Spiritual > Creative?

[aeoniq]

I've only played Civ IV up to prince but after having won a cultural victory with a non-creative leader, I feel creative is the crappiest trait.
After thinking about it, it is clearly inferior to spiritual. There is nothing creative can give that spiritual can't.

+2 culture per turn is modest in the long run. You get only 2000-3000 culture points which is less than a single Great Artist. Want a quick border expansion to grab resources? Go spiritual and build stonehenge. Or since you are spiritual, you should have at least one religion. Use that missionary and you can also build a temple to give you both the money and the culture. Usually I'm not in such a hurry and a missionary would do the job or just wait for religion to spread.

Speed up production of theatre? Well, it's not hard to build one in the first place. Also, spiritual already saves you a few turns from anarchy which should, in the end, gives you more production than creative can give.

In the long run, spiritual seems way more powerful than creative given the money and the allies you can get (gotta be quick to spread it here). I think Firaxis' gotta be more creative about creative here e.g. +1 artist for a city of size 8 or more.

 

[DaviddesJ]

Try Immortal, and you'll find it's not so easy to get that one religion, or to build Stonehenge before the AIs do. Also, having free cultural expansion at 2 cpt is better than Stonehenge at 1 cpt, even if Stonehenge were free.

 

[Martinus]

I think neither Creative nor Spiritual are really great for Cultural victory.

The main benefit from Creative is early border expansion, which means you have one less thing (such as building a monument or founding/spreading religion) to worry about in early game and, depending on the map size and your location, choke other civs.

Spiritual has even less connection to Cultural victory imo (note that, contrary to a popular belief, not all Spiritual civs start with Mysticism, and there are non-Spiritual civs that start with Mysticism as well; so it has no bearing on being able to found an early religion). Sure, cheaper temples are somewhat helpful but any cheaper buildings are helpful for Cultural victory.

Three traits that have the biggest impact on Cultural victory, imo, are:
- Financial (more commerce means you get an early research lead, and more importantly more culture once you change to culture building),
- Philosophical (more great people = more great artists, when played right), and
- Industrious (more wonders, though admittedly, culture from wonders is inferior, efficiency wise than culture from commerce and great people).

Expansive and Charismatic also help to some extent, due to more health/happiness meaning bigger cities, which equals more culture production per turn.

As for starting techs, I'd say Mysticism is important for an ability to found an early religion (and possibly build Stonehenge). The other one is more open to a debate, but Mining (with an immediate access to Bronze Working/Masonry) comes handy imo.

As for leaders, I would say the best suited for a cultural victory are (not necessarily in that order):
- Gandhi (India) - starts with Mysticism/Mining, Philosophical, well placed to get early religions (and then get great Prophets from Philosophical to found even more religions and/or build Great Shrines), with a great builder-oriented UU,
- Elisabeth (England) - starts with Mining, Philosophical/Financial, industrial era UU, which comes just right when you switch from research to culture, so you are slightly stronger than under normal culture victory strategy,
- Huayna Capac (Inca) - Industrious/Financial, starts with Mysticism, so well placed to grab at least 1-2 early religions; can keep the tech lead and build wonders to his heart's content; and comes with an awesome UB (granary that generates culture),
- Ramsess II (Egypt) - Industrious/Spiritual; a bit second-rate on first look, but his UB is a variation of a monument, so you can just get Mysticism asap, build Stonehenge, and get a UB in each city for free - allowing you to set two Priest specialist for an early Great Prophet boost, which in turn would allow you to found a bunch of religions; later focus on wonder building and you should be fine (perhaps trying an alternate culture victory SE strategy with him would be more worthwhile than going for a standard commerce based culture victory);
- Louis XIV (France) - like Ramsess II not your first-league cultural victory leader (interestingly enough, starts with the same techs - Agriculture and Wheel), but his UB (which grants a free artist specialist in each city) may give you an interesting leverage. Also, a specialist (or hybrid) economy could be an interesting choice for him.

 

[slowcar]

how about chinese?
their UB adds +25% culture, not too bad.

 

[Cookie Crumbs]

The main benefit of Spiritual is the lower cost of Temples, allowing you quicker access to the 50% buildings. Otherwise though, I'd agree -Fin/Ind/Philo are the best for Cultural. Industrious is useful for grabbing Stonehenge+Oracle, giving you early Great Priests for grabbing religions, and GAs from Parthenon and such.

 

[aeoniq]

You guys digress from the original topic. The point is creative is good for nothing. There was another post that stated that creative is the obvious choice for cultural victory which I think we agree that it's not true. Then what is it good for? Domination? Not really. Conquest, Diplomatic, Space race? No.
So it should be buffed or changed to something else.

Someone mentioned immortal but at that level, I don't think cultural victory is possible in the first place.

 

[DaviddesJ]

You guys digress from the original topic. The point is creative is good for nothing. There was another post that stated that creative is the obvious choice for cultural victory which I think we agree that it's not true. Then what is it good for?

It lets your early cities expand their borders without having to build an obelisk/monument. This is pretty valuable.

You can also occasionally get some benefit from taking territory from your opponents, or flipping their cities.

 

[VoiceOfUnreason]

I've only played Civ IV up to prince but after having won a cultural victory with a non-creative leader, I feel creative is the crappiest trait. After thinking about it, it is clearly inferior to spiritual. There is nothing creative can give that spiritual can't.

+2 culture per turn is modest in the long run. You get only 2000-3000 culture points which is less than a single Great Artist. Want a quick border expansion to grab resources? Go spiritual and build stonehenge. Or since you are spiritual, you should have at least one religion. Use that missionary and you can also build a temple to give you both the money and the culture. Usually I'm not in such a hurry and a missionary would do the job or just wait for religion to spread.

I'll confess that I haven't quite figured out Creative, but I'm pretty sure this collection of negatives isn't the right way to do it.

First thought - Spiritual may make cultural victories easier than does Creative. shrug... maybe creative is better at something else?

Second thought - the advantage of the early border expansion is really only significant in the early going. On the other hand, a big part of CIV strategy appears to be built around finding advantages in the opening and milking them into a game breaking edge.

Third thought - the edge in Creative is likely to come in all the bits that you can skip (extra hammers, techs you don't need). Archers for defense, catapults for attack. Do you even need workers, or can you just bury the world in stone and timber? I don't know - I haven't seen anyone make it work.

There's lots of information around that could be compiled into a guide to spiritual, and you could probably do the same for financial (ok, that might be a bit thin) and philosophical. I'm not sure there's really much strategy information on the other traits, though. From what I can tell, this means nobody has found good answers that they like.

 

[Cookie Crumbs]

Creative is good for Domination when you get the land quicker, and makes settling cities so much more flexible early game. But using it for a Cultural victory is a joke. This connection is little more than word association between 'Creative' and 'Culture'.

 

[shadyforce]

I *hate* starting next to creative leaders. Maybe the biggest benefit is not that it help you, but it hurts your neighbours. Having said that:

1. The early land-grab can be quite important on certain starts (eg. small pangeas), and creative leaders have the edge.

2. You don't need to be too picky about where you build your cities (the corn/wheat/pigs can be 2 squares away and you'll get it quickly enough), giving you more options, and better long term cities.

3. Without the need to head to a religion or even research mysticism for monuments, you can head right for bronze/iron working and get whipping, chopping and building axemen/swordsmen fairly quickly enhancing security. (You might not even need archers.) Giving you a headstart militarily and technologically.

People say that the benefits of creative are only in the start game, and they are absolutely right. But the game is usually won or lost during the lifetime of creative.

Having said that, the total cultural from creative is peanuts for the cultural victory. Philosophical is the one you need, with any of financial, spiritual or industrious a handy second. I personally prefer industrious, not just for the culture of wonders, but for the specific benefits of certain key wonders (Eiffel tower, Statue of Liberty, Sistine Chapel, etc).

 

[shivute]

It lets your early cities expand their borders without having to build an obelisk/monument. This is pretty valuable.

You can also occasionally get some benefit from taking territory from your opponents, or flipping their cities.

Its not valuable. Especially when you can whip a monument - taking only one turn of building and one turn to whip. Only costs 1 pop point. This makes creative pretty dung at high levels of difficulty as well as the lower ones. I play marathon though, creative may be more useful at standard speed and faster (is there faster?)

I think it easily wins as being the worst trait by far.
I have been playing with Mehmed as I thought expansive and organised were pretty poor and on a par with creative - I have found out differently!

 

[cabert]

Spiritual has even less connection to Cultural victory imo (note that, contrary to a popular belief, not all Spiritual civs start with Mysticism, and there are non-Spiritual civs that start with Mysticism as well; so it has no bearing on being able to found an early religion). Sure, cheaper temples are somewhat helpful but any cheaper buildings are helpful for Cultural victory.

that's just
creative gives you cheap theatres (good for cultural victory) and cheap coliseums (no culture)
spiritual gives you cheap temples.

How many theatres do you build in a cultural game? 4 to 8 depending on map
size. (not counting those you build for happiness)
How many temples do you build in a cultural game? 6x3=18 to 12x7=84 depending on map size and number of religions you get. (not counting those you build for happiness)

I think having 18 cheap buildings is more powerful than having 4.

 

[Lanthanide]

I've got some suggestions to help improve the 'less useful' traits. These are mainly 'icing on the cake' changes, but they do help round out the traits and help them to compete much better with the others. In the case of creative, it turns the trait from being an 'early game expansion-only' trait to one that will last the whole game and is especially useful for cultural victories.

Creative - artist specialists give 4 GPP instead of 3. This means 25 turns for your first artist instead of 34. 13 turns if you are Creative + Philisophical (apparently no leaders are, though). This obviously gives a large boost for anyone aiming for a cultural victory. This means in the time that it takes a non-cultural civ to get 6 GA via specialists alone, you will have gotten 7. This also gives you much more flexibility if you just need to get 1 or 2 artists, you don't have to spend as long using the artist specialists but can swap over to something else like scientists.

Expansive - +1 food from city centre. This helps to make less viable areas (lots of jungle/desert) easier to work as you've got more of a safety net available and helps your cities to grow faster. It also means that late in the game you could end up with an extra 1 pop in a particular city that another non-expansive civ may otherwise not get. Possibly this could be bumped up to +2 in city centre when an appropriate technology has been researched 1/2 way through the game - civil service or education? I think Biology is a bit late, but maybe others would prefer that.

Organised - either +1 hammer from city centre, or possibly +1 hammer from engineers or +1 GPP from engineers, hard to say. This goes along with the idea that organised civilizations are better able to work efficiently and organise (well duh) themselves when it comes to public construction efforts. While another civ might be bumbling around with the blueprints, the organised civ has already started construction on the foundations. +1 hammer from city centre means they always get the bonus, but the bonus never improves. Granting +1 from engineer is similar for most of the game - for a long time you can only have 1 engineer specialist with a forge. Later in the game you start to benefit from this more as more engineer spots become available. Alternatively, the 1 extra GPP would help mean that this civ will get more GEs than most others (if they try), however I'm not really sure if this belongs with Organised as its more of an Industrial type bonus. To be clear - I am suggesting only 1 of these 3 bonuses be added, but I am unsure as to which is the best path to be taken for this one.

Spiritual - +1 GPP per priest. This simply lets you get your prophets out quicker - you can either focus on getting lots of them for multiple religions/shrines, or get lots of them for the techs they give out, or simply use it to get the first 1 or 2 quicker and then swap to something more useful like scientists or whatever.

 

[VoiceOfUnreason]

I don't know squat about the other three traits, but Spiritual has got all the icing it needs.

 

[DaviddesJ]

Its not valuable. Especially when you can whip a monument - taking only one turn of building and one turn to whip. Only costs 1 pop point. This makes creative pretty dung at high levels of difficulty as well as the lower ones.

This is ridiculous. Creative gets you expansion in 5 turns (scaled by speed level). Pop rushing a monument gets you expansion in 20+ turns (you have to grow to size 2), and makes you wait longer for your other buildings as well.

I don't believe you've played many games at Emperor/Immortal, if you think this.

(And playing at Marathon speed is like going down one difficulty level.)

 

[KrikkitTwo]

Its not valuable. Especially when you can whip a monument - taking only one turn of building and one turn to whip.

Whipping a monument is a ridiculous answer. first, assuming you have a food bonus Adjacent to your city, that will take at LEAST 5 turns to get that extra pop, (assuming you get it worked almost immediately) and then it will take another 10 turns... and you have set back an early city by 1 of its 2 pop.

Second you have to have researched both Bronzeworking AND Mysticism.

Basically what Creative allows you to do is ignore the religious path. Until it becomes the prerequsite for other things.

Creative is designed for the early rush game, you concentrate on non-religious/non-Wonder military building and rush your opponents.

It could probably afford a bit of a beef up (maybe add 1 culture per pop from a city) but it is overall OK

 

[GoldenWheels]

Creative is designed for the early rush game, you concentrate on non-religious/non-Wonder military building and rush your opponents.

Agreed, and it can be very powerful as well in that regard. I am only a Prince player, but anytime I want a quick fun game I choose Kublai Khan (Roman is too quick, LOL).

Grab up all the land you can with the creative trait, and while you do that research bronze working and begin building your army. After archery you head for horseback riding, and you have lots of land, double promoted axeman (with barracks) and promoted Keshiks with the stables from HR. More than match for the AI, on prince anyway.

Often with smart expansion on a pangea you have also cut off a few of your enemies from copper or iron with a choke...making them even easier pickings.

Territory can be power!