Godotnut's Guide to Totally Peaceful Deity Cultural Victory

godotnut

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At the request of some of you fine Civfanatics, I've finally gotten off my lazy butt to do a write-up on how I won my six HOF Deity games (three on Beta, three on the new one). Be warned--it's still quite a challenge with this strategy, but it works fairly often for me, proving that contrary to the conventional wisdom, it's quite possible to achieve a totally peaceful builder's win on the highest settings. In fact, it's only really challenging on Deity. So this one goes out to all you builders out there: peace wins ;)

Settings

I'm going to explain how to do this using strategic settings, but it DOES work with organic settings--it's just harder, and it may be impossible with some types of maps and/or sets of opponents. You do need one thing for this to work, especially with chopping having been nerfed: you need stone in your starting city to build the Pyramids, and you must have the Pyramids to win before the AI launches the ship. I have done this without starting stone before the patch, but have found it impossible with 1.61. So if you don't find stone in your starting position, regenerate the map until you do.

Disclaimer: this strategy borrows bit and pieces from many others' strategies and tips. I am especially indebted to the excellent players, who contributed to the conversations in the Beta Gauntlet III.

For a peacful win, I'm convinced that Elizabeth is the best cultural victor, hands down. The combination of financial (for cottage spamming) and philosophical (for the great artists) can't be beat. The next best cultural leader is Mansa (half priced temples plus financial). Also, the slower game speed the better for faster wins.

EDIT: Huyana also excels at this strategy, but with some modifications (not all peace). For more, see the conversation in the thread below.

Maps: smaller is easier but larger offers the opportunity for faster wins. Why? Because the more opponents you have, the harder it is to keep the peace and to build the Pyramids on Deity. But more opponents also means more tech trades and so a faster win.

The easiest map allowed by the HOF is Pangea on smaller maps, and Pangea or Continents on Standard and larger. The easiest map, period, is Balanced, because it offers great resources, and it is the largest map, but the new HOF doesn't allow this map type. Water means slower contact with the AI, which means no early tech trades. Yes, it's easier to expand with a continent all to yourself, but it's nearly impossible to tech fast enough to win without trades.

Opponents: You want peace. This is easier with Peacemonger opponents, but it can be done with more warlike opposition (though with Izzy in the game, it may be impossible). This strategy guide assumes that you already know how to use diplomacy to keep the peace. That's a whole topic in itself and deserving of its own thread. If you really want to win though, here are the peacemongers, in approximate order of peace-lovingness: Mansa, Cyrus, Hatshepsut, Asorka, Ghandi, Catherine, Frederick, Louis. Also, this strategy assumes you know how to cottage spam.

More settings: low sea level helps A LOT to expand to the requisite six cities. If using Pangea, a "pressed" coastline, as I understand it, presents "sub-continents" (which = good! cut off your opponents!) but without a lot of islands (which require naval investment = a waste); but I personally enjoy "random" -- call me sentimental. (Temperate or Tropical both work fine.)

There are three main obstacles to a peaceful cultural win on Deity: building the Pyramids before the AI, expanding fast enough to get six cities, and achieving legendary culture before the AI launches the ship. Seldom will the AI win by any other means using this strategy.

First City Build Order

This all depends on a succesful start. It's pretty easy after that. The challenge is to both build the Pyramids and not get boxed in. It's not easy, but this seems to work best: Worker > expand to population size two while building a warrior (you can finish him later) > as soon as size two, switch to Settler > expand to size three while finishing the warrior/starting new one > Worker #2 > Pyramids. After that, I build whatever seems most necessary until the "temple spam" stage.

I never build any barracks or any troops other than one warrior per city. I don't hook up with copper until I've built six warriors, so that the option is present to build warriors and not the more expensive axemen or spearmen. If diplomacy fails and someone invades (rarely happens), retire, rinse, and repeat.

Starting Research Path

Bronze > Masonry > Wheel > Agriculture > Pottery > Writing > Alphabet

Teching after that is a matter of researching techs that the AI is slow to attack, so that you can use them to trade. So, for example, I never research Calendar or Mathematics, because the AI always researches them, and I can trade for them, whereas if I research them, I can't trade anything for them because the AI already has them. So techs like Paper for example that aren't a big deal in most games become important to research relatively early, because the AI researches them late, and you can trade them for others. You need to make early contact with all or most of the AI to establish tech trades so you can win.

What to Do

First of all, be aware that in a peaceful world on Deity, the AI will launch their rocket any time between 1500 and 1850 (or even earlier perhaps on larger maps). The more opponents you have, the faster the AI launches the ship. On a standard map with six opponents, expect 1500-1700. The AI finishes faster on larger maps. You will need to finish early to win peacefully, and sometimes, the AI just outraces you. If you can manipulate them into war with each other diplomatically, that's a good thing.

At first, micromanage your capital with an emphasis on food and growth if not building a worker or settler. Don't worry about defense. Even if you play with barbarians turned on, the land gets settled so fast that the fog of war vaporizes, along with the barbs.

Use your first worker to chop two or three forests to accelerate Settler spawning. As soon as you finish Masonry, quit chopping and improve the stone square. In addition to being required for the Pyramids, this helps a ton with speeding up settler production. You don't need roads until just before switching to Pyramid building, and if you're lucky and both the stone and your first city are on a river, you don't need roads at all until much later.

By now you've finished the first settler. Settle in a spot that will allow you to cottage spam later and which blocks off and claims potential territory from your nearest opponent the most effectively. Build another settler right away. Move worker number one with settler number two, as soon as the worker finishes its task when settler two is spawned. Improve one food square if in cultural boundaries and then chop until the second worker is about done in the first city. Time your first worker's arrival back to your capital with the production of worker number two. Hook up to stone using both workers. Switch to Pyramids the second the stone is hooked up and don't stop until you finish it. If the AI beats you to the Pyramids, rinse and repeat. After the stone is hooked up, have one worker mine all of your hills while the other chops everything in sight. You want to be as large as happiness allows to occupy those mines. You may need to improve a food resource to have enough food to support your miners. Put everything you've got into finishing the Pyramids, because if you don't, it's over.

The reason you need the Pyramids isn't so much for the happiness boost from Representation (though it's nice)--it's so you can buy religious buildings later, without having to tech all the way to universal suffrage.

Meanwhile, city number two needs to produce settler(s) ASAP. You need six cities to win, but only three of them need to be good cities. A "good" city in this strategy is one that you can cottage spam with and which is connected to fresh water. Health resources are more important than luxury resources. All of the general resources are useless except stone, marble, and copper. Stone you absolutely must have to build the Pyramids. Stone, marble, and copper are the resources that double production speed of the major religious buildings like Cathedrals, Academies, and Mandirs, which is why they are nice to have. Only stone is essential, though. After building the Pyramids and establishing three cities that you can cottage spam with, you're over the hump.

It's a challenge on Deity even to get three decent and three marginal cities without war, but it can be done. Really once you get that third one, you're usually home free, because you can often squeeze three more cities in around the edges of your cultural borders somewhere. Don't worry if your opponent's borders encroach upon your marginal cities. Believe, me you will beat their borders back big time in the end and before they flip you. In fact, if an opponent builds close to your capital or one of your three culture cities, you can usually flip it by the end game, which sometimes has provided me with my sixth requisite city.

Try to cut off your opponents from access to a peninsula, even if there are no resources on it. You can use it later to place those marginal cities. And don't worry if your three other cities occupy crummy positions. In the end, it really doesn't matter that much. Only the cultural cities matter in the end.

You will almost always receive at least two engineers from the Pyramids if you don't dilute the engineer gene pool. Use the first one on the Great Library, and use the second one on either the Sistine Chapel or the Taj Mahal. Don't build the Great Library in the city you want to use to spawn Great Artists later.

In a perfect world, you will manage your great people production so that you receive exactly three scientists from the Great Library before your Great Artist farm overwhelms it. Use all of your scientists to build academies in your three cultural cities. The cultural bonus they provide is just as valuable as the science boost. An academy in each cultural city provides double the value of being a civ with the cultural trait.

UPDATE: With regard to the previous two paragraphs, I no longer think that building the Great Library is a good idea in most cases. Subsequent experience indicates that keeping the Great Artist gene pool pure leads to earlier victories. Hope for only one engineer, and use it on the Sistine Chapel. Focus all of your energy on Great Artists only.

After building the Pyramids, focus on cottage spamming, occupying as many cottaged tiles as possible continually while growing. Don't worry about amassing culture in your beginning game. Almost all of it will come in your end game, when you turn your culture bar up all the way.

The overall plan is: cottage spam and tech as fast as possible; shut off all technology at a certain point (more on this later) and keep the culture bar as low as possible without having unhappy citizens, maximizing your gold input; meanwhile buy religious buildings; then crank up the culture bar. I know this part of the game plan is familiar to many of you, and I certainly don't claim originality here.

After other civs switch to Emancipation, you will probably have to turn up the culture a little to maintain happiness. Remember, the idea is to increase commerce and BUY all the religious buildings, so it's fine to not have much culture until the end. After you quit researching, the AI will gift you some techs, often good ones. That's the bonus of being a "backwards people." :)

I struggle with the question of when to quit teching. It seems to me the options are, in successive order: right after liberalism (for Free Speech), after Nationalism (for the Hermitage), or after Printing Press (for the bonus gold). My best game was when quitting after Printing Press, but I got some lucky gift techs in that game. Still, I'm leaning toward thinking that is best.

If possible, one of your cities that is not producing culture needs irrigated farms and food resources to be your Great Artist factory (you usually need caste system too). Any artists produced up until about 400-500 AD I add to one of my cultural cities (usually the slowest one). After that, save them for a big round of culture bombs at the end. The culture bombs are great at helping overcome discrepancies between culture levels in your three cultural cities. Everyone who is serious about their cultural games will be interested in O.H. Dog's superb Civ IV Culture Calculator Spreadsheet. It really helps in planning out your end game.

I never try to found early religions, and I am seldom able to found the late ones. But getting them to spread is usually not a problem in the end. You don't need all the religions, but the more the better. The fewest number I have won with is three religions. Whatever you do, NEVER use Theocracy. You MUST let those religions in! It's much easier for religions to spread on land maps. Trade routes also seem to help.

If there is one overriding world religion, obviously I switch to it, but if there is even one nearby country of an alternate religion, I remain without. I switch to Pacifism only when: a) my neighbors are so pleased with me that the "heathen religion" factor doesn't matter; or b) late in the game when the AI starts switching en masse to Free Religion. Remember: only cities with your state religion receive the great people bonus under Pacifism.

I buy or build every possible major religious building in my three cultural cities. For those who don't know, the six city requirement results from the temple building factor. On small and tiny maps, six temples in any one religion allows you to build three major religious buildings (cathedrals, etc.), and each major religious building provides a 50% bonus to your cultural production. On standard maps, six temples allows you two build two major religious buildings, and if there is a change in this on the larger maps, I'm not aware of it.

Switch to all culture, no income as you approach the end of building your major religious buildings. You don't want to waste your end game production in your cities, so it's OK to finish the last major building in each city with hammers, as opposed to buying it. If you want to estimate what your cities' cultural rates will be when you switch into all-culture mode, turn the culture slider up all the way for a second and check them out on the city screen. Don't forget to slide it back down after you've checked. This will help you to plan ahead. Or for a more precise and sophisticated look: use the culture counter spreadsheet I mentioned earlier.

The major religious buildings are what wins the game. So let's imagine that you receive a modest four religions with six cities on a small map. That means you can buy or build FOUR major religious buildings in EACH cultural city, providing a total plus 200% culture bonus in each of them. One will usually get the Hermitage, too. Combine this with cottage spamming, the other culture producing buildings, any added great artists, and perhaps a wonder; and you can easily create cities that produce 600-800 points of culture per turn by the end game. It doesn't take long to win at that rate.

EDIT: That was a conservative estimate on culture rate. My last Deity game, I had a city amassing culture at 1,080 / turn as I appoached victory.

There are many other nuances, but this post is getting long-winded already, so I'll leave it at that for now. Maybe we can use this thread to elaborate on the strategy and improve it. I would love to hear your questions, advice, criticism, etc.

Good luck peacemongers! Someday, we take over the world. :lol:
 
Gj, I vote 5 stars, but still I don't think it would work on a huge deity map. If you are familiar with my Inca strategy from the other thread, whenever I play vs 17 empires, I get pretty much boxed in. I buy that building Pyramids might be possible, but getting 6 cities up can be problematic. I will try your strat out tough. Sounds solid enough for me. :goodjob:
 
Thanks VirusMonster. I have read and enjoyed your huge Deity guide. I think a short Quecha rush--just to get the required six cities--could mix well with this strategy. Basically instead of building the first settler in your capital, crank out Quechas immediately and rush your nearest opponent. You can easily capture one or two workers that way too. This might actually be easier than the all peace route, but to me there's also something cool about a Deity win with no war at all.

I also think that in a time-competitive situation, the peaceful route will earn the earlier time, when successful. But I'm not sure about this, and it's a question that I'm interested in.
 
Wonderful article! :king: I didn't think cultural victories were possible on diety without doing something to really game the map (an archipelago, for instance.) The step-by-step instructions on how to quickly get two settlers out and build the Pyramids is excellent, and useful not just in Diety/Cultural wins. I had a question about one thing, though:

godotnut said:
You will almost always receive at least two engineers from the Pyramids if you don't dilute the engineer gene pool. Use the first one on the Great Library, and use the second one on either the Sistine Chapel or the Taj Mahal. Don't build the Great Library in the city you want to use to spawn Great Artists later, but do build the Taj there if you go that route.

I'm curious why you would build the Taj or Sistine in your artist city - it seems like the 10 base culture/turn in a commerce city (20 for the Sistine, once it doubles) would be more useful than the GPP's. As an example (using normal speed):

If you use an engineer to rush the Taj in your artist factory right after you get Nationalism (and stop research there), let's assume you spend 25 turns rush-buying temples/missionaries/big buildings, and then you have 50 turns of 100% culture. (Just an estimate, but it seems ballpark.)

In your artist city, you'd get 75 turns * 8 GPP (with pacifism+national epic), or 600 GPP towards an artist. In a commerce city, you'd get 10 culture * 25 turns * 200% (liberalism) = 450 culture while building the buildings, and 10 culture * 50 turns * 400% (liberalism + 4 cathedrals) = 2,000 culture once they're in place. So, about 2500 culture, more if you take into consideration that some of the buildings get built earlier, you could place it in your Hermitage city, etc.

Looking at the numbers, I have to think that 600 GPP isn't as valuable as 2500 culture unless you aren't making that many great people total (~10 or so, so only 5 great artists.) You would also still get 450 GPP in a commerce city that may or may not be wasted, depending on how high food it is. Analyzing the Sistine is a bit murkier, but if you get it to double by the time your cultural multipliers are in place, it should be worth more than even an entire Great Artist.

Now, I've never tried for a cultural victory on Diety, so my time frames, or number of great people, might be way off... it was just something that jumped out at me :)

Once again, great article! :goodjob:
 
@armstrong:

Excellent point. When I wrote that, I was thinking of a game when my Great Artist farm and one of my cultural cities were the same. Yet my guide suggests that you have a separate Great Artist farm from your cultural cities--hence the conflict. I updated the original post in consideration of your comment.

I still think that if you can found a fourth city as an artist farm, it's best to keep them separate, so that you can populate more cottages in the cultural city instead of having specialists. In this case, you are absolutely right Armstrong, it would be better to put the Taj or the Sistine Chapel in a culture city.

In reality, it's somtimes impossible to build that separate artist farm, because the AI often grabs all the good spots. In this case, obviously, build the wonders in the artist farm/culture city. Thanks for the clarification!
 
If you build wonders in your culture city, all your culture cities become small GP farms. One for the engineer, with the priamids (and maybe the Hanging Gardens, one for GA with Sistine Chapel, Taj Mahal. And maybe one for Great Prophet, if you mange to build the Oracle or the Stonehenge. But I guess, It is a dream on diety game. I never tried it but I think it is a good strategy.
 
@actionmedia:

The GP points from wonders can't compete with a Great Artist farm, maxing out on food and Great Artist support. It's pretty easy to establish 4-8 artist citizens, resulting in several times as many GP points as a wonder or two can produce. With the Philosophical trait, the National Epic, and Pacifism, you can expect 40-100 Great People points per turn--or even more--in your Great Artist farm. The wonder GP points get overwhelmed by the Great Artist farm and never produce anything.

The exception to this is the Pyramids, which are established long before the Great Artist farm and which should produce two Great Engineers before the artist farm swamps them if you're playing with a philosophical leader.
 
I agree, but +4 GPps over those +12 or +15 from specialists is not neglectable. Ad that +10 culture or so and the wonder pay's off the effort.

As for engineer and prophet. They should come early to boost your production. But I guess it is simply impossible to buils so much wonders before the AI on diety level.
 
godotnut said:
I was thinking of a game when my Great Artist farm and one of my cultural cities were the same.

Ah, I see. I guess that's one of the consequences with the land grab on Diety. I'm actually curious now, though, what is the makeup of your artist/culture city? Normally, when I have a city like that, it's because I play on lower difficulties, and it's a high food, high production coastal city that can actually build the wonders, but that's not an option on Diety...

So, my question is: how do you split the tiles between cottages and specialists in your hybrid city? There's obviously an ideal point where the city is at max size and running as many artists as possible, but you're not going to reach that with a fast win. I've found that for cottages to be really useful in fast cultural victories, you need to work them early. Do you have any general guidelines (e.g., grow at least 3, 4, 5 food a turn and work as many artists as possible, work all cottages until you've almost made your last Engineer/Scientist, etc.) for distributing the tiles?

Also, a couple of tangential things: I tried replicating this on Emperor, and I found I was really stymied by lack of worker technologies. Going Bronze->Masonry->Wheel directly meant I was working unimproved tiles except for stone and mines - it didn't seem to make much sense to grow my capital to size 3 on 3F1C tiles. What do you think of Qin? He'd allow you (if you make sure to start with grain crops) to get a faster start (Agriculture instead of Fishing, and Industrious) - you'd miss out on some great artists in the end, but you'd have a useful worker tech to start with and speed up everything (including the Pyramids) a bit.

Finally, what's your opinion on coastal cities for commerce/culture cities? It seems that the trade income is good (and being able to connect them with Sailing rather than roads is really nice in a peaceful world), but you trade some cottages and production for fishing boats/lighthouses to get it, and by the time you can trade for Compass for harbors, you're probably busy with religious infrastructure/missionaries.

Okay, and second finally (ultimately? ;)), how do you handle distribution of your religions? Do you use any missionaries until all cities have gotten "natural" religion spread? Do you pre-build/position missionaries?

Once again, great guide :)
 
armstrong said:
Ah, I see. I guess that's one of the consequences with the land grab on Diety.
That's exactly right. A great artist city will never produce as much culture as a city in good terrain optimized for culture with cottages. Along with the land grab limitation (at deity, you rarely have a chance to grab 3 good cottage spots and a good great person spot, you also begin to run into some cottage growth limitations with fast wins.

Ideally, you want your cottages to be towns at the end of the game. That's easy enough for your first couple of cities, but the timeline simply doesn't allow your 4th, 5th, or 6th city's cottages to become towns before the game ends. So the ideal may be something like 1st, 2nd, and 3rd cities being cottage cities and the 4th city being the great person city, but realistically that doesn't happen all that often.

One comment about the strategy guide (which is very good) - your first 3 or 4 cities are going to cover the cultural cities and great person city requirement. But what do you do with your 5th and 6th cities? My recommendation - place them where you have the most bonus food. This often means coastal by a couple bonus food resources. These spots don't work so well as culture cities (not enough space for cottages), but are great as secondary great person cities. +8 excess food is worth 4 specialists, which is worth a couple extra great artists over the course of a game. They can also be used to helped micromanage finances late in the game. Once a city has produced it's last great artist, switch the specialists over to great merchants. The extra cash allows you to run the culture bar a little higher at the end of the game. The combined affect of extra great people and higher culture bar can shave a significant amount of turns off of a win.
 
One comment about the strategy guide (which is very good) - your first 3 or 4 cities are going to cover the cultural cities and great person city requirement. But what do you do with your 5th and 6th cities?

Thanks for the compliment. Weren't you in on Beta Gauntlet III (and finished very well, I might add). I seem to recall picking up a tip or two from your strategy.

Terrain permitting, your plan for cities five and six sounds right to me. If you're lucky, you have sea resources, and if not you can often use a food resource from one of your cultural cities. You don't need those extra food resources in your culture cities when you've stopped growing and switched to all cottage mode, so yes, use that food for GAs and end-game Great Merchants. Good point.
 
@armstrong:

I'll try to answer your questions. I only build a "hybrid city" when I can't settle a seprarate GA farm (which, as walkerjks points out, is quite often), and if I have to do it, I still try to populate as many cottages as possible. The hybrid city, if needed, is simply the one of cultural cities with the most food.

re: improvements. Well, your stone square will get improved, and, as I mentioned, if you have any farmable resources, they will get improved too. I'm not sure that going for Animal Husbandry is worth it. That detour can cost you a lot of tech time, if the AI beats you to Alphabet. Perhaps on a standard or larger map with more people to trade with, this would be viable.

re: Qin. I like Qin as an all-around leader, and I've had some succesful games with him on Emporer. I wouldn't use him on any levels above that, as the industrious bonus will wind up only helping you on the Pyramids, Hermitage, and the National Epic.

Sometimes I'll use a coastal city plush with food resources for a cultural city, but only if there are some cottagable tiles nearby--five may be the absolute minimum.
 
godotnut said:
Thanks VirusMonster. I have read and enjoyed your huge Deity guide. I think a short Quecha rush--just to get the required six cities--could mix well with this strategy. Basically instead of building the first settler in your capital, crank out Quechas immediately and rush your nearest opponent. You could probably capture your second worker that way too. This might actually be easier than the all peace route, but to me there's also something cool about a Deity win with no war at all.

sup :D After some long tedious work, I updated my article with saves from my current 1.61 HOF mod game. The saves are about capturing 6 cities by 2500BC. I also included a link to your article, because I think it is great. I also rewrote parts of the article with fresh ideas, fewer words, did some underlining, bolding, etc. :)

I agree that a combination of quechua rush upto 6-7 cities followed by your cultural win strategy is very possible, but I didn't have the time to test it out yet. You just need a stone to begin with and by 2500BC you can have 6 cities up and running. The target cities don't have to be crappy ones either, they can be all good production and commerce cities with at least 3 initial population.

After initial warmongering, cultural win would be so cool ;) :goodjob:
 
VirusMonster said:
I agree that a combination of quechua rush upto 6-7 cities followed by your cultural win strategy is very possible, but I didn't have the time to test it out yet. You just need a stone to begin with and by 2500BC you can have 6 cities up and running. The target cities don't have to be crappy ones either, they can be all good production and commerce cities with at least 3 initial population.

After initial warmongering, cultural win would be so cool ;) :goodjob:

A few of us tried this is Guantlet 3 with pretty good results -

http://hof.civfanatics.net/civ4/ind...&mapSize=Small&incBeta=on&speed=Any&submit=Go

I would actually recommend the Inca approach for games with random opponents. Taking out the thorniest neighbor early can save a lot of headaches later. There is also greater ability to get stone or marble resources. Finally, you can often grab an early religion (via conquest) which can help with the finances late in the game.

One other possibility is to combine Inca rushing with an overloaded map. If you add extra civs (particularly on smaller maps where you can overload without using really aggressive civs). Overloading gives you the three nice advantages:

1) More civs means each civ will less space to work with so the AI is less likely to runaway with tech. You are not as limited since you will simply take the land you need.

2) More civs means more opportunities for tech trading. Tech trading is the single fastest way to get to the tech target for 100% culture. Of course the AI will trade more as well, somewhat offsetting the #1 advantage - but if you can stay a tech ahead in one line, such as to liberalism, you can trade for the rest of what you need).

3) More civs means your neighbors are closer, making your earlier conquests much closer. This is keeps your city costs down since distance modifiers can take up most of your commerce at deity.
 
walkerjks said:
A few of us tried this is Guantlet 3 with pretty good results -

http://hof.civfanatics.net/civ4/ind...&mapSize=Small&incBeta=on&speed=Any&submit=Go

I would actually recommend the Inca approach for games with random opponents. Taking out the thorniest neighbor early can save a lot of headaches later. There is also greater ability to get stone or marble resources. Finally, you can often grab an early religion (via conquest) which can help with the finances late in the game.

One other possibility is to combine Inca rushing with an overloaded map. If you add extra civs (particularly on smaller maps where you can overload without using really aggressive civs). Overloading gives you the three nice advantages:

1) More civs means each civ will less space to work with so the AI is less likely to runaway with tech. You are not as limited since you will simply take the land you need.

2) More civs means more opportunities for tech trading. Tech trading is the single fastest way to get to the tech target for 100% culture. Of course the AI will trade more as well, somewhat offsetting the #1 advantage - but if you can stay a tech ahead in one line, such as to liberalism, you can trade for the rest of what you need).

3) More civs means your neighbors are closer, making your earlier conquests much closer. This is keeps your city costs down since distance modifiers can take up most of your commerce at deity.

Very good points! My preferred settings are almost exactly like yours. The saves I updated are practically identical to your description. I also put a link to your HOF score table with Inca scores :D Here is the link for the saves.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=169930
 
Interesting this post came up because I have been playing deity with Elizabeth recently (out-of-the-box default settings: Standard, Continents, Normal speed, 6 random AI) and finally managed to get a cultural victory recently.

My strategy is a bit different. I'm usually a worker first player, but recently I have been approaching Deity by training a warrior first to clear fog, then settler. The earlier settler is more likely to be able to claim a good city site before the AI grabs them all. Both cities then produce a worker when it's safe to do so. If the local terrain is heavy on flatlands with animals I'll research towards AH, otherwise bronze.

Sometimes some AI (usually Alex) wipes me out with an archer/chariot/axe rush which there's no possible way to defend, or I don't find/connect military resources in time and barbarians sack a city. Sometimes I get boxed into a 2 city peninsula and have no bronze to claw my way out. Like the OP I just take this as a hazard of playing at Deity, and laugh it off and start a new game if this happens.

I don't rely on pyramids since I never seem to have stone anyway. I also avoid great library if planning on a cultural victory, as I dislike the Scientist pollution it causes. I'll spawn 2-4 scientists from regular specialists and use them for either academies or to burn on Philosophy/Education. All other GP production goes to artists, a few GE points from a Forge are also good if the possible engineer arrives in time to pop Taj Mahal or Statue of Liberty.

My research goals are typically Alphabet, Drama, CS, Liberalism trading for everything off that path if possible. I can never seem to beat the AI to music at deity.

I started by trying to turn off research at Democracy. Often democracy pays off just to run Emancipation for cottage growth, and trade for economics/corporation. However, I kept getting killed by Toku or some other warmonger AI dropping an amphibious force somewhere between knights and riflemen. In my successful game I researched Rifling which allowed me to beat Toku and Caesar's invading forces off with redcoats. I also had to tech up to Medicine to deal with serious health problems, which turned out to be a good move in that game as Environmentalism saved me from major starvation when all my seafood resources were being pillaged. I won in 1848 with the leading AI still needing two or three major spaceship parts.

I also actually prefer the great artist farm to be one of the 3 culture cities with a food surplus and run it in hybrid mode, if I can find a suitable site. National Epic, Globe Theatre and the culture from the artists adds up.

I never see ultra-early spaceship launches (they build Apollo very early because they prioritise rocketry, but generally won't launch until sometime in the 19th century), but then I do see quite a lot of inter-AI wars.

I think for high scores Inca + overcrowded map is probably optimal, but I personally don't like playing this way.
 
What factors affect the cultural level that must be achieved in the three cultured cities? The Civilopedia says three cities at 50,000 at normal speed. What about Epic speed? Are there any other things that affect the target culture level? I am guessing this does not vary by difficulty level? Thanks in advance for any help.
 
ThorRex said:
What factors affect the cultural level that must be achieved in the three cultured cities? The Civilopedia says three cities at 50,000 at normal speed. What about Epic speed? Are there any other things that affect the target culture level? I am guessing this does not vary by difficulty level? Thanks in advance for any help.
Game speed is the only variable. 25K/city on fast, 50K on normal, 75K on epic, and 150K on marathon.
 
ThorRex said:
What factors affect the cultural level that must be achieved in the three cultured cities? The Civilopedia says three cities at 50,000 at normal speed. What about Epic speed? Are there any other things that affect the target culture level? I am guessing this does not vary by difficulty level? Thanks in advance for any help.

here's a useful tool: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=141740

Legendary city:
50,000 - Normal speed
75,000 - Epic speed
150,000 - Marathon speed
 
At the suggestion of VirusMonster, I tried this strat combined with an early Quecha rush. It took me three tries, but I just completed a 1550 finish on a small Deity Pangea map.

I blew the best starting position I've ever had the first game (corn, pigs, gold, stone, and more in my starting position) because I got too greedy and over-extended my Quecha rush in a quest for gold.

The second game, I tried to keep a city that was too far away from my capital, and killed my early research economy. I quit when I realized that the AI had beat me to alphabet.

The third time worked swell, and with a little better luck/fine tuning, I might be able to beat my best time from the Beta HOF using Huyana instead of Liz. Ultimately, with the right luck, I think Liz will score an earlier finish than the Inca; however, after this last game I'm convinced that Huyana will win more consistently. Of course, then it's not a "totally peaceful" cultural victory. :)

Two suggestions: only go after one opponent, and only keep his/her second city if it is either a) close to your capital or b) has gold/gems. And, don't overload the map too much, or you won't get your six cities, even with the Quecha.
 
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