Culture/Social Policy Questions

[CappyAA]

Hey everyone - I have a couple quick questions on social policies. I'm trying to improve my culture strategies. I am using the 4 city tradition approach. After I finish tradition I ran through piety. For my third policy tree I'd like to open rationalism for the science benefits. I know that rationalism and piety cannot be open at the same time and adopting rationalism will have a period of anarchy. My 2 questions are:

1. Can I use this approach for a cultural victory? Or will the rationalism open nullify the piety tree?
2. Will opening the rationalism tree nullify any benefits from the piety tree? For example, one benefit is +33% culture in cities with a wonder. Would that benefit get cancelled by opening rationalism?

Thanks for the help!

[Sp3ker4theD3d]

i'm pretty sure it locks the SPs that conflict with the unlocked SPs, so you can't even unlock them...could be wrong, only been playing a couple of months, but all of mine in similar situations have a "padlock" on them and it won't let me select them

[Kwami]

You can open Rationalism and take the anarchy penalty. You'll lose all benefits from Piety. I'm pretty sure that Piety will still count toward the Utopia Project, but I'm not 100% on that bit.

[TyBoy]

Yeah, having finished piety still counts for utopia even if you deactivate it. It does deactivate the benefits. I did a cultural victory once this way back when all the good bonuses out of piety were one time events.

I don't think it's a good strategy any more though. There are some great persistent bonuses in piety now for a cultural victory. If nothing else the finisher is probably going to outweigh anything you get from rationalism for a cultural victory. Taking it as a given that a cultural victory will include tradition, piety, patronage and freedom I would think liberty or commerce would be much better options for the 5th tree (notably, the liberty policy that reduces SP costs is about equal to the piety finisher at 4 cities).

[ense7en]

There are two vital trees for cultural victory: Piety and Freedom.
You want to finish those ASAP.

Considering you can usually be getting into Freedom by the time you finish Piety, sidelining to Rationalism is a bad idea...getting Freedom finished is extremely important to actually winning a cultural game.

I suppose that for the very last tree you could switch, but by then it won't matter anyway.

[Sjarrel]

I can't see it ever being worth it to be honest. Rationalism isn't all that great for cultural games anyway, while Piety is pretty sweet. Use that culture for something more worthwhile.