Culture Victory, my takeaways

goodolarchie

Warlord
Joined
Dec 27, 2009
Messages
282
Finished a French "peacemonger" culture victory in 1911, King difficulty.

Assyria
Morocco
Siam
Carthage
Byzantium
Iroquois

Only Morocco (score leader) and Assyria posed a challenge, with over 200% culture compared to the others. The final turn required a 3-hit combo - winning the Int'l games, performing a concert in Assyria, and having my GP convert his 3 cities to my religion for the 75% bonus.

Anyway.. my strategic takeaways. Mind you, this was a pretty easy difficulty, I played nice and only had to keep Assyria off my back as a warmonger. I had to think about what I would do differently at a higher level, against more social civs, here's what I came up with:

Early Game:
  • Deciding on seeing a culture victory through before meeting everyone is probably going to be the toughest victory type if you end up meeting Brazil or another war mongering superciv. It's not as fun to wage a tourism war as it is with a military one (though it is certainly just as strategically interesting).
  • Most of my final tourism rate came from tiles, wonders, buildings and special projects, as well as diplo bonuses in the late game... not from the base rate of great works. Theme bonuses as France with aesthetics make good sense, but there are other decent options for base tourism.
  • Building wide seems to be the best route. Not crazy wide, but having 6-9 cities with 10-16 pop, or whatever you can support, seems ideal.
  • I would emphasize a science lead and get TGL if at all possible. That's not going to happen in a Deity game against Pacal, or Egypt, but I would say it's worth rushing and chopping.
  • Get your 3 guilds online ASAP and staff them. I put them in paris, but it makes sense to put them anywhere you can generate a lot of GPP and have high pop. Generate as many Great Works as possible. This sounds like a no-brainer, but the theming bonuses will be hard to get if you don't prioritize this.
  • Founding an early pantheon or religion isn't as important as the tech lead, but getting +:c5culture: tile bonuses is fantastic later with Hotels and Airports. It helps with the settler rexing too. Most of your faith later will go to GA, GM, and GW's.

Mid Game:
  • At this point, you know who or whom is going to be the pain in the ass that will make your victory take another hundred turns. You have two choices, go cull their culture with the sword, or start planning your concert-bombs.
  • Unlock and build Forbidden Palace ASAP. It pretty much secures your ability to run the show for at least the first few proposals. World religion if you can, and Arts funding are fantastic early proposals.
  • Unlock Louvre ASAP and +1 naval/embark, it will speed up dig sites.
  • Prioritize tech for Hotels and Airports, as well as archeologists.
  • As soon as you get your hotels online, that's when a victory is possible. You could go crush the top culture civ, if you feel like doing a mixed domination. It's almost certainly a quicker path to victory than waiting for Int'l games and airports.

Late Game:
  • Prioritize the International Games. Remember the build wide strategy? This is where those hammers come through.
  • Spam museums and arche's for artifacts, same as above. It's a super easy way to get base tourism. With a tech lead you will have no problem securing 20-30 artifacts over 100 turns. Remember, you can "steal" one dig site from each open borders civ by apologizing and refraining with a null/negligible diplo hit, just like settling, religion spreading, city-state bribing, etc.
  • I didn't find any of the ideologies game breaking, but I was able to reach a 3rd tier freedom bonus of 33% tourism for broadcast towers.
  • Execute your plan to topple the last civ or two - meaning open borders, trade route, great prophet conversion, GM concert, or war. You will almost certainly need to do some combination of the above in order to win.

Other misc impressions and opinions:

Culture victory is diverse and fun. It brings a nice balance of hammers, culture, faith, and science. I laud Firaxis for putting much thought into it. I have a few petty grievances:
  • The Culture UI, specifically the great works screen, is acrid. Having no HUD on any icons, you'll have mouseover every single work of art, music, and writing in order to piece together your themes. Then you'll have to mouseover the tooltip on the theme bonus, then have to scout around and possibly trade works to achieve it. It's a flat out chore of a metagame and I can only hope somebody mods this, and fast.
  • There aught to be a way to hurt, culturally (not via tourism), another civ other than making war. My vote would be an enactment world congress/UN. It would help the massive imbalance and make culture victories a bit more feasible.
  • Great Works, even as France, are pretty lackluster. I think I collected over 60 GW and artifacts, but that alone didn't even come close to getting a culture victory. It would be nice to see early-effects of having, say TGL with two nicely themed writing pieces around 1AD. From what I could tell, tourism is a hidden nuke in a trenchcoat that doesn't really do anything mid and late game, except cause other civs to be concerned about blue jeans (with no true diplo hit). If Great Works added something beyond culture, like happiness or gold through trade modifiers, it would be far more interesting. Or how about having Civ A and B's works in your Louvre cause them to like you more? I don't know, it seems very bland and the swap works screen would cause any enterprising museum curator to reconsider their career choice.
  • Trade routes should add base tourism against said civ, not just a generic 25% modifier. It would make the strategy more interesting and allow you to dogpile them with something other than the Glorious Ninth symphony.
  • Nice work Firaxis, easily the most interesting and all-encompassing victory type ever created.
 
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