A strategy for consistent cultural wins on Monarch

Completely agree on mercantilism. I tried it in a game and didn't really like it at all. The extra specialist in the 2 cities with real gpp production was nice, but for the rest of the cities, 1 specialist couldn't replace the multiple +8 trade routes that got replaced by domestic routes.

I may have underestimated the overall importance of trade. Since trade routes add to commerce (and therefore science and later culture), grabbing currency early seems like a nice way to boost your economy.

At the moment, I see the following post-ancient techs as all pretty nice. I'm not sure the best ordering to get them -

1) Monarchy (manage unhappiness through military units)
2) Drama (manage unhappiness through theaters)
3) Currency (extra trade route, so +2 or more commerce in each city)
4) Calendar (+2 or +3 happiness in typical games)
5) Mathematics (health management + pre-req for other good stuff)

I'm finding myself going for early drama less and less (particularly with Catherine, since I need the culture boost less at this point) and doing math/calendar/currency and then picking up philosophy or drama.
 
oh, and another strategy that worked for me quite well involved me playing on a terra map. i could only get 6 cities, so i was wondering how i'd be able to get a third cathedral for my other big culture city. however, what worked out really well for me was letting other people's religious spread through. some of my cities had four or five different religions (and somehow i was able to found taoism...lucky trading i guess?). i ended up having a jewish, taoist, and a bhuddist cathedtral in three of my cities.

thanks for the strategies :) early drama worked for me...if anything it allowed for more specialist early. but, i'll try some other ways as well. but anything that can a) increase the size of your city and b) increase the commerce of your city are priorities. i guess it's more dependent on terrain as to which you should go first.

edit: oh yeah, and the thing that kinda bugs me is that i never saw a single culture flip during my game. i had cities that were completely surrounded by my culture, and i even saw one riot in a french city. however...none of the cities flipped to my control. yes, there were troops in there, but these cities were completely surrounded and in some cases only 24-28% of the foreign nationality. what gives?
 
I've been wanting to try a multiplayer game with a permanent alliance.... Has anyone tried this while going for a cultural victory? If I have an ally, will we win if I have 2 legendary cities and he has 1, for instance?

Could be interesting :)
 
I finally won a cultural win in 1910 on emperor. Some random thoughts on playing on emperor:

1) Being alone on an island stinks. There's no terrain grab, but you'll be virtually religion free until 1500 or so.

2) Religion is important, but probably not important enough to found them yourself. I figure each religion is worth approximately 150 culture/turn at the end in a 6 city game (so 3 temples, 3 monostaries, and 2 cathedrals in your core cities). Contrast this to my last game (panagea to guarantee I wasn't alone) where I managed to get 6 religions (3 by natural spread, 1 spread by another civ's missionary wave, founded Taoism, and a Hindu city flipped around 1700 AD). There were too many religions to fully exploit, but having lots of religions around 1000 AD is a lot better than having 2 religions at 1600 AD. Lots of religions also solved any happiness issues before I flipped the culture slider (I went straight from paganism into free religion).

3) I think I like Catherine better than Elizabeth. The downside is you lose great people. My +44 gpp/turn city would have been +66 gpp/turn with Elizabeth. This would have gotten me 3 or 4 more great artists. On the upside, creative is really good for an early land grab. I got early access to resources 2 and 3 spaces from my cities without having to build obelisks, libraries, or theaters early. This freed me up to concentrate on whichever tech would give me the biggest advantage. The second upside is the unique unit. With Elizabeth, you need gunpowder and rifling. Rifling is a fairly long path from where I typically end. Plus, redcoats are better at city defense than they are at protecting your precious towns. Cossacks only require gunpowder (1 tech from Liberalism) and military tradition (1 tech from Nationalism). And their mobility can better protect towns. Oh, one more plus - Catherine starts with mining and hunting, so you are 1 tech closer to archery, which is nice for early barbarian management. You are one tech farther from pottery, so it quickly evens out, but getting archery 5 turns or so sooner can save you some real pain.

4) Town development is always a bit of a problem. When you hit 1600 AD, you might have size 15 or so towns working some cottages that are towns, some that are villages, some that are hamlets, and some undeveloped. There isn't a lot of time left in the game for the newer cottages to grow. So I developed a strategy that seems to deal with this fairly well. Since my core cities generally have a little (or a lot) of gap between them, I build a town as close as 3 spaces away from the core city. I make sure that this city works the cottages for the core city. That way when the core city is ready to take them over (when I flip the culture slider), they are already partially developed. The extra cities also provide places to build temples (and military units). So even though your space my only support 4 real cities (which can easily happen on Emperor since the AI spreads pretty quickly), you can build 2 more cities within your existing borders. Don't overbuild these too early since there is a financial cost, but around 1000 AD or so might be a nice time to build these stub cities.
 
I've never played higher than Noble; is tech trading possible at the higher levels? If so, can you keep your military up-to-date with selective tech trades since you might even be ahead of the tech curve on culture-related techs?
 
This is a great article. My two cultural wins on Noble were made using Industrious civs and getting the culture from Wonders, but this forces you to research techs that slows your advance. Plus the best cultural wonders, Broadway, Hollywood, Rock and Roll and the Eiffel Tower are pretty far away.

My opinion is that Mercantilism could be VERY useful if you're alone on an island.

Okay, gotta go try that now :)
 
I won my first cultural victory today in 1960 on Noble as Frederick. I, too, had the problem of the city that I thought was going to be my third city ended up being not good enough.. the Incan capital I captured worked much much better.

I put the cultural on 100% around 1800 and watched the culture zoom.. I was 500+ in all three cities, and even got Berlin up to 750 before I dialed them back.

I agree with the trade routes. You can't have enough of them. I was running in the green at 100% culture thanks to a cornucopia of trade routes and commerce - and this without financial.

I probably could have won it earlier - I got a lot of non-artist great people (I had started this game before this thread had been posted actually!) and I also never had a golden age. Eight turns of extra commerce might have shaved a couple of turns off.
 
FYI.. Tried a game at Fast/Quick speed usig this strategy and it failed miserably. I'm assuming the game doesn't speed up resarch/production when game speed is altered?
 
walkerjks said:
...I developed a strategy that seems to deal with this fairly well. Since my core cities generally have a little (or a lot) of gap between them, I build a town as close as 3 spaces away from the core city. I make sure that this city works the cottages for the core city. That way when the core city is ready to take them over (when I flip the culture slider), they are already partially developed. The extra cities also provide places to build temples (and military units). So even though your space my only support 4 real cities (which can easily happen on Emperor since the AI spreads pretty quickly), you can build 2 more cities within your existing borders. Don't overbuild these too early since there is a financial cost, but around 1000 AD or so might be a nice time to build these stub cities.
Click to expand...

Lol! Talk about rezoning at its most devious. This is a really neat little trick.

I'd like to add some conjecture, if I may. I am currently working out my own cultural win strategy, and am in the process of databasing all the buildings I think could be important to the cultural win (for different reasons).

This is what I'd like to test/see tested: where all the breaking points of this strategy lie. For example, since the key elements of this strategy are some early culture, much late culture, adequate maintenance coverage, good GPP, lack-luster early research, and non-existant late research, I am curious to see what happens when these variables are played with. For example, is it possible to move the big switch to earlier than 1600 by switching to a more building/wonder centrist strategy with the Industrious trait? Artistic wonders might make up for the loss of the philisophical trait. This brings Qin Shi Huang to mind. Of course, the risk here is that you are also depending on having the appropriate stone/marble. Another thing you might do here is to focus mainly on Production in your core cities (and maybe use your rezoning strategy above) rather than specialists.

Could an increased tech focus work, with the idea being to reach 1800, ready for the big switch but with a much higher culture output than 500/turn due to things like Hollywood, Broadway, Eiffel tower, etc? You might combine this with the Kremlin and all that Commerce to pop a bunch of temples and cathedrals at the last second, instead of focusing on them earlier; if you manage to get Universal Suffrage quickly.

How much better is it to have 100% Culture than 80% Culture? Well, it depends on what you have to give up, but 100% Culture means your win will come 20% faster once you flip that switch! Coversely, you could also say that 80% Culture means you will win 25% slower than if you'd have 100%.

Or, what if 30% were pure profits? Profits that could be spent on hurrying production and upgrading military units at the last moment to ward off the incoming invaders.

Just some ideas.

=$= Big J Money =$=
 
Jaraq said:
FYI.. Tried a game at Fast/Quick speed usig this strategy and it failed miserably. I'm assuming the game doesn't speed up resarch/production when game speed is altered?
Click to expand...

I just played at quick on monarch and did a cultural victory. 2 civs had appolo, but not much else. I'm going to try on emperor soon.
 
So I said I was going to try on emperor - I did and I won! I played on large continents, 8 civs, normal speed. At the time of my win a couple of civs had appolo and only a couple ship parts. UN was built but and I was voted secretary general oddly enough. I had a pretty good location, never fought a single war. I suppose I'll try on Immortal sometime soon, although I think that may be a little too difficult.
 
walkerjks, Thanks for all this precious usefull information.
At this moment, I've only played at Noble.
I had all my best cultural win with not 0 wonders as you but with a little one located in my cities producing Great Artist. I've had 2 different cities producing Great Artist in order to gain more but I did not check the number of Great Artist i've got!
I only buit the wonder generating Great ARTIST People Point : Notre Dame, Sistine Chapel , Taj Mahal...
I had another cities producing only Scientific Great People point: scientisc specialist and The Great Library (+2 more scientis specialist) in order to produce academy in the big commerce cites in order to boost science!


I'm thinking of another point: generaly I use to play cultural game with between 5 and 10 cities. But I'm wondering, what happens with more cities.
With more cities, I would be able the have cities producing specialist each : one city producing Engeneer, another Great Prophet.
Indeed, Great Prophet is huge. I construct the Shrine of my state religion in one of my game and I used Armies of Missionnary around the world: the effect is huge : +1 more gold for each cities having your relegion... with the use of missionnary plus the fact that my relegion was sprend automaticaly I had around 12 more gold each turn just with the Shrine of my religion.

LeSphinx
 
It seems like under Free Religion, the cathedral class religious buildings have a prerequisite to build them. For that civic, it seems like you have to have a temple of that religion in every city to build its cathedrals. It's something to keep in mind, but one should probably be running Pacifism for the religious approach to Cultural Victory, anyway.
 
Not a temple in every cities but you have to construct 3 temples of same religion in order to construct One cathedral.
LeSphinx
 
Have been following this thread with great interest. One thing I don't understand though. How come in my games I need 4 temples to build 1 cathedral instead if 3? Something wrong with my copy of Civ4?? :confused:
 
The amount of temples required varies by map size. Small needs 2 temples, standard needs 3. I can only assume you are playing a large map :).
 
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