Feudalism 100K Culture

[colontos]

It's a common meme on here that feudalism (govt) is not much good "except for 100K cultural victories."

I was wondering if someone could go into a bit of detail as to how this works. I don't understand it, but people refer to it very often as if it's common knowledge.

Could someone help out with an explanation that goes into a bit of detail please?

[Twonky]

The usual strategy for winning a 100k-game would be to conquer lots of land and to settle as many small towns as possible, in which you then build as many cultural buildings as possible. Feudalism helps you with the last bit, as it allows to pop-rush improvements rather than paying for them. Especially if you control the Pyramids, pop will grow faster than gold.

[Virtual Alex]

The theory is, since fuedalism has really good unit support for small towns (6 and below) and it allows pop rushing (to keep towns at 6 and below) and in order to win the cultural win it is better to have many towns with cultural improvments than few towns it's an ideal government for this game style. You can build many small towns, still sustain a large army, and poprush all the temples, libraries and cathederals you want.

At least thats how I understand it.

[gmaharriet]

Twonky and Virtual Alex are correct and, in addition, be prepared for LOTS of micro-managing. Your citizens are always unhappy, not liking your killing them off to build temples and libs, and you need quite a bit of war to get enough land area to build so many small towns. The towns outside your core need to be built as close together as possible to get the maximum number in the space available, and they never grow large enough to need more tiles.

[Tone]

I've never found the unit support an issue as you'll have so many towns that pretty much any government will do in this respect. However, Feudalism offers pop rushing without the despot penalty-really important when you want the population to rise quickly. Flood everything and whip them silly.

A few more details...

I find Babylon the best for this type of game. It offers cheaper builds for all the important buildings. (Colloseums are not good value @ 120 shields for only 2cpt. Leave them until you have nothing else to build.)

Try to get as close to the domination limit as possible. Squeeze those towns in right up to the AI.

Watch out for the maintenance costs. Once you've built a temple, a cath, a lib and a uni in a town, you can set it to wealth and employ the only citizen as a taxman (you'll have so much whip unhappiness that you cannot do anything else anyway) and it will still lose you 2gpt. When you've got a lot of these cities, that adds up to a serious badget deficit.

The screen shot below shows what I mean about claiming every tile and also the costs involved towards the end. I'm in a GA, I have 100% tax and yet I'm still losing cash hand over fist. I think that I should have built up a bit more of a buffer in my treasury before moving over to Feud. I've still to finish this game but I suspect that I'll need to switch back over to Republic for the last few turns.

[gmaharriet]

Very impressive, Tone! I'll bet you're having to refuse flips from the Zulus so you don't win by domination.

[AutomatedTeller]

for income, building wonders can help, and, of course, markets in the core cities.

[colontos]

Thanks, everybody! I'll have to try this in my next game.

[drakdan]

Just a question, but why ignore the domination limit if you can hit that first? Is there some benefit to going for culture? Maybe a higher score (Higher Jason score, whatever that is) seems to me that you'd be delaying the end of a won game but not hitting the domination limit.

[AutomatedTeller]

well, if what you want to do is hit the 100K culture in that game, hitting the domination limit will hurt that.

[Tone]

Originally Posted by drakdan

Just a question, but why ignore the domination limit if you can hit that first? Is there some benefit to going for culture? Maybe a higher score (Higher Jason score, whatever that is) seems to me that you'd be delaying the end of a won game but not hitting the domination limit.

No benefit at all. I play many of my games with the HoF in mind, which means trying to get to a specific victory condition in the quickest date rather than just win by any means. With the game above, there was never any danger of not winning. However in my mind, I have not won if I don't beat the current #1 slot in the HoF for that catagory. That's where the challenge lies.

Other players do it just to see if they can win that way. I guess it's the same as other self-imposed restrictions, such as 5CC or AW games. It adds a bit of fun to a level that you've already mastered.

BTW it's certainly not a way of getting a high score. Score is primarily based upon happy faces and you'll not end up with too many of those. The citizens that have not been whipped away will be *very* unhappy.