At normal speed a wheel map takes forever to cross. It is 64 tiles wide and 40 tall, and due to world wrapping and starting in a corner, we have to walk every one of them.
It would take a horse on a road 15 turns to go from one side to the other (10 with Engineering).
It would take a galleon 26 turns to go from the top right to the bottom left.
It takes about 35 tiles to walk from capital to capital using only spokes.
So..., your alive Tachy! Chime in!
4)Cultural - Wonder spam complicated by the fast AI teching at start of game. Not exactly a lot of prime cottage land. Not a financial, spiritual, or industrial leader. Aren't swimming in religions either. Whoever builds stonehenge will probably take the 4th religion when they bulb theology. Sadly, emperor appears to be the difficulty where wonder vs. cottage spam is a draw on speed.
4)Cultural - Wonder spam complicated by the fast AI teching at start of game. Not exactly a lot of prime cottage land. Not a financial, spiritual, or industrial leader. Aren't swimming in religions either. Whoever builds stonehenge will probably take the 4th religion when they bulb theology. Sadly, emperor appears to be the difficulty where wonder vs. cottage spam is a draw on speed.
Cultural is looking quite good to me. These first three cities will be reasonable legendary sites. The first two can have about 10 cottages each, plus some wonder culture. The gems site can probably build HG and plan to run artists. Those all have enough hammers for the cathedrals after some early wonder and missionary spam. A site around the northern river mouth will be the primary GP farm. Some secondary sites might also produce a GArtist apiece. Philosophical is quite useful as a trait for this victory, because it ought to translate into at least one extra GArtist, if not two. Shwedagon Paya for early Philo+Paci+Caste+Rep could be great. GLib and Parthenon also options. We have all the multiplier resources for whatever cathedrals and wonders we want, and will have no problem settling the necessary 9-10 city sites (for 3 temples each in each of 3 religions) without a war. We'll probably have to rely on spontaneous religion spread, unless we get lucky with Confu or Tao. We don't have to run an early war for land - but if we learn of a nearby AI capital that would farm artists well, that one could be a legendary site. We only really have to defend the spoke choke point if someone DOWs us, assuming we control the ocean culture bridges.
Cultural still has a big risk associated with it. We don't know how hard the wizard will be to find and/or kill. If the wizard is a unit then I would imagine that it has to be at a minimum on an island to avoid either it killing an AI or an AI accidentally killing it.
That probably means we will need astronomy (although the wizard might be reachable by galley).
Worst case would the wizard is only reachable by paratrooper/nuke.
Thanks. And...what the hell! I ceased reading for 3-4 days (I didn't logged in but was still following your deeds before those few days) and the post count exploded. Lot of work to catch up. Not really much for now unfortunately.
Sure, but we can still time our GArtist bombs to win the turn we kill the Wizard. Still it's another 30+ turns before we have to start committing to a victory condition.
In a traditional cultural game you shut down research after liberalism and go 100% culture. Great Artists speed up achieving Legendary status but they are not the primary vehicle to rack up the culture.
You have to slow a cultural game down to get the techs and/or units that will likely be necessary to kill the wizard.
We can try a nontraditional cultural game that uses espionage to produce a legendary city, and maybe we can get one city up to legendary with just great artists. And another city perhaps with wonder culture. That would enable us to continue teching if we needed to do so.
Okay, what I meant by this post about a cultural game...
In my opinion cultural games in general are difficult to win before 1500 AD or so. And so I believe they are already a bit slow compared to the times that we could achieve with other victory conditions.
In an ideal cultural game you can devote most if not all of the commerce after liberalism into culture by putting the slider at 100% culture. I understand that some of the culture will come from the artist specialists themselves and some from wonders, but the vast majority of at least 2 of the legendary cities' culture usually comes from using the cultural slider and lots of commerce from cottages, etc.
And on top of the late date we would most likely not be able to devote all our resources to producing culture and the necessary temples/cathedrals for decent victory date. We would likely have to spend some time teching rather using 100% culture. I understand that we could prevent the accidental cultural victory by holding back on bulbing the great artists. But that really wasn't my point.
So in my opinion culture is slower than most victory conditions even before you consider the complications of the wizard.
I don't think we will be competitive if we go for a cultural victory, unless we develop a novel way of doing it.
I think it is too much to expect to have a large army, continue teching some with the slider, and finish a cultural game with a competitive date.
edit: cross post (edit: emperor cultural games are difficult to win before 1500 AD... at least for me)
That's turn 220 or so. We can't get any kind of civ-killing army anywhere before turn 120... That's not a lot of turns for a military victory on a big map. I guess we should play out some different VCs on the test game to have some idea what is possible.
3)Diplomatic - Random AI and paired AI will make diplomacy a head scratcher. Eliminate two pairs of AI and then have another pair vote with you against the larger 2nd pair? How do paired AI vote? This has the real possibility of being the fastest win if the smaller pair can be made friendly and will vote for you.
Or it would, if the wizard wasn't on an island spamming an islands heavy civilization with the wicked witch of the west (Monty?) guarding his front door 50 tiles from our capital. (Worst case)