Seek
Deity
- Joined
- Aug 7, 2010
- Messages
- 3,773
Off the cuff, I would say it is worse. It prevents an earlier era cultural victory since without the bonus SPs, you have more SPs to get. It also makes it take longer even with the free SPs, because with each SP, you increase the cost of the next SP. Then you have to throw up a wonder.
Free policies don't add to the cost, so in fact it's only two policies longer, assuming you win before future era.
I'm no expert on cultural victories so someone please tell me if I'm being an idiot, but this is something that strikes me every time I get a bit cultural....
One thing I would suggest as an option would be to switch one of the culture buildings from a +n culture building to a +n% culture building (and I'm thinking Opera House as the obvious candidate, for perhaps +50% culture).
The reasoning for this is that there's very little reason to focus culture in a given city at the moment (prior to Hermitage/broadcast tower/freedom). Generally, you're better off going horizontal with culture before going vertical - simply because it's both better value and gives more return on investment with regard to giving (and evenly spreading) new city tiles. There's not much incentive to go vertical and build specific "cultural meccas" before the late game. And there's not much reason to favour artists in one city over another either, except which one needs more border pops. Sort of seems like production cities become the de facto cultural cities by virtue of being able to build more of the buildings faster. Contrast this to science cities, where vertical investment pays off in spades.
Sorry, but this argument doesn't fly. Expanding is a big no-no for culture victories: Like the tooltip says, each city you found adds to all policies from then on an additional 30%. Two to three cities is usually optimal. Horizontal growth is *much* more friendly to science than culture because of the tie between science and population and the ease of gaining population at small numbers, which is why ICS is so powerful in this game. This is not to say that a % or per-pop cultural building wouldn't be a good idea. (Though the Opera House does not seem like a good fit to me, the Museum would make much more sense I think.)
I don't want to see GAs become uber-bombs as the mechanism to increase culture. Use them for border bombs and landmarks (maybe grossly increase the landmark bonus so you create a mecca in lieu of growth/production tiles).
Even with the boosts to the GA in this mod, it's still the weakest of the bunch in my (and many other's I think) opinion - and if you're going for a culture win you end up with a lot of them, with not much choice but to settle (unless there's a resource you need risking a possibly dangerous war because of your small empire). I really think the GA should operate like every other great person and give a decent bonus to their field with their special ability. I miss the culture wars from civ4 too!

So like I said, it's not too different with the mod as without - but it is more fun because of the extra policies, though!

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For anyone interested, an excellent thread regarding culture wins can be found here. It's long, but well worth the read.