I would like to play the Devil's Advocate here and see what kinds of points I can jot down in favour of playing a Cutural game.
Nice, mainly by the best diplo date of last GotM
"Every AI is still alive and running a state religion." = "Each AI has at least one city and is not running the Free Religion Civic"
I can't think of any other situation where an AI would not have a state religion, unless somehow they were isolated by Map-Designer-created-mountains and somehow could not get a religion spread to them--once an AI has a religion, it will convert to it automatically.
Sure.
But Orange, Darius, Elizabeth and Asoka have FR as favourite civic. And any leader will adopt that civic in the same turn he learn the needed tech.
I just hope the mapmaker not choose any of them, but instead others with OR or Theocracy.
But with many of them a diplo vote can be hard, if they're running a different religion.
This can be a point in favor of the Cultural option.
1) We will control the finishing date. With a Diplo game, we can easily lose due to missing one of the game conditions accidentally. Even with lots of tech to trade to an AI to influence them, if an AI changes their Civic to Free Speech within 5 turns of our victory date, unless we gift them the Cristo Redentor or unless they have that Wonder, we just lost the game... unless we notice and we intentionally abstain from our victory. CAN SOMEONE PLEASE CONFIRM THIS POINT: Even if we have plenty of Espionage points, we can't change an AI's Civic if they have made a Civic change within the last 5 turns, so really, we could accidentally lose due to an AI changing their Civics when we don't want them to do so. With a Cultural game, however, we can use Great Artist bombs on two Legendary cities but can save the last Great Artist Bomb or two for the 3rd Legendary City until we have all victory conditions in place, meaning that we are in control, instead of the vote timing being in control.
Sure
2) Most Cultural Victories can be won without any wars. Most Diplo games are very tough to win without any wars. DEAR BLubmuz: For all of your statistics on Diplo games, can you please cross-reference those games against Domination Land % owned by the winner? If that amount is more than 25% of the World's Land Area, then I think that those games are not eligible for comparison. Since we can't win by Diplomation, subject to a few minor exception cases that I won't get into here, only fast Diplo games where most of the world was AI-controlled should really count in your analysis of whether Diplo games really are faster than Cultural games. I'm not sure how HOF saved games work, but at least for XOTM games, you can download the submitted final saved game in order to see how much Land Area was owned by the player--if the same can be done for HOF games, then pick a few to compare and check the Land Area % values. You might as well record the Land Area %, the Total Land Area % required for Domination, and the Victory date for Diplo, and then put that info into a table for us to see. Only then will I believe that Diplo consistently beats Cultural when War is not a major contributor to the victory. Since we won't need to be in wars, as we won't benefit from them very much, Cultural has a major advantage here: we will have friendly relations, good tech and Resource trades--even beyond the WFYABTA limits, and we will hardly need any land area to win: 7-8 self-built cities are sometimes enough if you can culturally subsume 1-2 in the "cultural push" stage, but 9 self-built cities would be enough for sure. Diplo would need a bigger, more corrupt empire and we'd probably anger many AIs on the way to getting such an empire. Ivory is hard to trade for if the AI controlling it doesn't like you a lot, so we'd likely be able to get the trade in our more peaceful Cultural game, and the only city that we'd need to capture is the Barb City on or near the Fur Resource.
The HoF games are downloadable. I can do it and i'll do it soon. I just hope they are in BtS 3.19, otherwise i cannot open them.
3) Here's a biggie: We won't need a lot of tech for a Cultural game. So, the AIs won't get a lot of tech from us in trades. The overall tech pace of a Cultural game is much slower than in a Diplo game. In most of my Diplo games, many of the AIs get to Liberalism and are thus danger factors for switching to Free Religion. In my Cultural games, most AIs don't get as far as learning Liberalism, giving us a huge safety margin on the Civic-shifting potential problem of the AIs.
4) There is no "dealing with failure" that you often see in a Diplo game--things can go wrong and go wrong quickly in a Diplo game. Not enough AIs like you at the right time or you get a Demand by one "ally" to stop trades with another "ally," and then you lose one of your voting allies at the last minute. In a Cultural game, we'd only be worried about being declared on--no AI will be near Space, no AI will possibly steal a Diplo game from us--and since we're spreading religions around, we'll certainly spread the Apostolic Palace's religion around enough to prevent an AI Apostolic Victory. No other way to lose. But in a Diplo game, the AIs can vote someone else to be the winner. They're getting closer to Tanks and will have other high-tech items such as Destroyers and Air Ships, so they'll have higher power ratios that will make them more likely to attack us. They might even get close to Space if we keep failing our Diplo votes. With the Cultural game, as long as we keep our relations good, then we won't get into any wars and victory will be smooth sailing.
5) Since we'll be able to focus on spreading religions around instead of building military units, we'll have enough religions that we can switch religions upon AI-request without hurting our empire's Religious Civic bonus. With a Diplo game, we won't have the Hammer output to be able to do so.
This will allow us to avoid negative diplo points for not having the same religion (thus winning the UN election) while still meeting the state religion requirement.
which can play.
