Non-military Victory

[Syiss_]

So I've played about 6 games of CiV so far. I am finding that domination wins are incredibly easy and straight forward. I've won 3 games already on prince/king with 3 different civs with domination (all randomly chosen). Two of them ended before 1500 AD. After reading up, I made several attempts at some cultural wins, but even with the information available on these forums, I am finding cultural victories incredibly difficult. I've cherry picked the civ and regenerated the map several times to get a good start, and still I can't pull it off. My closest attempt was I made it to about 1850 AD but still had like 10 policies to go, and then got declared on by multiple civs and couldn't defend myself.

I'm interested if anyone has actually achieved a non-domination win yet, what civ you had, how you planned it out, how you achieved it, etc (include difficulty level and map please). I am interested in all victory types except domination.

 

[HamTard]

Did you try only making 3-4 cities to keep social policy costs down? Did you Ally all the cultural city states for the massive bonuses they give you? Did you surround your border with military units to discourage attackers that see so many units?

Also, don't max out any of the social policies until you've got 5 of them just 1 away from completion. Once you've completed 2 or 3, the AI gets angry, so delaying that until you can complete all 5 with your next 5 policies is ideal for delaying AI aggression.

 

[Syiss_]

My closest attempt was with Siam (50% food/culture bonus from city states), I had 4 cities (each one had 1-2 happy resources). I was pretty low on military units because I was using most of my production towards culture producing buildings. My tech path was also towards buldings/wonders that would help with my victory, so my military was out of date as well. I also had a problem with AI's killing off my allied city states. Because I was weak militarily, even though I had pledged to protect them, the other AI's really didnt care.

I find that beyond actually protecting your city states with actual war declarations, pledging to protect them doesn't mean crap to the AI. My last domination victory, Hiawatha had 1 city and like 5 weak military units, and still declared on one of my city states I had pledged to protect even though I had a huge civ, huge army, and 4x his score.

I hadn't completely finished any policy tree when I finally got declared on in my Siam game, I suspect the declarations were more due to my military weakness than being close to victory.

 

[HamTard]

Put a ring of weak military units around your city state allies. The AI won't be able to get to them

 

[Shillen]

My first game was a space race victory because that's always been my favorite victory condition in civ. Although, I was severely disappointed when all I got was a picture at the end and no movie of a spaceship taking off. This game was on chieftain so it wasn't very hard.

My second game was a culture victory with Gandhi on prince difficulty, continent map, normal speed. I wanted to get the bollywood achievement so I only used 3 cities the whole game. I settled my 3 cities pretty far apart so they wouldn't overlap at all and would get as many resources as possible. The AI's built cities too close to me though so I had to raze a couple of their cities to make room so I was in bad relations with my home continent civs the entire game. I allied with 3 city-states fairly early, 2 cultural and 1 maritime. I built all the wonders I could and kept my tech pace up. All 3 of my cities were powerhouses but I had one with more science, one with more gold and one with more production. I think I used 4 scientists to create academies instead of popping techs and I used 4 or 5 artists to create their building also. I was at war with one civ for most of the game but was able to kill his units as they entered my territory. It still took me until 1982 to win. Cultural victories are pretty difficult.