Fergei
Prince
- Joined
- Mar 31, 2020
- Messages
- 436
There is recurring talk about how underwhelming or generally useless culture is. I would argue that the issue is not with the culture settings, it is with how other default settings in the game destroy the value of culture for both the human and AI.
Changes that make culture more valuable to the human
Double the cost of buildings that produce culture (facilitates culture flips) – this provides buff to the Scientific and Religious traits. More importantly, it makes the AI, when it lacks those traits, more likely to not build culture buildings quickly. This typically leads to massive variations in AI cultural output and tricks the AI into accentuating its traits rather than them all doing exactly the same thing. You will get AI Civs with large militaries but neglected culture and these can fall behind on tech a little. These Civs can become targets of your ambitions for culture flips. Even if those Civs become powerful and use their military successfully against another AI, you can build cities in the debris of the warzone and potentially flip the military Civ’s conquests from under their nose. All with a reduced risk of your newly aggressively planted cities being lost to a culture flip themselves.
More congested maps facilitate culture flips – the default settings create a prolonged expansion phase. If you increase the number of Civs by around 30% on each map size (tiles x land percentage / number of Civs = around 240 to 280) you get more congested maps with empires of around 5-10 cities each and a curtailed expansion phase. Crucially, this create many areas where cultural boundaries are shared by more than 2 Civs. When this occurs it is possible to make far more adventurous city placements right at the cultural border and try to effect a culture flip. The AI will lose landtiles to your new city and typically place far more military units into cities vulnerable to culture flip. So you can end up tying up their military even if your culture flip plan is not successful. This works even better if you have settings that autoproduce settlers during the initial expansion phase, but this can very much occur with standard settler production settings.
Lower Domination victory conditions – with 66% required, culture isn’t really relevant. Make it double your Civ’s proportion of the population on turn 1 (e.g. 8x Civs = 25% domination victory conditions) and ‘domination’ because an ever present possibility for both human and AI, where grabbing land with cultural expansion suddenly very relevant in both pursuing that victory condition and denying it to a rival Civ in a far flung part of the world you cannot interfere with.
These three settings combined mean a more passive building play style can still produce a domination victory. Whereas in default settings this is only remotely possible if you have the Temple of Artemis.
Changes that make culture more valuable to the AI
Remove bonus starting units for the AI facilitates AI 20k culture victory - in conjunction with below. To compensate, change the Cost Factor to the level of the next highest difficulty. So Emperor AI has no bonus starting units but has the Cost Factor of Demigod - resulting in a similar level of challenge to default Emperor.
More congested maps facilitates AI one city cultural victory (aka 20k culture) – I confess that, unlike the examples above, I did not plan this. I merely observed it having stumbled across it when playing with custom settings. I do not even fully understand it, but it is undeniable. Have Civ to land tile ratio of around 240 to 280 and an AI with a productive capital and a strong tech position will produce less units (especially settlers) and instead just churn out Wonders, disproportionately in the capital. On higher difficulties Wonders are hard for humans, so the AI can really take advantage of this and start threatening (and completing) a 20k culture victory. The AI Civ doesn't even need to have the Religious or Scientific trait to 'pursue' this victory condition. Again, this may be more likely if you have a period of auto-produced settlers, but I guarantee this can also unfold if you play with standard settler production settings too.
Summary
Of course, even given the above, Republic slingshot, close city placement and churning out a huge military remains the golden path for human players but, if you are happy to explore different play styles, there are really interesting (and impactive) cultural developments in many games. Additionally, instead of being restricted primarily to a Space Race victory condition as their only feasible option, the AI can now threaten the human player with a domination or cultural defeat. It may not have the intelligence to actively pursue these conditions, but the fact they can even stumble upon them changes the challenge greatly and makes games much more varied. If you consider the amended domination victory conditions to be too low, ask yourself if you consider getting 20 to 25% of the land and population in a game more or less of an achievement than a diplomatic victory.
For culture to truly be fantastic in Civ 3, we'd need the AI to place their cities based on cutlural boundaries rather than on distance from other cities. This would make high culture AI place aggressively against low culture AI (and humans) and potentially threaten culture flips. But alas, that isn't something I can amend.
Changes that make culture more valuable to the human
Double the cost of buildings that produce culture (facilitates culture flips) – this provides buff to the Scientific and Religious traits. More importantly, it makes the AI, when it lacks those traits, more likely to not build culture buildings quickly. This typically leads to massive variations in AI cultural output and tricks the AI into accentuating its traits rather than them all doing exactly the same thing. You will get AI Civs with large militaries but neglected culture and these can fall behind on tech a little. These Civs can become targets of your ambitions for culture flips. Even if those Civs become powerful and use their military successfully against another AI, you can build cities in the debris of the warzone and potentially flip the military Civ’s conquests from under their nose. All with a reduced risk of your newly aggressively planted cities being lost to a culture flip themselves.
More congested maps facilitate culture flips – the default settings create a prolonged expansion phase. If you increase the number of Civs by around 30% on each map size (tiles x land percentage / number of Civs = around 240 to 280) you get more congested maps with empires of around 5-10 cities each and a curtailed expansion phase. Crucially, this create many areas where cultural boundaries are shared by more than 2 Civs. When this occurs it is possible to make far more adventurous city placements right at the cultural border and try to effect a culture flip. The AI will lose landtiles to your new city and typically place far more military units into cities vulnerable to culture flip. So you can end up tying up their military even if your culture flip plan is not successful. This works even better if you have settings that autoproduce settlers during the initial expansion phase, but this can very much occur with standard settler production settings.
Lower Domination victory conditions – with 66% required, culture isn’t really relevant. Make it double your Civ’s proportion of the population on turn 1 (e.g. 8x Civs = 25% domination victory conditions) and ‘domination’ because an ever present possibility for both human and AI, where grabbing land with cultural expansion suddenly very relevant in both pursuing that victory condition and denying it to a rival Civ in a far flung part of the world you cannot interfere with.
These three settings combined mean a more passive building play style can still produce a domination victory. Whereas in default settings this is only remotely possible if you have the Temple of Artemis.
Changes that make culture more valuable to the AI
Remove bonus starting units for the AI facilitates AI 20k culture victory - in conjunction with below. To compensate, change the Cost Factor to the level of the next highest difficulty. So Emperor AI has no bonus starting units but has the Cost Factor of Demigod - resulting in a similar level of challenge to default Emperor.
More congested maps facilitates AI one city cultural victory (aka 20k culture) – I confess that, unlike the examples above, I did not plan this. I merely observed it having stumbled across it when playing with custom settings. I do not even fully understand it, but it is undeniable. Have Civ to land tile ratio of around 240 to 280 and an AI with a productive capital and a strong tech position will produce less units (especially settlers) and instead just churn out Wonders, disproportionately in the capital. On higher difficulties Wonders are hard for humans, so the AI can really take advantage of this and start threatening (and completing) a 20k culture victory. The AI Civ doesn't even need to have the Religious or Scientific trait to 'pursue' this victory condition. Again, this may be more likely if you have a period of auto-produced settlers, but I guarantee this can also unfold if you play with standard settler production settings too.
Summary
Of course, even given the above, Republic slingshot, close city placement and churning out a huge military remains the golden path for human players but, if you are happy to explore different play styles, there are really interesting (and impactive) cultural developments in many games. Additionally, instead of being restricted primarily to a Space Race victory condition as their only feasible option, the AI can now threaten the human player with a domination or cultural defeat. It may not have the intelligence to actively pursue these conditions, but the fact they can even stumble upon them changes the challenge greatly and makes games much more varied. If you consider the amended domination victory conditions to be too low, ask yourself if you consider getting 20 to 25% of the land and population in a game more or less of an achievement than a diplomatic victory.
For culture to truly be fantastic in Civ 3, we'd need the AI to place their cities based on cutlural boundaries rather than on distance from other cities. This would make high culture AI place aggressively against low culture AI (and humans) and potentially threaten culture flips. But alas, that isn't something I can amend.
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