic era.
In general, you should also have no issue hard building PT over 20-25 turns in a satellite city after opening Rationalism since the AI seems to just never take rationalism...
Other wonders
I recommend not to bother at all with the Parthenon, if anything, the Oracle will boost your game more at this point in time and help you achieve other techs for far more important wonders earlier. The Sistine Chapel is also great to hard build, quite more than the globe theater because it can host artifacts. However, due to tech path discussed below, Globe Theater can be a viable hard build. Eiffel tower is worth hard building and even GE rush if you happen to have one pop around that time or expect to achieve more than the 5k faith by Internet and can faith purchase a GE.
Tech order:
Pottery (writing) -> AH+Sailing or Mining depending on AI proximity and whether you have a worker and mining lux -> other lux tech -> currency if you have a petra worth start, philosophy
otherwise. From there it's a succession of beelines
Education
Printing Press
Architechture
Scientific Theory
Archeology*
*Upon learning Archeology, you basically want to shift all of your cities to spam building archeologists. You can steal one artifact per neighbor with little diplo consequence. 2 Will likely drop you a notch so its safe to do 2 on AIs that are far away and not in a DoF as you don't want to lose RA partners. It is a great time to use those ancient/classical era units to move atop neutral/CS/within your own territory sites to cover them from enemy AIs stealing your artifacts. It can even be done in Open Border territories to ensure you can at least steal 1 from each neighbor. You will want to pick, from outside your territory, 2 per city for museums, at least 2 for the louvre and then however many "arts" slots you have left and won't fill with Great Artists before the end of the game. Anything within 3 tiles of any of your city should be converted to a landmark unless you are at risk not to achieve The Louvre's bonus without it.
Afterwards comes another wave of Beelines that is quite similar to that of Science victory.
Radio
Refrigeration
Plastics
Radar
Satellites if you are almost guaranteed to be able to build hubble as the techs pays itself off AND you deny another AI from launching.
The Internet
How to use the World Congress:
The most potent hard to achieve proposal is for your religion to be world religion. However, it comes with much diplo penalty and is quite hard to achieve. As such, you will want to delay it as one of your last 2 proposals, once CSs are worth at least one vote and you own many of them. For safety, especially if the AI alternate proposal is "" (aka AI will rather deny your religion than enact the other pick), you will want to trade GPT or lump gold for 3 votes to any/all possible AIs where you have a Diplomat.
A very easy proposal that should be done as your first possible pick, is the GAMW+33% with -33% GE/GS/GM (Art Funding). This has a double effect of slowing the pace of the game, effectively increasing the time you can spare to hard build wonders, as well as reduce the number of GE-rushed wonders etc. etc. and it is, at least up to my current experience, extremely easy to achieve. More often than not, all AIs will be favorable to both that and the reverse proposal because they see it as a bonus regardless on their strategy.
Internaltional Projects. World's fair is ok but there are plenty of infrastructure and wonders during renaissance/industrial/early modern not to intentionally propose it. On top of it, if you only run OCC/2city, if you happen to get it up at the same time as the International games, it will allow you to focus 100% on international game and hopefully steal 1st place.
However, the real strength of the International Games is if you can delay it such that the 20 turns bonus still applies once you have researched The Internet. This is somewhat out of your control to achieve but leaving other go-to bonus proposals to AIs (e.g. not proposing world fair early) will help you get the most out of the 20 turns buff.
Cultural Heritage Site as well as Historical Landmarks are better off delayed until after Airports, possibly even skipped as they are, early in the game, only helping all AIs runaway in culture making it significantly more difficult for you to great-musician "bulb" through their absurd culture. This was a mistake I had done in my morocco game where Ghandi had 80k culture and Pacal had 70k around turn 300 or so making it absolutely impossible for me to bulb through both of them.
World Ideology. While this appears designed for CV, it really isn't. Trying to force the world to all convert to Freedom will generally only lead to spam DoWs and no AIs effectively adopting Freedom. This in turn means no open border bonus, no trade route bonus, no diplomat bonus aka it plays completely against culture victory. This is far more a thing for wide warmongerer empires hoping to convert a few extra cities by the shear raw pressure. I'm afraid they may need to tune this proposal to make it worthwhile for anything that getting DoWed across the board or getting easy DoFs with people minded alike.
SP Plan
Full tradition
Patronage left side to scholasticism, don't bother with consulates unless there are many faith CSs and you are far below 50 FPT mark to reasonably achieve 5k faith between industrial and the internet.
Aesthetic open+cultural centers. Delay everything else until you have at least 6 Freedom tenets.
Exploration Opener - The Louvre is simply a MUST (this was written as typical Pangaea game, it may be worth investing more into the tree for watery maps obviously)
Rationalism Opener + Secularism. Since you are growing many tall cities and will be working many specialists, secularism is very strong. However, since the revamp of the tree, it would only be worth investing more than those 2 points if you have outstanding culture flow. My T271 victory I ended up with 750 CPT and didn't spare 2 rationalism SP. I would generally consider 2-3 points in Piety early or Consulates over spending more in rationalism.
Tenets - Order is somewhat situational but here's my current generic approach
Freedom
T1 Avant Garde > Civil Society > most others
T2 New Deal > Arsenal of democracy > Universal Sufferage
T3 Media Culture > Treaty Organization
If the game is expected to be short and you have decent gold/existing CS alliances, you will only need 6 tenets. However, Treaty Organization is extremely powerful and it becomes your go-to solution (easy diplomacy victory) if you are stuck with 2 crazy culture runaway AIs that you can't GM bulb through. The sad thing is that this will more often than not lead to an earlier turn to victory than culture
. But hey, it's always fun to see a size 23 city from a neutral civ across the map convert to you from their unhappiness. If only they had realized that 23 turns of a useless city in the super late game with a 5% science backfire actually slows you up. I sold it for 110gpt to a DoFed friend that was not at war with him.While Aesthetics yells for CV, it is honestly not necessary to fill the tree until the very late game. You only need to open it and possible get the production increase so that all your cities can benefit from it for opera house and maybe even amphitheaters since there's no point building those too early in satellite cities.
Religion
As stated, you will need roughly 5k faith between industrial and the internet. Anything well above that is outstanding because it means either extra GE rushes or, possibly if you can reach 120+ FPT, you can achieve 10k faith for 4musicians and 1 GE. This is actually achievable from another AIs' religion. Sadly however, you need to have a religion for the World Congress proposal of +50% tourism in your capital, as such, the best religion picks are along the lines of:
FPT Pantheon
Pilgrimage
Cathedrals (for extra artifacts slots)
Religious Arts or Divine Inspiration. If you can't achieve at least 50FPT with everything else, DI should be prefered over RA.
Mosques>Pagodas or Monasteries>Religious Communities
RT>IP>RU - RU is somewhat situational, but if you are surrounded by many CSs and have extremely aggressive other AIs on the map, going RU will generally provide better pilgrimage benefits than both RT and IP. This is because you are basically guaranteed to retain the 2FPT from pilgrimage for all the nearby CSs whereas the other2 could very well be out pressured by crazy spreaders. Also, "erratics" spreaders hit civs but not CSs making RU a great pick. (like in my last game, Ashurbanipal hit 5th religion and spammed about 10 GPs throughout and was target-spreading holy cities and some 2nd/3rd cities from other civs without any actual spreading strategy just negating the city from their religion for 30 or so turns).
Should you, for whatever reason, go full piety (can be potent at lower difficulties where the tourism from the reformation bonus is really strong), then Messiah becomes a great alternative as each holy site will produce 7 culture in the late game with the appropriate world congress proposal. It is an actual somewhat viable alternate approach. The downside is that it doesn't give you nearly as many alternative victory condition availible against multiple runaway culture AIs as there can be on higher difficulties.
Culture Specialist Allocation. There is one important mistake to avoid here. Don't work the GM slot 24/7 upon building. You will want only 1-2 musicians pre modern era and time a GM shortly after teching Radio. This is in order to achieve the Broadway Theming Bonus. With the free GM it provides being in modern, it is important that you can produce enough GPP from start to end of modern era to generate 2 great musicians. You will also want to be able to time the next GM after Broadway theming bonus is achieved immediately after teching the Internet (1 turn after as the great person spawns before the tech in the turn-order). I find the safest spot is to only build one GM pre modern. However, with the appropriate Enact (+33%), SP+Tenet+Garden+National Epic, 2 GM pre radio is very easy to achieve and allow to time the 5th with The Internet without having to remove the specialists well ahead.
Special considerations for CV:
It isn't exactly possible to control culture spamming AIs from doing so other than merely purchasing their culture CSs. This means that it is possible, in a given game, for multiple "runaway cultural AIs" to coexist. This is extremely rough to counter within reasonable turn-to-victory. As such, it is really recommended to have an alternate game plan. Because of the mix of 2 tenets, Diplomacy victory is the obvious easy alternative. However, achieving so many SPs and Tenets, in the current frame where rationalism isn't prohibited to culture victory, actually allows for a change of plans around Teching Plastics which, at this point, you've really only delayed tech order by archeology and are still on par for a good turn-to-victory science. The gold-purchase spaceship part T3 tenet will also allow you to recuperate another 3-5 turns, obviously depending on your capital's production output. Not only that, but even domination is still availible. Mostly because the current deity AI is a joke and should be lagged behind 5% in tech at least so you can rape the world with bombers and cavs. This is not necessarily so much an option with watery maps though.
TODO:
Present base TPT scaling in the late game. Discuss the strength and weight of Great Musicians (10*base TPT at spawn). Come up with some rough mats of how much stronger say just 2 late games faith GM are over a non-FPT oriented religion strategy (no pilgrimage/DI) for the low-difficulty reformation bonus oriented strategy.
*I have skipped the build order opener. It will very likely fall into the typical 1-4 city tradition opener. However, as I am still iterating on this and Budweiser hasn't updated his guide yet, I might add a section with my personal approach later once I have iterated on it enough to be confident that it's generic enough.
*edit fixed copy/paste alignment errors
*edit added TODO
*edit added Shoshone OP initial save
