Strategies I never will do in civ V...

zxcvbob said:

I think culture victory is the most fun (it's certainly the most challenging for me) -- watch the other civs collapse under the weight of my magnificence

Of course I do a little military warmongering in addition to my culture war. Try an Autocracy culture victory sometime -- don't even build the artist guild or the musician guild until you pick Futurism.

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No VC is harder than domination, because if you can win domination you can camp out any other VC in most cases. I might make an exception for those last-second cap steals if allying a runaway until final betrayal, but generally not.

danaphanous said:

I would enjoy the cultural win a lot more if it was made actually hard to do--as it is I can focus on science and sometimes win at cultural, even on immortal difficulty, by accident because tourism investment just happens as I try to boost my culture and propose things in world congress. And it's foolish not to theme if you can and win international games.

A few changes I think would make cultural win better:

1. Wiping out civs does not erase their cultural presence it just stops it from growing and you need to overcome their static influence now. This makes it possible to stop someone winning over you by invading them but makes it so you can't use war to get a cheap win over someone that stopped you winning culturally. Otherwise the win condition is far too similar to domination imo and far too easy.
2. International Games should not only double the tourism of one player but should have brackets where the winner gets 100% boost, the second tier +50% and the 3rd tier +25%. This would make it so winning by a few hammers doesn't make such a massive difference but everyone who invested in the games and did well gets some tourism benefit for it.
3. Ideological pressure system should be changed from a thresholded bracket to a point-spread system. Right now you can plunge the AI or they you into massive sudden unhappiness just by crossing a threshold like 10% (exotic) first. I believe that ideological influence levels should be based on the spread-difference of influence. So if they pass into 10% they begin to get a chance to exert pressure on you but not if you are only 2% behind. Maybe the first level of influence is a spread of 10%, the second 25%, the 3rd 50%. And to win you don't just have to pass into the dominant threshold which you could do with someone close behind and suddenly win anyway, but you need to pass into dominant AND be at least 25% above their influence on you. Otherwise it would be like saying. Well you got dominant culture over everyone, France was 98% from being dominant over you but oh, tough luck they still lost. This doesn't make practical sense at all.

These 3 changes would make the AI more competitive and make the win condition actually more like it would be in real life and I would be more proud of a cultural win as it would take some real dedication to pull off and distinguish it from conquest. Right now there is no win condition that conquest can't lead too and it would be great of the cultural win was the exception.

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Meh, the real way to win a culture victory at high levels is to make simply a decent culture game yourself and then take the capital of the civ that built all the wonders you missed.

TheMeInTeam said:

No VC is harder than domination, because if you can win domination you can camp out any other VC in most cases. I might make an exception for those last-second cap steals if allying a runaway until final betrayal, but generally not.

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Seconded... my sentiments exactly

durron597 said:

Meh, the real way to win a culture victory at high levels is to make simply a decent culture game yourself and then take the capital of the civ that built all the wonders you missed.

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lol, that's exactly what I don't like. That you don't have to beat them at culture just invade the ones that are actually competitive. The game is basically setting itself up so every VC can be solved through war and I don't like that. I wish there was at least one that that wasn't the case. I find only maybe 3/10 AI do well at culture. The fact that you can just invade the small percentage that does means YOU don't have to actually do that well at culture or tourism to win. I know because I've done what you're saying myself, but I wish it wasn't that simple. I wish that to win at culture you actually had to go all out and sacrifice being competitive in some other ways. As it is I can be winning at culture, science, and military all at the same time, there's not really a hard seperation between ways to play and intended VC. I love the ideology mechanics but as I say I wish the VC was a little more nuanced.

danaphanous said:

lol, that's exactly what I don't like. That you don't have to beat them at culture just invade the ones that are actually competitive. The game is basically setting itself up so every VC can be solved through war and I don't like that. I wish there was at least one that that wasn't the case. I find only maybe 3/10 AI do well at culture. The fact that you can just invade the small percentage that does means YOU don't have to actually do that well at culture or tourism to win. I know because I've done what you're saying myself, but I wish it wasn't that simple. I wish that to win at culture you actually had to go all out and sacrifice being competitive in some other ways. As it is I can be winning at culture, science, and military all at the same time, there's not really a hard seperation between ways to play and intended VC. I love the ideology mechanics but as I say I wish the VC was a little more nuanced.

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Everything can be solved through war. Civ building spaceship? Kill them. Civ with loads of culture? Kill them. Civ with loads of city states? Kill them then they won't have those city states.

thanks for repeating me.

Personally I'm fine with war being able to stop other people from winning. That's the safety net and it's intended. However, I don't think YOU should be able to win every VC directly through military effort. For variety sake I was saying I wish they'd done culture so you couldn't help yourself out by invading people. And I made a few suggestions farther up about how this could have been done and the whole VC be better polished.

In fact I find nearly every game plays the same and I could conceivably win all four ways at the end of my games because on every game you ally as many CS as possible, try to get ahead on tech, and try to get tourism/culture if only for ideological defense so you aren't plunged into -20 unhappiness when ideologies hit. I play on immortal difficulty and every game I'm about an age ahead of the AI on tech so science is easy. Being ahead on tech usually means I can easily conquer the world if I want too it's just a choice of whether I feel like it when I'm the first to tanks, planes, rocket arts, and battleships/subs. Being ahead on tech means my production is higher and I easily win international games for tourism boost and also get the majority of the artifacts. It also means I could grab internet years ahead of the AI. My superior gold, tech, and culture means most of the CS come to my side and those that don't can be easily pursuaded with nothing but gold even without patronage. I hate diplo but honestly I could do it every game easily. So my games it's usually a choice based on how I feel: do I want to conquer the word? Do I want to build the spaceship? Or will the game end before either because tourism dominated the world? Honestly this happens on immortal most games and it's just a question of which can I do faster. Because military invasion of competitors can easily secure me the last CS or take out cultural contenders, often the quickest route is a combination of all 3. I'm aware you can nuke to win the science race but honestly I'd be so embarrassed I lost I'd probably just let the AI win. They are terrible at building the spaceship in a timely manner. Usually they haven't built even apollo by the time i'm launching.

I'm not sure how I can break this cycle. I play my games for what seems best for my empire at the time so I focus on culture, religion, science, and expansion/infrastructure. CS are helpful so I get them too. And every game I end up with everything I went for and a bunch of ways I could win. Deity I've found is similar they AI just have way bigger armies and are more aggressive because of their huge discounts in unit production and maintenance. Just more to slaughter. It makes domination harder but is a bit tedious for me as I like to relax and experiment on my games. I'm usually not playing optimally but just going after ideas I have. Most games I secure a powerful religion as well to support my empire and it's usually tall and wide simultaneously. Like I said I have it all on my games. The AI is usually completely outclassed in every category but military numbers.

So, as I said, it would be nice if cultural games required me to play differently. But the AI's poor tech skills and inability to recognize the worth of the games or beelining archaelogy means they are left far behind on tourism. Usually there are some holdouts and occasionally even a competitor that clearly went for cultural victory and requires a while to wear down but the fact that I'm that far ahead without trying to play culturally is just sad. Seriously on my normal science route it only requires a slight diversion to also be winning culturally so I always do it before ideologies so I have defense. The fact that I can just invade the holdout with my superior tech army and wipe out their best cities in a few turns makes winning cultural kind of a joke and I often realize I can do it before the spaceship. I'm beginning to see why experienced players only play conquest.

On higher difficulties Culture Victory is pretty hard, the hardest VC for peaceful play. It's basically a science game, because it is very important to get the tourism bonuses very early (rush archaeology to get artifacts, rush hotels, rush NVC, rush internet, rush airports if necessary). If you don't get them soon enough and time getting musicians to perform concerts on the cultural runaway (which surely will exist on deity), it will be very very hard to win, and you might lose to an AI SV in the mean time. Also teching fast is really important if you want to stand a chance to get wonders. Getting both Sistine Chapel and LToP is not that easy on deity (they are not essential but help a lot).

On top of this very restrictive aspect of fast teching (you basically need to play a SV game at least until Public Schools) you also need a lot of hammers, because you will be building a lot of things that you are not building in SV: cultural wonders, archaeologists (these you cannot rush buy), cultural buildings like amphitheaters, opera houses, museums and broadcast towers, then you need hotels and maybe airports. All these cost a lot of hammers and/or a lot of gold. In SV you can take commerce as a filler for gold purchase reductions, but for CV you are obligated to get into Aesthetics and you will be purchasing at full price for most of the game. Between science buildings, culture buildings and tourism buildings it's really a hard choice, considering you might want gold and faith buildings also, not to neglect military. While SV is viable with high food low hammer terrain, CV is a lot harder, you need both because science and production are key to a timely CV.

Yes, you don't necessarily need to research the lower part of the tech tree, but you do have a longer build queue, and you do need to get into aesthetics on top of getting into rationalism and ideology.

You also might want to use your GWAM differently in the CV game (I suppose great writers can be bulbed since you don't lose much tourism, but great artists will give you theeming bonuses for hermitage and probably lovure or uffizi, so you do need to get great works from them, meaning fewer golden ages).

I've stolen a city-state worker or two in desperation, but really I don't like doing this. I personally also won't coup a city-state (I hate that mechanism) and I won't pay an AI to DOW someone else I'd rather just tackle a runaway head on. I also never bully a city-state but that's more because I usually go patronage and want them as allies.

As to the culture-tourism thing I find it boring, domination is the only thing that holds my interest now and mainly I try to get it done before the Industrial era.

Back to the original topic on strategies I don't like to do:

1. The pillage/repair trick, which I think is not really how it was intended to work. Personally, I think you shouldn't be allowed to repair improvements in the territory of someone you're at war with. It's a sort of exploit, if you ask me. Consequently, I rarely build the Pyramids, since for many people this is the most important reason for building it.

2. When the AI offers a peace deal in which he demands something back from you, you can remove that something and the AI will accept a white peace. I think this is a bug, so I will just refuse. (Or accept the peace deal with his original demands, but I would rarely do that.)

fyar said:

2. When the AI offers a peace deal in which he demands something back from you, you can remove that something and the AI will accept a white peace.

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This one puzzles me too. It seems to me that there was time when it was not like this and the AI leaders were pretty stubborn in their demands during peace negotiations. Probably it was changed by one of the patches? Anyway, I look at it as their initial negotiating position, which can be softened (a bit like in trade deals where they demand obsolete strategic resources that they do not really need), and happily accept white peace, if they agree.

MrRadar said:

It seems to me that there was time when it was not like this and the AI leaders were pretty stubborn in their demands during peace negotiations. Probably it was changed by one of the patches?

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This is my clear recollection, initially there were 5 tiers, and the AI was stubborn, but the bigger problem was that the AI did not know when it was losing -- so it was often unreasonable.

Then there was patch where they added a tier in between each of the 5, so nine peace conditions. This much is detailed in the patch notes, and I can probably dig up a link if you want. But they did not fix the underlying problem of the AI not being to assess when it was losing.

Some time after that, the developers silently introduced the white peace bug.

beetle said:

This much is detailed in the patch notes, and I can probably dig up a link if you want. .

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Yes, I remember that patch and found and reread the notes, but there was nothing about new white peace options. So it is a bug then, eh?

beetle said:

the bigger problem was that the AI did not know when it was losing -- so it was often unreasonable.

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I'm not 100% sure, but I think the AI considers military power at the time, and disregards what has been happening in the war or the positioning of military forces. Consequently, if the AI has triple your military power, it will demand half your cities for a peace deal (which, as we've all discovered, you can remove.) It does not factor in that 100% of their remaining military is on the other side of their empire (fighting the person you bribed to fight them), or the fact that you've lost no units in the war, while they've lost a dozen units and two cities. Since the AI's peace deal proposal is based on an incompetent evaluation of how the war is going, I don't think there's any dishonor in renegotiating for white peace.

Is this "white peace" actually a bug?
Well if it is it doesn't matter in my games. If the AI calls me up for peace it's because I'm whipping them and they are offering me stuff not demanding it. I rarely see them call before, is this common?

ShakaKhan said:

I'm not 100% sure, but I think the AI considers military power at the time, and disregards what has been happening in the war or the positioning of military forces. Consequently, if the AI has triple your military power, it will demand half your cities for a peace deal (which, as we've all discovered, you can remove.) It does not factor in that 100% of their remaining military is on the other side of their empire (fighting the person you bribed to fight them), or the fact that you've lost no units in the war, while they've lost a dozen units and two cities. Since the AI's peace deal proposal is based on an incompetent evaluation of how the war is going, I don't think there's any dishonor in renegotiating for white peace.

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Well if we're talking "dishonor" that's an awfully strong word. I wouldn't go that far by any means, because I have no problem with anybody else renegotiating for a white peace. I certainly don't go around thinking to myself how dishonorable everyone else on this forum is for doing it. So I speak only for myself when I say this: I interpret its demand for half my cities to mean that the AI does not intend to accept a white peace. Incompetent has nothing to do with it.... if the "competent" thing to do for the AI would be to accept the white peace because s/he is losing the war, then I'll just allow them to lose the war for a few more turns until they finally recognize it. But certainly to renegotiate to a white peace in situations where the player is actually losing the war feels like an exploit to me, and the question of "losing the war" is subjective enough that I just choose never to do it.

Wild_Woojsha said:

I may be wrong about great musicians, I can't remember the details. Hopefully someone can, but I know the other aspects of a culture victory are more important.

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for GM's it's the last 8 turns before they spawned and they don't change while alive

for GS and GW it's the last 8 turns before used
(GS is like GM in the NQ mod)

MrRadar said:

Yes, I remember that patch and found and reread the notes, but there was nothing about new white peace options. So it is a bug then, eh?

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It could be that the white peace “bug” was an accident introduced with that patch. But, if that were the case, I would have expected that the new behavior would have been noticed soon after the patch.

Memory is quite fallible, but my clear recollection is that it was not until like a year latter that people started posting about how white peace was always an option.

So, I don’t think it is a “bug” so much as an undocumented feature deliberately added later, after the extra tiers of peace conditions didn’t fix the underlying problem.

But I also vaguely recall a thread where someone posted that that, as implied from looking at the source code, it is bug from a simple oversight with the order of nesting conditions. But that implies that the white peace bug would have been present from launch, and that certainly does not seem correct!

So who knows?

But the game is as it is. I use the white peace bug all the time. I hardly ever use pillage-repair. The white peace bug I can hardly avoid (since I can hardly avoid war). Pillage-repair feels much more like a choice, so I don’t go out of my way to exploit it, but if I am at war and there are workers around, then I play the game as it is. I don't really see the point in handicapping yourself because you wish for the game to be different than it actually is.Get a mod if these sort of things really bother you.

One more common strategy that I don't like to do, because it came up in another thread: declaring war just to get "open" borders and have my great musician perform a concert tour. Others consider this a perfectly reasonable strategy, but I don't like to do it because of the sheer ridiculousness of the concept. I imagine President Obama trying to complete America's "cultural victory" over North Korea, unsuccessfully being able to negotiate open borders, and finally telling Kim Jong-un, "Ok, your licit nuclear program was bad enough, but not letting Beyonce perform a concert in Pyongyang is the last straw. This means WAR!" Meanwhile, Beyonce is just sitting in a boat in the Yellow Sea, waiting for the declaration of war. And somehow, just by declaring war, without the accompaniment of any naval warships or stealth bombers or marines, she's able to force herself into Pyongyang, perform a concert tour against Kim Jong-un's will, and this somehow leads to the capitulation of the North Korean government.

fyar said:

One more common strategy that I don't like to do, because it came up in another thread: declaring war just to get "open" borders and have my great musician perform a concert tour. Others consider this a perfectly reasonable strategy, but I don't like to do it because of the sheer ridiculousness of the concept. I imagine President Obama trying to complete America's "cultural victory" over North Korea, unsuccessfully being able to negotiate open borders, and finally telling Kim Jong-un, "Ok, your licit nuclear program was bad enough, but not letting Beyonce perform a concert in Pyongyang is the last straw. This means WAR!" Meanwhile, Beyonce is just sitting in a boat in the Yellow Sea, waiting for the declaration of war. And somehow, just by declaring war, without the accompaniment of any naval warships or stealth bombers or marines, she's able to force herself into Pyongyang, perform a concert tour against Kim Jong-un's will, and this somehow leads to the capitulation of the North Korean government.

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You made me think of this:
http://www.wired.com/2015/03/north-korea/
Perhaps it's not so far fetched after all.

Puhi said:

You made me think of this:
http://www.wired.com/2015/03/north-korea/
Perhaps it's not so far fetched after all.

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That idea seems perfectly reasonable. If "smuggling" in copies of Friends could be emulated by some spy mechanic whereby you could trick the AI into allowing open borders, then I would be just fine with doing that strategy.

Declaring war just to get those open borders still seems far-fetched.