Civ Jewelers is better than Sid’s Sushi and Mining Inc

[blitzkrieg1980]

I can't disagree more. Sistine chapel is a warmonger wonder. You push people back in land prewar, gives you the ability to attack 3-5 cities on the turn of DOW. This is a HUGE advantage, crippling the enemy from the beginning of the war, and shaving 5-ish turns off the war length. You can take a couple of cities with absolute minimal forces, and move in the longbows easily, move the attackers back over your own roads, ready to regroup to make 2-3 big stacks for the core. Culture is big for both culture AND domination. Very neglected feature of the game, and a neglected wonder. If I get a good shot, I always build it, unless I'm heading to space, then it's utterly useless. But don't neglect culture on a domination game. It matters a lot.

In my CIV history I'm primarily a domination game winner. I never have trouble and have only built the Sistine Chapel one time. If you have enough culture happening to push your enemy's borders back that much, perhaps you should consider shaving a ton of turns off your game and going cultural.

The advantage you discuss is nice, but not by any means necessary. Especially if you're looking at for Sistine.

I don't neglect culture on domination wins. I use the slider. No hammers invested, and once I'm on a solid domination push, I don't really need to focus on tech too much unless I've done something wrong. Also keeps my war weariness at bay.

 

[UncleJJ]

I have to agree with helemaalnicks, culture is important in domination warmongering both before the war and after. The Sistine Chapel is useful in the age of cannons and rifles before corporations are available and especially if you use SP instead of corporations it can be your main sources of long term culture, a temple gives 6 culture and all specialists including settled ones get +2. I find the extra culture is useful for removing the motherland, reaching the 10% own culture for drafting and for stopping vassals from causing problems with revolts. It is an expensive wonder and I seldom build it myself but I sure appreciate it when it's captured.

 

[blitzkrieg1980]

I appreciate any wonder when I capture it (or build it ). But culture has never been an issue in my domination games. Again, it's nothing that 20% culture slider doesn't take care of. And if I happen to be in Caste System (very possible with rifles/cannons if I'm beelining military techs) a couple artists along with the slider takes care of cultural borders.

I'm not saying culture isn't important for domination, I'm saying I'd rather use culture slider (provides both culture AND happiness during war time) and Mining Inc/Sid's Sushi than Civ Jewelers. In a recent game I had +16 from Mining Inc. With the modifiers, I was looking at a bonus of 32 in my basic production cities, a bonus of 56 in my heroic epic / mil academy city (units), and also 56 in my Iron Works/mil academy city. Add in Sid's Sushi for an extra 8 which is 4 specialists in each city that has it (+3 in Representation each) and I more than made up for my 20% culture slider.

 

[Iranon]

Order of usefulness for me:

Mining.Inc: Can be had early, gives a powerful and trouble-free bonus. Snowballs nicely since I can build executives quickly. If I run corporations and forgo this, I'm probably going for cultural victory.

Sid's Sushi: Seafood is usually plentiful, and the culture is a nice bonus. Can be a bit tricky with regard to growth caps, but if I worked towards corporations I probably settled very tightly anyway. Has a variety of uses (enabling total cottage spam, mass specialists, mass slavery).

Standard Ethanol: Plenty of resources to work with, very nice gold:science conversion, no cap trouble. The perfect alternative to a food corp if I don't want to waste my time building all that health infrastructure or if I'm working all tiles already and not interested in running Representation. Secure access to oil is usually a minor matter for me but it's nice. The main strike against it is that it comes quite late.

Cereal Mills: Usual povides less food than Sid's Sushi and comes a little later. Being slightly more cost efficient is not enough to make it preferable most of the time.

Creative Constructions: Mining.Incs small and more refined little brother. Not worth waiting for outside of cultural victory.

Aluminium Co / Civilized Jewelers: Of marginal use. the former because it only has 1 resource, greatly reducing its impact. The latter because its effects per resource are relatively minor outside a cultural victory... Sushi does the same job on the side while doing something much more powerful.
On the plus side, they will not drain gold (Jewelers making a profit, Aluminium Co giving the best exchange rate for gold:science in the game for a small amount of gold sacrificed, which is usually more than recovered by hq profits).

 

[Skallagrimson]

With Sushi and Caste system you can run artists with the food when you need border culture, then flip 'em to more useful specialists later on when the conquest has pushed the borders out further.

So with the versatility you get more from Sushi, IMO.