Wonderful thread. I saw this about two weeks ago and have now been using it myself, to pretty similar results, though on average 10 turns slower. I’ve always used an early Culture powered strategy for fast SV, as I too am one of the players who discovered the power of this thanks to CivTrader6’s videos (praise be to CivTrader6, haha). However, I never really thought of using Choral Music. I was a fan of Jesuit Education and using TS and GWs to provide your core Culture yields.
I personally prefer fast CV due to the variety of strategies, but I’ll admit, going this route has made SV a little less boring. Though there is a core concept, there is some flexibility in exactly what Pantheon and Religion combo you can pick. I also think that it solidly puts this on par with fast CV in terms of the number of turns you need to win. Also, unlike CV which can be slowed down by a runaway civ’s Culture yields (or Russia), SV is more independent of how other civs are doing.
So far, I’ve used Earth Goddess + Choral Music as well as the Dance of the Aurora + Work Ethic variation. Work Ethic is just too tempting, and I’ve always built a lot of TS in my old strategies that the production can now go towards. My experience so far has been the faster production towards TS and Amphitheaters to place all those GWoW earlier, as well as build Monuments faster, essentially makes up for the Culture from Choral Music.
I would like your thoughts on the viability of Rome for this strategy, as well as other civs (I know you’ve mentioned Brazil, Greece, Korea, and Japan ... I already tried Japan, and they do well). Rome is my main civ, and I’ve had great success at fast SVs with them going the TS route.
I tried one successful game with them so far, using the Earth Goddess + Choral Music build (they really aren’t viable with Work Ethic). It was was comparable but slower, coming in at turn 172. This is in the same range as my TS strategy with them. I also had to re-roll, as I lost out on getting Choral Music twice. Their lack of bonuses to generating Great Prophet points is definitely their key weakness in this strategy (this is why I preferred Jesuit Education previously, the AI doesn’t prioritize this as much). In addition, even with Earth Goddess, Faith generation was an issue during the early game. I couldn’t Faith buy nearly as many settlers and instead had to rely on the typical Rome strategy of the 1-2 settler advantage you get by having Colonization so early, taking cities from neighbors, and Magnus chops to keep up.
On the bright side, I think their Culture and Gold yields were great. Free Monuments as always got me to the early and mid game Civics super fast, faster than Russia or Japan. I also had no issues with Culture later in the game, as the Free Monuments gave me a lead to use the Policy cards, Pingala, and governments earlier and for longer, compounding Choral Music and my TS. The same concept applied to Gold.