Cultural victory and Piety

If you want a Cultural victory, I'm going to put forward that you need to go through Piety. If you can match Sacred Sites with one, or better two, religious buildings, the Culture game suddenly becomes so much easier.

My first game as France, I missed Sacred Sites, but I was able to build the Great Library and the Louvre in Paris. Even with the double theming bonus, the Aesthetics bonus, and spamming Great WAMs and digging up Artifacts left and right, the game still lasted well, well into the Information era. Even with the Internet, Hotels and Airports in every city, and the National Visitor's Center in Paris, the game lasted long enough for Poland to get a Science victory just before I was about to become Influential over him.

My second game was as Brazil. I rushed down Piety to grab Reformation, snagging Sacred Sites, Pagodas, and Cathedrals. About two thirds of my Tourism was coming from religious buildings, and I easily won a Cultural victory in the modern era. I was already becoming influential in the Renaissance.

The difference here is not that I was playing as Brazil instead of France - the difference is that I got Sacred Sites.

I heartily disagree. Two experiences aren't enough to justify saying you need piety for a culture win. I barely got involved with religion my first culture game, buying two missionaries tops, but I got a culture win in the Modern Era well before the internet. Piety can help if you spam religious buildings with sacred sites and get culture boosting beliefs, but it isn't absolutely essential.

I get all my culture victories through conquest. Remember, you only have to be influential over the surviving civs.

If a nail dares to stick out, hammer it down and steal all its valuable artifacts.

Hmm... well I for one am going to try this on my next game. The one in currently doing as Indonesia is taking me an awful long time to generate the culture and I went the full tree in Aesthetics first and now doing the Piety; I think I should have went the reverse.

I tried to mix Piety and Tradition, but it delayed Aesthetics so it wasn't effective. I do wonder how pure Piety will played out though.

After playing a Byzantium game with Cathedrals, Monasteries, and Pagodas all with Sacred Sites, it didn't seem all that impressive to me. 6 tourism per city seemed like a drop in the bucket once you get hotels going, or even earlier if you can get a lot of great works.

Holy sites are certainly powerful now that landmarks have been restricted to digging sites.
Getting +3 culture an +3 gold from the piety tree makes them a decent all-around tile. If you pick the -25% prophet faith cost perk (e.g. if you play OCC or see no option to spread your religion against competetors), you can get quite a few of these.

And yes, late game faith is fantastic thanks to artists, writers and muscians. Everyone of those starts at 1000 faith and is pretty useful.

Piety tree only gives +3 culture to holy sites, not gold. They can still be buffed to crazy amounts, though.

Base yield: +6 faith
Improved with piety finisher: +3 culture
New Deal tenet (Freedom): +4 faith
Historical landmarks resolution: +2 culture

Total: a whopping 10 faith and 5 culture per site. Not bad!

I'm currently on my second try as Byzantium going for a culture victory. I am probably somewhat lucky in that I was second to religion and able to pick two religious buildings as well as Sacred Sites (which was really non-negotiable for my game), also got the Parthenon, and found out something interesting:
it doesn't matter if the faith-bought buildings are from the same religion as the one with Sacred Sites or not. Another civ's religion chose the Pagoda and Monastery to my Cathedral and Mosque beliefs, and I was able to spread it to all of my cities except the Holy City. All I did was buy both religious buildings and then re-convert the city to my religion, and bam - eight Tourism per city in the late Medieval/early Renaissance. At this point I am at about 80% with two civs and between 40-60% with four others; influence is rising fast and all I need to do at this point is survive a potentially nasty war and figure out how to spread my influence to the newly-discovered guy on the other side of the world.

Culture Victory attempts now have different paths to choose:

High-faith generation, medium-to-low number of cultural wonders (Uffizi, Sistine Chapel, Louvre etc.) means you should go Piety and spam Great Prophet improvements and try to get the beliefs for religious buildings (Cathedrals being preferable).

Low-faith generation, medium-to-high number of cultural wonders means you should go Aesthetics, spam Great WAMs, and get theming bonuses.

Low-faith generation, low-to-not-any cultural wonders means you could still attempt a cultural victory by conquering key cities (the city with a Great-Work filled Louvre, any city with a large number of Great Works, etc).

* * *

So now, there's

culture thru faith
culture thru art
culture thru war
culture thru archaeology

to try and get a CV.


Of course, if you don't desperately need to fill one of the other SP trees, you could go both Piety and Aesthetics. That would probably be ideal, unless you have an early shot at ideologies (via having coal and building 3 factories).

And you could always do all three: grab Piety, grab Aesthetics, and have your military do what it can to grab cities with important cultural wonders and/or lots of Great Works in them.

Really, though, don't forget Exploration. It's sort of a hodge-podge of SPs, but the opener is crucial if you want to use a GE to get the Louvre, and the closer is crucial for hidden sites. Exploration on its own, if you have a wide civ, may give you enough sites in your own workable tiles to be able to turn them into landmarks, and whatever sites are outside your borders you would then turn into artifacts. Exploration, even without Aesthetics or Piety, might be able to eek out a CV in the right circumstances, though I'd generally imagine its best as a bonus to your culture rather than as the main way of getting it (since a good number of SPs in the tree are really about maritime bonuses and coastal bonuses that having nothing to do with culture).

VainoValkea said:

Piety tree only gives +3 culture to holy sites, not gold. They can still be buffed to crazy amounts, though.

Base yield: +6 faith
Improved with piety finisher: +3 culture
New Deal tenet (Freedom): +4 faith
Historical landmarks resolution: +2 culture

Total: a whopping 10 faith and 5 culture per site. Not bad!

Click to expand...

You get 3 gold per holy site from the Theocracy SP, this used to be part of the Piety finisher but this now means you get it earlier in the tree (unless of course you finish with Theocracy). I love holy sites with Piety, they are hugely powerful.

I agree, but not for the reasons you mentioned. I'd argue that the meta-game will breakdown into saving up enough faith to buy 3+ great musicians after Internet tech. I believe their power is based off of when you get them, so saving them up isn't an option.

I am only basing this off my sample size of one, but Arabia's culture bar is way ahead of everyone else's and it would take forever to try and surpass it naturally. 4 great musicians would make up the difference though.

This is assuming you don't take the route of "cleansing" the opposing Civ off the map.

mikeg said:

You get 3 gold per holy site from the Theocracy SP, this used to be part of the Piety finisher but this now means you get it earlier in the tree (unless of course you finish with Theocracy). I love holy sites with Piety, they are hugely powerful.

Click to expand...

Thanks, I had overlooked that!

Yeah, those things would make piety definitely worth it.

I've only ever won culture victories when going tall with a few cities or even OOC, Tradition first, Aesthetics second, Rationalism third.

The reason is that the Renaissance wonders are critical to a culture victory, so getting there quickly and having a strong city to build them is very important. The other reason is the Hanging Gardens: they allow me to assign specialists early without sacrificing too much growth.

If I focus on a religion or open with Peity, it will be hard to get the wonders built, and hard to have enough food for specialists while still growing. At least on Immortal where I play.

I'd agree with the OP that Piety can help massively with a CV, if you go for the Sacred sites reformation belief along with two faith buildings. Mandate of Heaven makes those buildings if anything too powerful for their cost, allowing you to pretty much spam them through your empire, then adding 2 Tourism per building will allow you to more than likely at least double your tourism early in the game (where Great Works are hard to come by). If you've got a wide empire then I'd suggest considering Monasteries even if you're short of wine and incense, you can pick these up at a snip at 120 Faith with MoH.