Optimum number of cities for Culture Victory

[padlock]

Not a bug. It's a documented feature mentioned on the description of what making a puppet state does. It's also historically accurate: think conquered people paying for palaces in the capitals of their conquerors, artists moving from conquered cities to core cities, etc.

If that's true, I hope they re-visit this decision. In my opinion, the advantages of puppets (far less unhappiness + no increase in social policies) far outweigh the disadvantages (not being able to choose what they build), especially when going for a cultural victory.

In my opinion, it should be the other way around. Puppets should be a temporary stopgap to allow conquest without destroying happiness. They should be things that you aim to get rid of when you can.

Frankly, while I like the concept of puppets and appreciate they're necessity, I'm not really happy with the way they've been implemented. I think a better solution would be to have the consequence of puppets to be that you only receive 50% of the research/gold/culutre from them instead of not being able to control their production.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

Well, the Building maintenance means that puppets are potentially dangerousin that sense, pluss I think they can build Factories+power plant that use up your resources.

 

[DanPMN]

I was playing a game last night and going for the Bollywood achievement.

I'm pretty sure, albeit not completely positive, that the first extra city increased my social policy costs by 15% and the second increased them by 20%.

Are you sure that it's a linear relationship? This would mess up your calculations.

 

[Daniel D]

I haven't been able to dig too far into the game data for culture and policy, but there are some policy related attributes for world size and difficulty level. I'm listing these below in case they help with what you're researching.

Size / Number of City Policy Cost Mod
Duel / 30
Tiny / 30
Small / 30
Standard / 30
Large / 20
Huge / 15

Difficulty / Policy Percent
Settler / 50
Chieftain / 67
Warlord / 85
Prince and up / 100

 

[incubuspawn]

3 or 4 cities sound good to me. WIth how global happiness works and the amount of potential tiles each city can work, it seems that for most of the game it is a choice between a few really big cities, or a lot of little ones. So this is perfect.

 

[MuteWolf]

I would like to mention that playing as Asoka I noticed that my puppet states seemed to always build my special building first. The mud pyramid mosque increases culture by 5 and has no maintenance cost. It helped my culture a nice bit.