Isn't a Culture Victory Redundant?

Futurism CV is still very similar to SV: you aim for a quick, first ideology, then spam GWAMs until you hopefully win. You're no longer spending hammers on tourism wonders and buildings or on archaeologists, you no longer necessarily need any techs after Research Labs (maybe even Radio), and you ideally don't work any guild slots until you have Futurism, but you're still following the exact same pre-Labs strategy as an SV player (even more so because you're no longer diverting to build archaeologists and tourism wonders like a CV player), and you're still using the same method to generate tourism as an SV player would to get most of their techs (patiently and peacefully with specialists and GPs).

Yes exactly and so is an artillery into bomber game. Most of the game is the same but not the last third. Really the real difference domination is warring. Your economic and science development is mostly the same up to that point. It's a pretty big difference for sure but mostly due to war not being useful or very present in the game in general.
XCOM/SB rush is, like you said, almost an SV, though the placement of both XCOMs and SBs in the tech tree lets the player get away with avoiding a fair chunk of the post-Modern tech tree.

Same comment as above but with Internet.

An artillery domination isn't necessarily like an SV though. Sure, you can go for an artillery domination strategy if you've followed the usual SV playstyle up to that point, but you need not follow the usual SV playstyle to execute successful artillery domination games: against opponents who don't get yield bonuses, the turning point of Liberty's hammer advantage is roughly around Modern Era, which means you can definitely turn a 6+ city Liberty game into one of artillery domination (and 6+ city Liberty games do not follow the usual SV path).

It is similar, up to the point you decide to no longer pursue science but make units. I'm not sure what Liberty has to do with it. It's a perfectly valid SV tree.

You also should not forget about Frigate/SotL rushes, Chariot Archer rushes, and Battleship rushes, all of which can be mixed with a variety of other DomV strategies. Battleship rushes can be executed along the way towards an XCOM/SB rush, especially if you can upgrade into them, since you don't have to devote less hammers to bombers and paratroopers that you'd be upgrading. Frigate/SotL rushes can also be executed along the way to XCOM/SB rushes, primarily because they lie in an excellent place on the tech path (unlike artillery) and because their strength is fairly high for their era.

Oh sure I'm not denying domination has more options on how to deal with it. But is a chariot rush for domination followed by economic growth followed by another attack really that different than someone also doing a chariot rush and then following this by a culture game ? Warfare is a tool until you decide to truly commit and get all capitals.
The real issue here is that warfare is not rewarding enough for non domination strategies so it is not viewed as a common tool for other goals. A problem my mod kind of try to fix btw, good luck winning peacefully on 4 cities at levels 7-8 :D

Any game that features offensive warfare before Info Era would tilt the game's dynamic toward the DomV-style strategies that are not redundant. If I'm not mistaken however, this sort of stuff plays out very differently in Deity/Immortal singleplayer where your opponents have a significant hammer advantage from the getgo, to the point where it is often better to stick with 4-city Tradition turtling unless you're looking for a DomV specifically.

I don't get this comment.

The other key thing to note is that DomV is the only victory type where you cannot win by peacefully gathering a certain, global yield type that is produced consistently over time, and where you don't win by constantly spawning and faith-purchasing GPs. Great Scientists will help up to a certain point in Atomic and Info Era, but thanks to the tech tree's layout, they're not as strictly necessary as they would be for SV.

GSs are useful for a DomV. You probably won't faith buy them though yes and also spawn a little less of them. But if we're looking at a industrial/modern win, they'll be used like in most strategies, to get the key techs. Granted these techs are a bit everywhere while the key techs of the other victories are all in the information era.

Between choosing which targets to attack, playing Civ5's combat system, and constantly dealing with the sort of area control problems that are only really present in Civ5 when warring, XCOM/SB rushes have a completely different game experience to them than SV, even if their buildup is very similar. Most importantly, you will be dealing with other players directly, and you cannot win by waiting. Sure, XCOM/SB DomV plays the exact game as SV up until around Radar, but their methods, not just their aims, diverge wildly afterwards. CV and SV's paths barely diverge before continuing parallel to each other: even after the point of divergence, you'll both be patiently gathering global yields through specialists and GPs until you have enough tourism/science+gold to win.

True, warfare is certainly a lot different in gameplay while CV and SV are both centered around economy and buildings. But isn't that a problem with how little of it there is for peaceful plays ? With passive AIs and unrewarding aggression ? After all these playstyles should still participate in warfare as it shouldn't be designed to be a domination exclusivity (something MP players have to learn the hard way).
 
Yes exactly and so is an artillery into bomber game. Most of the game is the same but not the last third. Really the real difference domination is warring. Your economic and science development is mostly the same up to that point. It's a pretty big difference for sure but mostly due to war not being useful or very present in the game in general.
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Same comment as above but with Internet.
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GSs are useful for a DomV. You probably won't faith buy them though yes and also spawn a little less of them. But if we're looking at a industrial/modern win, they'll be used like in most strategies, to get the key techs. Granted these techs are a bit everywhere while the key techs of the other victories are all in the information era.
The point I'm trying to get across is that even if there is plenty of gameplay overlap between DomV strategies and SV strategies for a majority of the game, DomV isn't redundant because the parts that do not overlap diverge so completely. By contrast, the non-overlapping parts of CV, DiploV, and SV still follow the same gameplay patterns, which is why I would consider them redundant: remove one, and you can still experience the same gameplay pattern through two other victory conditions. Speaking of removing victory conditions, I would gladly remove CV or DiploV or have the two fused into a single victory condition if whatever remains gets retooled enough that aiming for it would represent a gameplay pattern that is markedly different from both DomV's and SV's. After all, perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Oh sure I'm not denying domination has more options on how to deal with it. But is a chariot rush for domination followed by economic growth followed by another attack really that different than someone also doing a chariot rush and then following this by a culture game ? Warfare is a tool until you decide to truly commit and get all capitals.
The real issue here is that warfare is not rewarding enough for non domination strategies so it is not viewed as a common tool for other goals. A problem my mod kind of try to fix btw, good luck winning peacefully on 4 cities at levels 7-8 :D
I'm assuming we're discussing vanilla rules though. You could literally change the entire game's dynamic by a tweak of a single variable. Possible candidates include: the reduction in science cost of a tech that a civ you have already met has already researched, the food consumption of a single population, the gold-to-production conversion ratio for instabuys, the tech prerequisite for Hotels, the hammer cost of XB's, the per-era strength increase of cities (set it to 0 and laugh), making Chemistry a prerequisite for Scientific Theory...

I don't get this comment.
Combat in Civ5 is a deceptively unique system because it is the only one that deals with zero-sum competition across a discrete, non-uniform, often asymmetrical space: a map of distinct tiles that have unique neighbors (every tile's set of neighbors is unique to that tile). Therefore, the gameplay pattern that arises from Civ5's combat system greatly varies across games, even if certain unit types will always tend to be more prominent than others. Mixing any combat into a Civ5 game experience will add variance to the gameplay pattern, so CV with some combat is less redundant vs. SV with some combat than CV with no combat is vs. SV with no combat.
However, I imagine that mixing early combat into an Immortal/Deity singleplayer Civ5 game that does not aim for DomV is more risky than avoiding combat altogether, and one of the main reasons for this is the raw hammer advantage that your opponents have from the beginning of the game.

Note: a combat system need not necessarily be the only system that has such an effect. For example, if Civ5's espionage system were transformed into a system that revolves around managing spy units who plant sleeper cells (your usual range of espionage activities would work through those sleepers) and counter-espionage that imitates the mechanics of hidden movement board games (eg. Scotland Yard, Letters from Whitechapel), I can easily see it becoming another such system whose gameplay pattern is markedly different in every game.

It is similar, up to the point you decide to no longer pursue science but make units. I'm not sure what Liberty has to do with it. It's a perfectly valid SV tree.
I tend to associate Liberty games with games that capitalize on early hammers to knock at least one civ out of the game to steal their land/wonders, and in singleplayer, those games almost always devolve into DomV for me.

True, warfare is certainly a lot different in gameplay while CV and SV are both centered around economy and buildings. But isn't that a problem with how little of it there is for peaceful plays ? With passive AIs and unrewarding aggression ? After all these playstyles should still participate in warfare as it shouldn't be designed to be a domination exclusivity (something MP players have to learn the hard way).
The problem isn't necessarily that there is so little combat in non-combat playstyles, it's that there is no substitute for the variety and depth of combat in non-combat playstyles. War is supposed to be diplomacy through other means, yet nothing can truly replace it in Civ5. Policies and city-states were supposed to be the answer in vanilla, the religion system and espionage were supposed to be the answer in G&K, tourism and world congress were supposed to be the answer in BNW, affinity-dependent victory conditions and quests were supposed to be the answer in CivBE, and I'm guessing diplomatic favors are supposed to be the answer in CivBERT.
The funny thing is that even though none of these seem to have worked (in the case of CivBERT's favors', I'm speculating that it'll be CivBE's great works swapping, ie. an avenue for AI abuse that wouldn't ever be used between human players), I can see every single one them being excellent alternatives after some more design polish. If city-states were transformed into OCC AIs with all the interactions that come with AIs (eg. gifted military units would actually be ones the CS produced with hammers, CS's could build wonders and found religions, CS's could spawn great people, CS's could vote in World Congress independently of their ally but based on their ally's considerations, etc.), non-military competitions over CS's could basically become "diplomatic combat"; doing this would also roll into World Congress as an alternative, though the AI's voting logic would definitely need to be both more advanced and more transparent for it to work in singleplayer. If more beliefs in Civ5 relied on having more followers and/or more types of followers (ie. across different cities and players) and if players had more ways to spread religion (eg. Underground Sect's effect as standard for all players would be neat), religious competition would evolve into a competition over common spaces, and so would be well on its way towards equaling Civ5's combat system in gameplay pattern variance (the exact details would be highly dependent on the actual beliefs available); bonus points if you can make players with the same religion compete over influence within that religion some way, and if you can make the relevance of religion over the course of the game mirror the relevance of religion over the course of human history (Civ4's religious civics are an excellent example).
 
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