54 turns
EDIT: I have done an edit for typos, clarity and additional info.
First, let me say out of the bat that although I was 1 turn faster than
@Manpanzee , that was solely because I got
4!!!!!! military IPs in my map. He played a much better game.
I first did a training game in a different map, and my take away was that all the things that we know about the culture victory still apply. I also learned a little about the first turn choices and allocation of points.
My conclusion on those first turn choices was that getting the max on attributes (4) was essential, and that the free civics were very very powerful. After that, towns and after that, cities, with money dead last. The armies are situational in my opinion, for a culture victory I felt I wanted to run a peaceful game, and create a ton of trade routes on t1, which would help keep it peaceful, so one army would be enough.
So in t1, I spent the points on 1 city, 3 towns, 4 wildcard attributes, and all three free civics, the first row of the culture tree. The reason I spent points on a second city, apart from the obvious, was to have more shots on goal on the overbuilding. Useless, as I got zero artifacts from overbuilding. That is very rare as in ALL the games I have played since the release of civ 7, including the training games I did for this GoTM, I got 1 or 2 artifacts.
Attributes were 4x culture, 2x diplo, 4x econ and 4x expansionist. I always try to get to the 30% in towns on the expansionist tree, it is incredibly powerful. As for economic, I wanted the 15% discount on buying, a no brainer when you are going to buy all explorers, and I was planning to buy 5 or 6. And as long as I was there, I put another point on econ for the gold on imported resources, as my strategy was to buy 5 merchants on t1. That meant not putting any points on science, likely a mistake. I thought I would have enough science to get to Mass Production comfortably, but the game proved me wrong.
On t1, I planted the towns and cities in the obvious spots. I then specialized everything to mining towns, with the exception of my resort town on the NW and my coastal city to the north. I chose hub town for it, as I felt I would need more influence and thought I would be settling up and down the coast and settle on DLs across the sea, so the town would quickly get to 7-8 influence per turn. Alas, that did not happen, Confucius was like 5 tiles away so I settled only one more town on that coast on the NW to the north and my one DL settlement was too far away to be connected. I got less than 250 influence from that town in the whole game, which helps, but the opportunity cost was a ton of money. That was a mistake.
As I had only 3 towns, I started building a settler on my second city and bought one in my first city. The cost of settlers is so low vs what we are used to in full games, basically because you have so few settlements compared to the 22-25 I usually start Modern with. Also, the settlement limit is so high (16 I think) that I was sorely tempted to do a settler spam and see what happened. But in the end I decided to play conservatively, so I planted only 2 resort towns in the other 2 wonders, 2 mining towns towards the East to have a museum in the continent and capture 2 golds, 1 silver and 2 marbles and 1 town in DLs, to capture 1 gold, 1 marble and have a museum in the new continent.
On t1, I also bought 4 merchants (and the settler), one on each settlement. Again, that was probably a mistake. I likely should have bought my first explorer on t1 and bought the merchants immediately after that.
On t2, when the map revealed, the game really started and allowed me to make the plan and execute it:
- I got what I thought was a poor IP deployment, as the only friendly IPs were a couple of Gold IPs and one diplo. But I got lucky and had a Narrative Event that gave me a choice of something like 600 influence or 900 science in the middle of the game, I chose influence of course. And that saved me and allowed me to suzerain 2 hostile culture IPs. I could not figure out what had triggered the narrative event, maybe I was friendly with more than 6 AIs, something like that. Anyway, if anybody knows it, please let me know.
- I planned on building a explorer on the capital, buy the first explorer when I was one turn away from finishing the explorer and finishing the build of the explorer in the next turn by dispersing a military IP. I had three military IPs in my land mass and one of them relatively close to my southern towns. In real life, I relized very quickly that was not a great idea, and bought the first explorer as soon as I could, not in t1 as I had spent the money in merchants and settler, but in t3/4, when I got the money reward for killing my first unit.
- I wanted to plant a DL settlement on the coast in front of me, and I saw a likely spot for it not very far away and close to one Gold. I knew that would not help my relationship with my neighbours, but I also knew it would take them a long time to get to hostile, so went for it.
- I saw that we had 2 additonal NWs very close by, amazing map. So planned to plant a settlement in each of them, work the NW and turn them into Resort Towns.
- Planned the Explorers, assuming I was going to get to Hegemony. I see in
@Manpanzee's post that he managed to get all 15 artifacts before Hegemony (amazing!), I did not believe I was going to be able to do that. So I hoped to get 4-5 artifacts from my continent and neighbouring continents, 4-5 from NWs (AIs tend to ignore that mastery for whatever reason), 1 from an IP and the rest from reaching Hegemony and researching in a museum in all 4 continents. I also knew there is a Narrative Event that gives you an Artifact, because I read it in an old Culture victory post I wrote for GoTM11, but I could not remember for the life of me what triggered it and I did not write it down in my old post, I could kill myself
. By my calculations I would need 5/6 explorers to be safe. Bought the first, dispersed a military IP to get the second, and bought the others as soon as I could.
- In the culture tree I beelined Hegemony, with the only detours of the Natural History mastery for the NWs artifacts and Democracy for the cultural (and diplo) points. I reached Hegemony on t48 and only needed to research the 4 continents to get the 4 remaining artifacts. As I am re-reading this, I realize that in most cases the detour to Democracy is likely a mistake, that is a 6-8 turns investment and there is no way the extra culture from the diplo and culture points will give you 6-8 turns worth of speed up the culture tree. Of course in this case, it would have been useless as I would not have had enough artifacts by Hegemony to finish the legathy path, but in most cases you get 1 or 2 from overbuilding and that would have been enough.
- I did not get any of the Mexican civics, same reason as above.
- On t2, I bought and sent a scout towards the West and a second scout towards the East, with the idea of uncovering the fog of war areas of the other 2 continents, specially the northern part, as I thought it was likely that there would be IPs that I had not discovered, imagine a friendly cultural or a firendly science or an additional military. My idea was to explore the Southern part using 2-3 of the units given at the start. I only found the military one and hostile science, gold and diplo (dispersed them), no friendly culture or science in the whole map.
I suzerained two hostile cultural, two friendly economic, dispersed everybody else I could reach (1 science, a couple diplo, a couple of gold, and 4 military). I dispersed one military to get my second explorer and dispersed the other three to accelerate a Worlds Fair that was built in 6 turns, thanks to the three military IPs, the 10% on wonder attribute, the 10% on wonders tradition and the 4 marbles that I had collected in my territory. I was not able to build the factory on time, as I had to spend money in units to defend against a double attack, a mistake as I believe could have ignored the attack, I am certain that if I replay the last 6-7 turns I would finish one turn earlier with the 20% from my 3 coffees plus a 4th from trade with Lisbon. As I had a lot of influence saved, I also avoided going to war with a couple of other AIs by reconciliation or just declining their tank relationship proposals.
For a more detailed guide on the Culture victory, I wrote an in-depth post on GoTM11,
https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...d-of-game-spoiler-thread.700595/post-16891640
Here is a screenshot of t53. The save game is from t53, on clic the World's Fair completes and you win on t54.
