ALC wanna-be, culture shock.

[Sisiutil]

Cultural victories usually score quite low. The score mechanism values population very highly, and completed technologies and wonders are up there too. A cultural win usually means you've been avoiding conquest, so you have a small population, and you've been extremely focused and have avoided a lot of techs and wonders that you don't need.

If you check the Victoria ALC game (link in my sig), there's a different type of cultural victory: conquest of a continent followed by a late-game, specialist-powered cultural win. The biggest benefit of the approach is that it definitely avoids the military weakness so many cultural win attempts suffer from.

 

[cabert]

Congrats for the win
Sisiutil's right. Score won't be great (+ you finished in 1947, that's not really early!), but does it matter?

I see you mastered it, but where reluctant going full speed culture.
That's not a good idea.

I know 3 ways of going cultural with low risk of failure :
- Cottaging like crazy 3 good cities, building a SE for the rest of the empire.
- Farming like crazy 3 good cities, caste system pacifism + sistin chapel will let you run high output artists there, while teching through cottages or specialists in the rest of the empire
- Cottaging like crazy 3 good city sites, while building hordes of units in the rest of the empire to avoid falling down in power = you start running at 100% culture as soon as you hit liberalism, and you don't look back.

The third one is only safe if you managed to get shrines to pay for everything IMHO. If you didn't I don't know how to fund the empire.

In any case, it's really easier to go cultural AFTER conquering the continent you're on like Sisiutil said.

My 2 cents if you plan going for cultural :
- religions are a big key. It's worth going for the early ones, then for others too (CoL gives confucianism, philosophy gives taoism, you "need" those!)
- if you don't found a religion, open borders with the founder + build roads to him = let the religions spread.
- as soon as a religion comes in, build a monastery for it. Better to build a monastery in your wanabee big one first, since after 1000 years the culture output doubles (so an ancient monastery is 4 base cpt!).
- If you don't need to (= Pacificism while running 3 GA farms), don't choose a state religion. If you do, all other religions don't give culture (though the buildings still work). So you can have 5 base cpt from being a holy city +1 cpt for any religion in a city. If you select one religion, the others don't count anymore.
- if you go specialist economy early, don't try too hard to farm artists. later great persons are very expensive in GPP.
- don't try to be everybody's friend, you'll only manage "pleased" status. Pleased neighbours may attack you. Better to have a few "friendlies" and kill the others

 

[LosBlack]

thanks Sisiutil and Cabert for the feed back. i have not gotten around to reading the Vicky ALC yet, but it's on my to do list.

i will try out your strats and see how i fare. i had actually already started a new game with Saladin to try Sisiutil's suggestion, but i don't know if i can knock Spain and the Incas off the map when i get done with France..i have the Incas boxed in and just took Paris so we'll have to wait and see.

sadly, i'm still working on city specialization. it just takes practice and poor me has a full-time job and school. glutton for punishment.

/whine

oh well, on to bigger and hopefully better things. thanks again.