Multiplayer cultural Victory

[Bizrock]

Can someone share tips of how to win a cultural Victory in multiplayer? because i've been trying and I everytime loses cause:
The Guy that is focusing in military gets more and better civ units than me and just smash.
The Guy that is focusing science just rush airplanes/nukes and smash me
Everybody that sees my big culture just makes war, so no trade rotes and no open borders.
I just can't compete online with culture. There is no military uperhand with culture, ir you are not Brazil, and war fudgs tourists, I Just dont know How to do It.

 

[Oberinspektor Derrick]

Got no good answer for you, as I'd like to know myself.
Defending against tourism is rather easy, since you can just DOW any cultural civ sending trade routes, never accept open borders, steal great works, then later kill off/censor rock backs if not outright destroying the cultural civ unless he also has a good tech and army to defend that.

Part of the problem with culture is imo that there are no real strong secondary spill-over effects into other domains.
Like you mention with science, you will eventually get a huge tech lead that can be translated into a concrete military advantage, but with culture you don't really get that apart from corps/armies (which arrive rather late, and are somewhat limited in effect).
Culture does benefit from religion, but that's religion having a spill-over effect on culture, not the other way.

I really wish Firaxis added some spill-over effects from culture that made a cultural player a more potent threat in multiplayer.
For instance through increased loyalty pressure on neighbours if you have a sufficient tourism lead, similar to how Civ 5 had ideologies.
In civ 5 you could wreak some havoc on other civs if they chose the "wrong" ideology compared to the culture leader, as they would eventually get massive negative happiness and potentially a revolution in their lands (massive internal barb spawns, cities stopping production and if they switched to "your" ideology, they lost all the social policies invested into the "wrong" one).
In civ 6 there are however no such spill-over effects, which hurts a cultural strategy in multiplayer as you can't pressure your opponents with all that tourism (apart from warning them that they need to DOW you, whereas peace is what you actually want so it ends up counter-productive).

I hope to see a spill-over effect for culture in civ 6 that can properly "weaponize" tourism, as the multiplayer meta usually comes down to conquest and tech leads, which is somewhat boring (unless someone pulls off a sneaky religious victory as everyone else focuses science).

 

[Buktu]

CV in MP is quite hard. If you are coastal you can try to rush seaside ressorts (unlocked in the tech tree, not the culture one) and build alot of wonders. Also a religion wouldnt be too bad or at least a nice faith income to spam national parks or rock bands before anyone gets the card to ban them. Also you can pick beliefs for science to keep up in this regard. There are also some merchants who grant tourism for campus districs and industrial zones in the information era. Otherwise you might look for some civs who have tourism in their UI like Ethiopia with the rock hewn church. Again this is unlocked with flight in the tech tree so you want to a good science output to get there fast. This will help you to keep up militarily.
Still any player can kind of screw your plans by just declaring war, denying alot of your tourism potential. I have played or seen arounf 200 MP games so far but only 3 or 4 CVs in all of them. So in general I would recommend to go for another victory in MP.

 

[GrumboMumbo]

Yeah CV is very hard in MP. The fastest ways to achieve CV in single player are through Religious Tourism (Relics/Reliquaries), but this isn't really viable in MP because players aren't exactly going to let you run your apostles to their death to create the relics. It's similar for Religious victory (almost impossible if players know what they are doing). Same goes for trade routes and open borders, if players suspect you of going for CV they won't let you have these things.

I think this question will largely depend on how competitive the players in your MP game are. But as the current system stands, science/domination are the main routes to victory in MP. (this was the case with civ5 too) It would be great if the devs would consider victory condition balance for multiplayer too.

 

[Swissy]

CV is not real hard. It's more dependent on what is in the game as far as player civs and CS. If there is are no competing culture civs, you can push through the civics tree and the other players will be virtually defenseless to the power of the late game pro-tourist policies. Having a CS with a UI that converts to tourism is also nice to have.

I have won numerous CV in multiplayer. Even after a player realizes what's up, I still win. A player even nuked and took my capitol, losing because he ignored the dozen seaside resorts I had. You win because the average online player knows only the ins and outs of DomV and/or SV. I also have six DiploV and one RV. Most players just don't look for.it.