Does anyone actually use the culture slider?

[MeatUnit2]

I have used the Cultural slider in the past to very little effect. It seems to me to be the weakest of the slider options.

It is probably a personality defect, or a lack of game skills (or both), but I tend to be a warmonger. Using the cultural slider is like trying to smother your opponents with kisses.

When I feel "cultural pressure" from a neighbor - his cultural boundaries encroaching on mine - I find it so much more efficacious to cross his borders in force and to raze or capture his cities. Or to send spies into those cities and cause trouble.
Often both.

Periodically during the game there are pop-ups announcing that someone or other has completed his great work listing the ten civs with the most culture and I look at these lists like a dessert menu. There is nothing more tempting to a warmonger than a civ that is spending all its commerce on cultural projects.

Very late in a game I have cranked up the cultural slider in order to get as many extra tiles out of (frequently my vassal states) neighbor's territory in order to reach a dominance victory. Other than that, give me guns, gold and spies.

 

[AJ11]

Not only did you actually employ spies, but you haven't won conquest yet. Can't win conquest, in the 1700's. You have EIGHT rivals left. At least one of them doesn't even have your culture in his capitol. Screw the 1700's, you won't even beat my 1st attempt where I had an inferior leader over a year ago with this nonsense save. You might break 1900, maybe, depending on revolt luck and how quickly in particular you an get at least some culture on the last AI.

Never noticed that those spies were FORTIFIED on their squares, did you? They are DEFENSIVE spies. I never ran a single spy mission. Heck, I don't even have Security Bureaus or Intelligence Agencies in my cities, only Courthouses for maintenance purposes. If you look at the EP status, you will notice the pathetic amount of EP that I have, spread evenly over ALL AIs (well, except the dead ones).

As usual, you never really examine what the other guy says. You just shoot your mouth off using assumptions. And in this case, your assumption was that I cheated.

I really don't know what you are trying to prove anymore beyond the fact that you really don't know anything about the game outside of your comfort zone.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

As usual, you never really examine what the other guy says. You just shoot your mouth off using assumptions. And in this case, your assumption was that I cheated.

Nobody said anything about cheating (why would someone assume that I had a cheating assumption ? It's not like I said anything about cheating...). Strictly speaking, given that you ran culture slider 100% of the time (once you had the right multipliers etc), you should still technically be allowed to use espionage.

Ah, but my point is dodged...the save posted is not a 1700's win. It's a failure to prove that culture slider > espionage slider...which would lead one to the conclusion that:

I really don't know what you are trying to prove anymore beyond the fact that you really don't know anything about the game outside of your comfort zone.

Shouldn't be coming from somebody who turns off all the the victory conditions the AI actually wins .

Seriously, the argument that culture slider > espionage slider fails in the math and it failed in the demonstration. Can you please not resort to personal attacks because the facts don't support the arguments from your position?

 

[AJ11]

Nobody said anything about cheating.

I think this quote speaks for itself. Goodbye.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I think this quote speaks for itself. Goodbye.

Wait a minute!

I'm still waiting for that completed save that proves me wrong .

 

[MeatUnit2]

I think AJ11 and TheMeInTeam should play a series of games against each other in a controlled environment. Possibly ping pong, or a drinking game.
Why don't you trade email addresses and do it on your own time?

I respect your opinions but this infighting is not interesting.
Get a room.
And I do mean it when I say I respect your opinions. Don't make me disrespect you.

 

[AJ11]

Hmm... Interesting. This time, I paid a little bit more attention, and actually played semi-intelligently. Different map because I didn't have the save from the other one. Same settings, though, and no offensive spies. The idea is to conquer by culture only. Map didn't have gold, silver or gems... Civ Jewellers was out. Sushi and CreateCon was in.

By 1750, I only had 4 opponents left. The slider was at 100% culture. Revolt chance in 3 of the 4 was about 4-8%. Saladin was a problem because he had enough units to prevent a revolt. How the heck was he keeping all those units??? Then I realised how. Open borders... Like a bloody idiot, I forgot to turn the damned thing off when I had surrounded his little town two deep in culture.

Well, that sucked. Live and learn, I guess. This is only the second time I've played this style. Different, and interesting.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

^ you can consider using the EP you DO get to incite revolts or pop starve, should speed things up.

If you do get a super early finish drop the save here. I'm not too stubborn to learn a thing or two, especially with recent joinings into realms beyond pitboss/PBEM against people who are probably better than me by a fair bit.

I was originally skeptical of mines/specs w/o rep over cottages too, but U Sun and Rusten showed me a thing or two about the tradeoffs there.

The hidden reasoning behind me asserting the dominance of espionage mission is fairly simple; you get to point-focus all of your nation's commerce. In essence, that means that no matter how far away a city is from the cities you currently try to flip, you can still put the same amount of heavy pressure there. Another reason is that it will always take <20 spread culture missions to make a city's culture >50% yours (you get 5% of total culture for that city each mission, and the culture from previous missions counts) If you place something like cathedrals or hermitage it only works until after you flip the cities they touch. Cities along the coasts that are no longer adjacent to flip-targets don't get to do much.

 

[AJ11]

^ you can consider using the EP you DO get to incite revolts or pop starve, should speed things up.

The challenge is to NOT use any offensive espionage missions and to be able to do it by the end of the 1700s.

I'll have to start another game tomorrow. I want to see how my strategy would work if I have Civ Jewels in my pocket.

 

[uat2d]

I already have my popcorn, AJ vs TMIT is entertaining to watch.

/ontopic

I only use the Culture slider when I'm going for culture, when I'm about to reach the Dom land requirement or, when playing RoM - AND, to counter war weariness (most of the best civics can really increase WW to a very painful level but it's more often than not more beneficial to just run the slider a bit than to lose turns swapping to worse forms of government).

 

[AJ11]

I already have my popcorn, AJ vs TMIT is entertaining to watch.

It is only entertaining to you because you are not talking to a brick wall.

AJ: Please be more polite and stop ranting at people.
TMIT: Events are the pits! Anyone who likes them are not competitive!
AJ: Hey. Stop being rude. People can play any way they want.
TMIT: But events are anti-competitive, and you can't say otherwise!
AJ: Stop being a jerk.
TMIT: Events... blah blah blah!

A question from someone relatively new to the forums: Do you guys just ignore him and let him rant or do people actually listen to him?

 

[Archon_Wing]

I like to rant myself, so I won't be criticizing anyone.

 

[ori]

Moderator Action: Please discuss each others posts while not posting swipes at each other

 

[AJ11]

Well, that is coming along. This time, I didn't even bother building spies

1750 and only three guys left, and the only reason Persia is still alive is because he was hiding in the corner and I couldn't get to him until the mid-1600s.

Justinian was a complete donkey, though he is hanging around 9% to revolt. Theology SUCKS, although I was really stupid in not hitting upon the idea to gift him Buddhist missionaries sooner (only did it in early 1700). It is just a matter of time now.

I am not sure how Willem is hanging on when the city two squares from him is already at Legendary culture.

Anyway, here are the saves if anyone wants to have a play with it. well, I think those are the saves. I have so many, I get mixed up. Let me know if I got it wrong.

Remember, no offensive espionage.

Oh, and it was a good thing I turned off cultural and domination win. I would have won either in the 1500s...

 

[uat2d]

It is only entertaining to you because you are not talking to a brick wall.

AJ: Please be more polite and stop ranting at people.
TMIT: Events are the pits! Anyone who likes them are not competitive!
AJ: Hey. Stop being rude. People can play any way they want.
TMIT: But events are anti-competitive, and you can't say otherwise!
AJ: Stop being a jerk.
TMIT: Events... blah blah blah!

A question from someone relatively new to the forums: Do you guys just ignore him and let him rant or do people actually listen to him?

That's your opinion of how things are, I bet he was a different one and everyone else (including me) also has his own, and quite frankly, your discussions are really interesting to read because they're that fervently-written.

But ori is right, argue all you want and try to prove each other wrong, just don't post assumptions about each other and take those cheap shots. Arguments are fine, flamming like that is not.

As for your question, no, we do not ignore him, at least I do not. I'll talk for myself, he's not the most friendly guy around (even when I first interacted with him, I kinda got pissed at how he ridiculed my playing) but for the most part, he is right and one can't argue with his knowledge of the game mechanics.

I've won Emperor and I still learn quite a lot from his posts and videos. Even if he sometimes rants a little bit too much and fails to understand that most people (IMO) don't play Civ competitively like he does. If you get past that, you'll find that he means no harm and doesn't talk out of his hat.

And no, from where I'm standing, it doesn't not seem like he's the one ranting about events and you're the one telling him how to behave. It's not even your job to tell him how to behave, that's something for the mod team to decide. You're both responsible enough to know how to behave, and those passionate arguments do make the CFC experience more enjoyable, please don't turn that into a cat fight, it'd be a shame if the mods had to intervene.

As for events, that's another topic, this one is about the culture slider. I don't want this to be a fully offtopic post, so I'll just say that both might have its uses (culture more than rng events, obviously) and that both when used extensively are boring, as culture victories suck and events are just annoyances that ruin your day and occasionally your game, so both should be disabled by default.

If you'd like to play with them on, it's your choice, it's just that if I were to play Civ MP with you, I'd rather not have them on.

 

[AJ11]

Challenge complete. Same starting save as above.

This is the save towards the end. The year is 1655. Persia is the only one left by virtue of hiding in the corner. It already had one revolt (just about to come out of it, as you can see). It is completely swamped. In fact, I just got the circumnavigation notification because my borders are seeing each other over Persia.

There is a Great Artist (ahh... Vincent... Starry, starry night. Paint your palette blue and grey...) sitting in the nearest town waiting for Persia to come out of revolt for a culture bomb. There are also a bunch of other Great People lying around. I got lazy towards the end and didn't bother with Golden Ages. Don't know if there would have been an effect, but meh!

From this save, you can see why all VCs are off except Conquest. Domination would have been won a long time ago, and half my cities are at Legendary status in terms of culture. Before they all died, the entire world was a Buddhist lovefest thanks to my missionaries (except Willem; I somehow missed him, which accounted for him hanging around that long...). Diplomacy and religious would have been in the bag for me as well, seeing as I would have been the one who have built the AP and the UN (I built every wonder that was built in the game) and my empire's population would have been more than the rest of the world put together.

One more thing to note is the Culture Slider, the topic of this thread. Yep. It is at 100%. Why? Because 100% culture when multiplied out by buildings can give over 1000 culture per turn per city (the highest culture per turn in that save is over 3300). That's right. From zero to legendary in less than 50 turns. From 1 ring around your city to 6.

Case in point: Constantinople, the city with the highest culture per turn. I had to go through Washington and Rome to get to it. It flipped in 1470AD. Between 1470AD and 1655AD, it gained just over 56000 culture. It went from zero to legendary in, what, about 36/37 turns? The best part of it all was that none of its infrastructure was bought. I never had the cash. Running 3 corps and a 100% culture slider made things interesting in the financial department for a long whle (in fact, ever since I got CreateCon). In other words, it built all of its culture buildings and multiplier buildings, making that 36/37 turns longer than it could have been.

To those that said it cannot be done, well, the results speak for themselves.

Oh, and here's the ultimate kicker: This game was played with both huts and events on. In fact, it is my standard events setting (10% per turn, etc., etc., etc.). In this game, events hindered more than it helped. Tiwaniku went into revolt about half a dozen times (the losing 1 pop and lose a turn if you pay cash event, not slave revolt). Cuzco got hit a couple of times and Machu was hit once. Tiwa also got hit by a typhoon that knocked down two buildings (one of which was the Buddhist monastery; luckily, it was early, so I was able to rebuild it). Through all that, I must have also lost about two dozen improvements thanks to my neighbours blowing them up because of the riots event (the one that allowed them to interfere for more damage).

Proves that with the right planning and contingencies, bad events, even the primo-bad ones, don't hurt you that much.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

^ Very impressive!

I'll have a look...and see what espionage can do for this one.

 

[Ramesses-Rules]

as culture victories suck )

Oh, shot in the heart. I play exclusively for Culture Victory, and have a lot of fun doing it. When I first started, I tried war-mongering strategy. I find it boring, tedious, and stressful. "Each to his own."

 

[uat2d]

Oh, shot in the heart. I play exclusively for Culture Victory, and have a lot of fun doing it. When I first started, I tried war-mongering strategy. I find it boring, tedious, and stressful. "Each to his own."

What I find boring is no researching, no building, no growth, no war threat, just skipping turn and culture bombing till 3 of your cities get Legendary culture.

But hey, whatever makes the game most enjoyable.

 

[Ramesses-Rules]

What I find boring is no researching, no building, no growth, no war threat, just skipping turn and culture bombing till 3 of your cities get Legendary culture.

But hey, whatever makes the game most enjoyable.

That part is right near the end of the game, and I sometimes start a new game once I see I am going to win. But there is growth, as my borders expand and the neighbor's cities do culture flips. It is the bloodless way to expand and take cities.

If I ever get to where I can win with some consistency at Immortal, I will lose interest in pursuit of cultural victory. I think Diplomatic Victory would be a challenge at Immortal. I mean, without killing half the civilizations to get the votes. I don't want to do it that way. Have you ever tried a peaceful path to Diplomatic Victory?