Number of Turns indicator, and pacing for Cultural Victory

[ÆnigmÆffect]

Couple of questions, one short, one long:

Is there somewhere in the UI that shows you how many turns you've taken/are left? I'm playing for a cultural victory, and I want to know so I can see how my pace is.

Second, culture related question: I remember in Civ 3, if you're going for 20k, there's a somewhat good estimation on how your culture is going vs where in the game you are (I don't remember the numbers). Would any have something similar for Civ 4? I understand that there are many, many more variables to this, but was wondering where I should stand. I'm at like 1500's right now, and my 2 [edit - I have 3 cities. Typo.] cities are only at about 6k total, and racking up about 150-200 culture a turn. I think I may be a bit on the low end... (And someone took Sistine, since I didn't realize how important it would become...)

Thanks.

 

[Legal_My_Deagle]

I cant help you much, except in pointing out that you actually have to have THREE culture cities, not two.

 

[ÆnigmÆffect]

Haha, typo. I meant 3 . I'll edit my original post also.

 

[petey]

At normal game speed, you need 3 cities with 50,000 culture in order to get a Cultural Victory. If your cities are at 6K in 1500, you're not in bad shape, but you're going to have to generate more than a couple hundred a turn. Try to get cultural wonders that lead to Great Artists and put them all in one of the cities. When the artists come, culture bomb the other two to help them catch up.

 

[bayareastank]

The game ends at a pre-determined year, 2050 i think (could be wrong, don't have the manual with me to look it up). So then you'd just do some subtraction in your head.

 

[Bezhukov]

Sistine is great to have, but its effect pales in comparison to loading a city with towns, building several cathedrals, and running a high culture slider.

I've only managed to really get this cranking relatively late in the game so far (max culture/turn 1215 in the mid 1900's), but the technologies exist to do it much earlier than that. You could conceivably turn off all research as early as the requisite civic techs (max trade routes with Astronomy) and run pure culture from there. This approach would require 9 cities to get the necessary temples and probably some overseas settling of temporary cities to grab all religions (don't need to found them, just get them so you can spread them in your own civ).

The problem with a great person/specialist strategy is that it wants to run Pacifism, while Organized Religion really heps a Cathedral-based strategy. With high enough base culture, +50% is way better than even 5 artist specialists, even with the boost from Sistine, and you can't beat the base culture of a high commerce/high culture slider city.

 

[ÆnigmÆffect]

I find it so interesting that there's so many different ways to win using Culture now. It really seems there's no one way to victory, unlike cultural victory in Civ 3.

I'm wondering if it's too late for me to switch strategies, or things are still looking good... I've been mainly wonder hording, and thought I'd run high food later on for specialist, but perhaps the culture slider makes more sense later on.

So... Anyone know how many turns I got left? It's kinda hard to do the 2050 AD thing, since the number of years/turn changes...

 

[walkerjks]

I think the victory conditions screen (F8?) shows the turns left even before it gets down to 100 turns.

 

[marioh]

I think the victory conditions screen (F8?) shows the turns left even before it gets down to 100 turns.

Yep, right at the top of the screen.