culture victory, cant do it

7 civs left and I was Influential with 3 of them and Popular with the other 4, rising nicely. Until Siam built the Great Firewall and now I am falling with them. I do not know of any way to counteract that, other than attacking them which I am too weak to do.

How did you manage great musicians, what turn are you on and what's your TPT?
 
I checked 11 turns after Siam built their Firewall and it is still falling, at what rate I do not know. My tpt is 324 and I am getting 500-600 tpt on everyone except on Siam, which is 286. I know they have far more cpt than that as they have been a powerhouse in that. I did shoot my load on Musicians, managed 6 concerts but will only get 2-3 more before the game ends (currently at turn 390). I know what to do better next time - prioritize the Musicians wonder and specialists in all cities, not just one, and to hoard faith to spam Musicians at the end. I see now where Musicians would make the difference with someone like Siam.
 
Still struggling towards a cultural victory in my game - so many are attacking me and my tiny army but I am buying time. And time is what I need because it becomes a game of patience, hoping you will survive long enough as I watch the white line slowly creep up the pink line. I have to do all this without only two Musician specialists in one city - I've done four concerts and can get one more bought.

I just won my first one (t.294, Morocco, deity) and if you're still interested i can share how i did it:

I expanded to 5 cities total and went tradition.

Then, between turns 130 - 190 i captured the whole of India with lots of good stuff. (xbows + artilleries + gifted impi). By the time i did it, the world was set for order and autocracy, so my freedom empire did struggle for about 5 turns, until Gandhi's works of art kicked in and i turned exotic with everyone.

Then it was time for Theodora to die and share few works of art with me. With small detour to refrigeration i went straight for flight and spammed GW bombers. After that, it was research labs --> airports --> internet beeline.

I did build guilds pretty early and staffed them easily with the help from a food caravan. Did build few late game wonders, like Sydney Opera, CN and Statue of Liberty, but they didn't do me any good. (or bad) I didn't even try going for earlier wonders, since AI's were spamming them left and right..

Policy path was: full tradition, aesthetics opener, 3 in rationalism, freedom till broadcast towers, full aesthetics for 3 faith bought musicians. Also generated 3 naturally. Used them ALL for concert tours.

Didn't have a religion, just +1 culture from pastures pantheon, so i improved my FPT gradually, until it hit +50. Was lucky to buy 2 R.labs with faith.

Won international games few turns after internet and peaked at 800 tourism.

It started as a domination game until i got bored :).

Spoiler :
 
If you could've or would've achieved domination faster than CV from the point you broke your strat, this isn't quite a CV -_- it's just a domination where you eventually spammed next turn. Don't get me wrong I don't think all starts lend themselves to fully peaceful CVs with the wonder requirements of the VC but I find it hard to call it a VC if all my wonders and GWs are stolen.
 
If you could've or would've achieved domination faster than CV from the point you broke your strat, this isn't quite a CV -_- it's just a domination where you eventually spammed next turn. Don't get me wrong I don't think all starts lend themselves to fully peaceful CVs with the wonder requirements of the VC but I find it hard to call it a VC if all my wonders and GWs are stolen.
Well, "faster" is relative. Lord knows in real time most domination games I've played take much, much longer.
 
If you could've or would've achieved domination faster than CV from the point you broke your strat, this isn't quite a CV -_- it's just a domination where you eventually spammed next turn. Don't get me wrong I don't think all starts lend themselves to fully peaceful CVs with the wonder requirements of the VC but I find it hard to call it a VC if all my wonders and GWs are stolen.

So, you call it a CV when you rolled "n" times to get super cooked game conditions, where you are able to spam most wonders, while AIs wage war between themselves? I don't mind. But there is more to BNW than that.
 
I'm tending to agree with Moriarte. I went into BNW being overall focused on one element (victory) to learn that in depth. I did that with Diplomacy+Trade/Gold, Religion (which sucked) and now Cultural/Tourism. While I do have a much better understanding how to make them work effectively, the game can be much more than that. I do realize that one can get lucky and have a game where it ends up like a sandbox (ugh) but I think it's a better game to do them against competition. Regarding Cultural, I missed out on nearly all of the wonders and I could only have done the themes with Oxford, Hermitage and Louvre, plus the Museums. I needed many more and I think it is viable to go out and get them from others. This is the same mindset of wanting to go domination but you still have to work on culture, unlike vanilla and G&K. But above all, science is still king and that is more of the key to making cultural and other games work effectively. So how to best balance science, wars, growth, gold, culture and tourism in more normal games is the learning process because not all games will play with passive civs on cooked maps.
 
Yeah I still haven't figure out how to do a effective peaceful CV...
I think you really need to go smack the guy with highest culture output to win.
Among all the AIs, I seem to have most problems with Darius. He is like in a permanent golden age or something, I just can't break through his crazy amount of culture output if I don't kill him.
 
Cultural Victory is tough. I spent a lot of time refining my technique. You almost have to be all things to all people. You need enough science to get to the key cultural wonders first. You need enough production to produce wonders and win the production contests, you need influence to have your relgion or ideology declared official and you need to defend your empire.

Culture isn't really a peaceful victory as it seems easier if some of the AI are killed off, whether or not you do it, doesn't matter. It is always easy to dominate less Civs culturally than more.

I've never tried the delay building great musician guild tactic. I have read that it is important to start generating tourism early, but a lot of the big bonuses come late. If you are Polynesia you can build the Maoi early, but late you can sculpt your coast line to be one big wall of Maoi, everything else being secondary to culture.

Ideology plays a big role. I won my cultural victory with Autocracy. Choosing an ideology that doesn't annoy your key neighbors/trading partners is part of my strategy. Getting the AI to flip and even help you have your ideology declared official helps with a cultural victory. Obviously you want to industrialize and build three factories quickly, but I don't think one free social trait is worth the long term penalty so if I'm not the very first person to choose an ideology I often take one that has already been chosen to gain a friend.

It is easier to dominate culturally with open boarders, so not being a warmonger and being a good trader even a friend helps. I have horded Faith, in fact relgion can have a huge effect on cultural victory. I still don't know what the optimal relgion is, it is map and civ dependent, and sometimes you just can't get to a belief first. I don't open Piety, but for cultural victories I tend to pursue it instead of Patronage. I also like Exploration over Aesthetics. I've done both, I've done just Aesthetics, but when I won culturally I was Polynesia and Exploration is great for them.

Do not underestimate the option to go wide and stuff your museums with artifects and of course surrounding all your costal cities with Maoi.

Later in the game you need to buy Great Musicians. The reformation belief that lets you buy any Great Person can help as usually I'm not the first to reform my relgion, even if I do often found the first one. I'm big on seeking out Holy Mountains and plopping my second city at the base. I also generally go for Stonehedge as my first wonder, staying at one city until it and National College are built usually.

Finally you do want to host the world games and you also want to get to the Internet quickly. +100% is a big plus. Your holy mountains and desert folklore or just tonnes of Mosques etc, lets you send musicians on tour frequently.

It isn't easy and presumeably it is even harder on whatever level you're trying to win culturally.

The Louvre or any shiny wonder, you can win without. Getting industrialized, getting coal and factories, and winning the bid for the games or getting to a key ideology tenet is more important than building the Louvre.
 
Well I am far from pretending that all starts are peaceful CV-able and I have never had much an issue with people using war to achieve other VCs. However, there are many, many flaws in the current culture system (esp at higher difficulties) that I believe are bound to be improved over patches.

However, I have never been a fan of having an easy domination victory at hand at some point and then just stopping and calling it something else than domination victory.

Currently, the CV system puts, imho, far too much emphasis on wonders and gives way too few penalties to warmongering. Some Great Works should be destroyed upon plunder, the leftover ones should not be immediately transferable to other cities to get the output whilst the acquired city is in anarchy and realistically, the +3 culture per wonder resolution is very imbalanced given how the essence of CV evolves around hotels, airports, NVC and the internet.

I believe they need to add some culture per tile derived from aesthetics for a given improvement (maybe the goto TPs) or something similar, somehow allow a larger shift or emphasis into culture GPPs that is not all about faith. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to purchase GPs with faith but I think its wrong that your only alternative to faith after the Internet is spam next turn working 2 GM slots.

It could be a lesser version of the GMs that can be built with hammers, it could be an era or a SP/tenet that unlocks the possibility to build a musician guild in more cities or it could be that GMs can be saved and their strength adjusts over time as with other GPs...

But anyway, the issue is that the only real scalability of tourism output is via super-wide praying that there will be many, many dig sites within 3 tiles of our cities and, more reasonably, by wonder spamming and that is downright bad design. A 10 TPT landmark in your wide empire would've yielded 6 TPT from the equivalent GW in capital, not accounting for the pissible theming bonus possible, not accounting for a share of the culture value of a wonder you put it in, not accounting for that the base infrastructure required for CV is higher than that of other VCs and going wider is naturally detrimental for "per city production average HPT".

So anyway, long story short I agree that it sucks to have to only play godly starts for peaceful CV. I don't think its as bad as you need godly starts but you definitely need a least one very strong capital to be able to achieve wonders as well as the capacity to achieve tech parity somewhere in renaissance.

The wonder-based scalability of both culture and tourism is such that if the player can't get many wonders, he will be facing one or two crazy runaways that have spammed the said wonder and scaled.


In the mean time, I still stand by my statement that stopping a won domination to win by CV is not a CV. You could very well just beeline artillery after Pschools and take 2-3 neighbors to have 3-4 times the amount of GW that you could ever produce on your own and that will almost always win you before T300. Yet if you warmonger pre T100-120, the amount of great works stolen becomes so marginal that you net little to no gain towards your VC other than the odds of a few more landmarks.

In that sense, you can just skip aesthethics and exploration as well as archaeology which have CV written all over and still pull an arguably easier CV than effectively trying to attract tourists to your cities peacefully. This last statement makes no sense whatsoever to me.
 
UPDATE: I was able to get all the other CV wonders (louvre, Uffizi, broadway, eiffel tower) and I am rising with everyone. As soon as I got dynamite I counter attacked Pocatello and swept him away with my artillery and volunteer army (freedom). Actually I did not have much of a choice, he held the only nearby source of Oil and he was starting to build artillery and great war bombers. It was bloody... I stayed at 5 cities up until I invaded the Shoshone. I expect to end the game with 8 cities. Currently beelining towards airports and then internetz for the win. I could still lose to science though, the world is too fragmented for a diplomatic victory. This game has been peaceful for the most part and I am not eliminating Pocatello because he cannot be influenced. If I cannot win this via peaceful CV it will be for one of two reasons. 1) someone very distant with closed borders will beat me to great fire wall or 2) my total lack of diplomacy will disable me from getting world ideology, religion, or the international games.
 
In that sense, you can just skip aesthethics and exploration as well as archaeology which have CV written all over and still pull an arguably easier CV than effectively trying to attract tourists to your cities peacefully. This last statement makes no sense whatsoever to me.

British museum (and other museums across the globe) are fillled with art and artifacts from all over the world, part of which were acquired by rather questionable methods. Does this fact make sense to you?
 
Agree. The fact that the game includes cultural rewards for warmongers (including successful warmongers who choose hang their swords above the mantel and settle down to win a cultural victory) is not only appropriate from a gameplay perspective (culture and tourism can rein in a warmongering runaway, and a warmonger can rein in a cultural runaway), but is also an accurate reflection of the real world. As I look around, all of the civs that are currently having a significant cultural impact on the rest of the world enjoyed bloody pasts (else they wouldn't be here now) and their museums are stuffed with the rewards of their prior aggression. The Louvre's theming bonus is quite apt, and similar diversity bonuses would no doubt apply to the British National Museum and the Smithsonian if they were in the game.

If a warmonger chooses to "settle" for a science victory, is that not a "real" science victory?
 
If you were playing a peaceful civ throughout the whole game, you shouldn't even wait for Internet before you win the cultural vic. At least, I won 3 times on Immortal and never even got close to Internet. All around T280-300.

Then again, I used cultural-oriented civs such as Poland, Brazil, and France.

Religion IS helpful and will save turns. It's not important to get a religion yourself, but it is important to get faith to purchase 1-2 GMs at the end.

If people have a hard time with CVs, they should practice with Poland, I think. The free social policies are ridiculously helpful. You'll finish Aesthetics faster and have some points into Piety for more faith.
 
British museum (and other museums across the globe) are fillled with art and artifacts from all over the world, part of which were acquired by rather questionable methods. Does this fact make sense to you?

Let me put it this way rather. Are you attracted by a trip to north korea currently? How long did it take Germany to attract international tourists following WWII?

I am aware that art does not originate from within borders pretty much everywhere around the world but not so many such artifacts were stolen through wars. They were stolen through similarly conceptual archeological digs (or other type of robbery).

I'd rather be able to tell a spy to steal a GW instead of a tech than think "hey let's go kill Ghandi and take 15 wonders, theses will surely attract more tourists". There has to be a post-war tourism recovery period for newly acquired wonders and GWs.


But even if it wasn't for a slightly more realistic experience since in the end, this is still a strategy game and not an time travel to 4000 b.c. :p, the fact that a newly implemented system that is meant to allow for an alternative peaceful VC is "too hard" peacefully does not make it more of a CV to tear the world down to pieces through domination and stop domination once the spoils of wars are sufficient to obtain crazy TPT.

So back to my point. I'm fine with taking advantage of warmongering but if absolutely no consideration of the peaceful CV difficulties were taken since instead you can just go significantly more aggressive in the mid game and plunder even more wonders and artifacts to get the same results, then really I just don't think this is CV. It's just domination. At least when it comes down to talking strategy...
 
If you were playing a peaceful civ throughout the whole game, you shouldn't even wait for Internet before you win the cultural vic. At least, I won 3 times on Immortal and never even got close to Internet. All around T280-300.

Then again, I used cultural-oriented civs such as Poland, Brazil, and France.

Religion IS helpful and will save turns. It's not important to get a religion yourself, but it is important to get faith to purchase 1-2 GMs at the end.

If people have a hard time with CVs, they should practice with Poland, I think. The free social policies are ridiculously helpful. You'll finish Aesthetics faster and have some points into Piety for more faith.

Most of the argument at this point is from Deity perspective and whilst it is possible to win pre internet on deity, it's extremely unlikely. Just the double settler start of AIs alone account for a few thousands extra culture over the course of the game and just gives them the tech lead longer making it more difficult for the human to catch any relevant wonders.

Without france/brazil/poly UI, you are somewhat doomed as a human if you could not catch enough wonders.
 
I've never tried the delay building great musician guild tactic. I have read that it is important to start generating tourism early, but a lot of the big bonuses come late. If you are Polynesia you can build the Maoi early, but late you can sculpt your coast line to be one big wall of Maoi, everything else being secondary to culture.
Early tourism is most important if you plan on being the first to pick an ideology (using Oxford to bulb Radio is a good way to accomplish this). If you pick your ideology first and have little cultural influence with other civs, the next two civs to get ideology will almost always pick different ones for the free tenets and then the rest of the world will fall in lockstep behind them. On the other hand, if you pick the first ideology and have decent influence with the rest of the world, they will tend to follow your path instead.
 
Early tourism is only important to counter going into the deep red happiness from external ideologies pressures. If you have an ok happiness buffer to survive that, early tourism matter extremely little compared to late game tourism for CV.

I tend to try to output more early tourism when going for science or diplo than when I do CV. Little tourism goes a long way in the influence calculation. 2 tourism for 150 turns saves you less than one late game turn so generally, shoving 5 turns off of NVC/Internet will earn you more tourism towards victory than pushing to get that extra GW out. (read don't over cripple growth to try to work all guild slots in the early game)
 
If you were playing a peaceful civ throughout the whole game, you shouldn't even wait for Internet before you win the cultural vic. At least, I won 3 times on Immortal and never even got close to Internet. All around T280-300.

Then again, I used cultural-oriented civs such as Poland, Brazil, and France.

Religion IS helpful and will save turns. It's not important to get a religion yourself, but it is important to get faith to purchase 1-2 GMs at the end.

If people have a hard time with CVs, they should practice with Poland, I think. The free social policies are ridiculously helpful. You'll finish Aesthetics faster and have some points into Piety for more faith.

Would you have recommended going to Piety instead of/before/after Rationalism and Tenets?
 
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