The best way to win culture victory

[Brons]

I've got a much better idea: once you reach the culture threshold you just get a SP point and your culture bar goes down to zero. This way you can save your picks for later branches but you can't sell your cities to buy whole trees at once.

 

[Lynxx]

The only suggestion that would really work so far is the one from Celevin. To make it a bit easier to understand (and keep the integers) I would propose the following:

The culture bar should count/show "culture needed till next policy". With many cities, you have a higher number to fill up (scaling as before), but also more culture coming in from your cities. Selling of all your cities the turn before getting the policy would do nothing, cause only the "culture needed till next policy" would scale down as it should and you would have won nothing at all.

Hope I made it clear enough for everyone to understand.

 

[Celevin]

That works as well.

The reason I like mine is people will be able to see the difference of adding a new city to their empire. They'll see their culture per turn change from 10 to 8.2.

 

[agentkirb]

personally I wish policies had a SET culture cost... just like tech... that was basically a seperate tree...
So that more cities = more culture. I don't like this BS "less cities are better" notion... its artificial and its silly. A massive empire produces far more cultural advances that some isolated tiny village in the middle of nowhere.

You must not have been around back in the Civ3 days when fast expansion was how you had to win. Like... if you couldn't get 3-4 cities in the first 20 or so turns you fell behind (maybe not 20 turns, but you get the point).

The whole point of those games were to expand as quickly as you could. And this continued the entire campaign. If you didn't have 20-40 cities towards the end of the game, you weren't doing it right (and back then of course, there was no puppet option when you conquered a city, it was either raze or annex).

I remember in Civ4 they kind of tried to fix it by making it so that 1 big city could be just as good as 2 smaller cities. But this didn't really solve the expansion issue, more cities were always better. In this game you can win potentially with 4-5 cities, and that was unheard of up till now.

And on a side note, I disagree with the "more cities = more culture" idea you are throwing out. Why would that be true? And to continue this logic, more cities doesn't always mean better civilization either because if you go back historically the most populated countries weren't always the ones with the best economies or the happiest people or the most technologically advanced ones.

I think allowing civs to win the game without having to resort to 30 city empires is realistic and it makes the game more fun because it doesn't turn into the rush to build the most settlers.

 

[SeptimusOctopus]

The only suggestion that would really work so far is the one from Celevin. To make it a bit easier to understand (and keep the integers) I would propose the following:

The culture bar should count/show "culture needed till next policy". With many cities, you have a higher number to fill up (scaling as before), but also more culture coming in from your cities. Selling of all your cities the turn before getting the policy would do nothing, cause only the "culture needed till next policy" would scale down as it should and you would have won nothing at all.

Hope I made it clear enough for everyone to understand.

This is basically what I was trying to suggest as well, but you have worded it more lucidly. It seems like the simplest fix to the exploit of selling off your whole empire to get entire SP trees at once.

@Celevin - I think I missed the post where you mentioned scaling only before adding your culture to the SP pool. That makes all this work out to be fairly equivalent I think.

 

[Lynxx]

This is basically what I was trying to suggest as well, but you have worded it more lucidly. It seems like the simplest fix to the exploit of selling off your whole empire to get entire SP trees at once.

Indeed you did, I just read through this thread a bit to fast to see it it seems, sorry for that, but three people saying the same with different words has to be better than just two so we are better off in the end arent we ...

 

[taltamir]

You must not have been around back in the Civ3 days when fast expansion was how you had to win. Like... if you couldn't get 3-4 cities in the first 20 or so turns you fell behind (maybe not 20 turns, but you get the point).

The whole point of those games were to expand as quickly as you could. And this continued the entire campaign. If you didn't have 20-40 cities towards the end of the game, you weren't doing it right (and back then of course, there was no puppet option when you conquered a city, it was either raze or annex).

I remember in Civ4 they kind of tried to fix it by making it so that 1 big city could be just as good as 2 smaller cities. But this didn't really solve the expansion issue, more cities were always better

you speak as if this is a problem... More cities ARE better... or at least, should be. and this is a 4X game... I WANT to conquer the world, and if you don't have 20-40 cities you aren't doing it right. I don't see why the need to "fix" something good by making it bad.
And you can't just ignore culture, because the bonuses from culture are absolutely essential to mitigate the costs of expansion (unhappiness, mostly)

And on a side note, I disagree with the "more cities = more culture" idea you are throwing out. Why would that be true? And to continue this logic, more cities doesn't always mean better civilization either because if you go back historically the most populated countries weren't always the ones with the best economies or the happiest people or the most technologically advanced ones.

1. More people = More people to come up with new ideas
2. Historically speaking, with a few rare exceptions, the most populous societies WERE doing the best, had created great cultural advancements, and great scientific advancements. While very small ones stagnated.

But regardless of whether its historically accurate or not, it is FUN to conquer the world.

 

[CreepyD]

I'd like to see it just cost most each policy just as now, but have nothing to do with amount of cities.
If you develop more culture due to having more cities, then fine.. That's how it should be no?
You have more cities, you generate more productivity, more science output, and also more culture. Why should culture be cut if you have more cities?

 

[SeptimusOctopus]

I'd like to see it just cost most each policy just as now, but have nothing to do with amount of cities.
If you develop more culture due to having more cities, then fine.. That's how it should be no?
You have more cities, you generate more productivity, more science output, and also more culture. Why should culture be cut if you have more cities?

I guess a good real-world analogy for this mechanic is that you're adopting social policies with the culture you bank. So implementing any one of them, say monarchy, for instance would be much more difficult in a society composed of 10 cities than it would be for a 2-3 city nation. That makes sense to me anyway.

 

[iop]

Change it so that even when you are storing policies, the game tracks the cost of each new policy.
So suppose my policy increments are 500, 800, 1200, 1500 (hypothetical).
And suppose I am saving culture rather than spending.
Then make it so when I reach 1201 culture, I have 3 SPs saved, rather than having 1201 culture to spend at whatever the costs are at the time.
So that even if I lose cities, the cost of policies doesn't actually fall.

That is a great fix. Note that this brings about the "inverse exploit", where you can collect SP picks with a small number of cities, then expand rapidly before unlocking order. However, since fewer cities means less military production and less science accumulating, I don't think it's something to worry about.


In addition, I suggest to change pupped states, so that they become something similar to "financial city states" that will give you a bit of money, but not science, or culture, and only a limited amount of unhappiness. The amount of money could be tied to city size, and one may even go so far as to have the option to demand high, low, or no tax. In case of high tax, you get more money, but the cities don't grow, in case of no tax, the cities would slowly start assimilating. Thus, puppet states would give you tiles, resources, an a bit of gold. Conquest would become a bit easier, but there would be a bigger incentive to annex the cities eventually, and there would be much less room for exploits.

 

[milk steak]

Has anyone tried Siam for a cultural victory? I'm guessing the +50% culture from cultural city states is huge.

 

[taltamir]

I guess a good real-world analogy for this mechanic is that you're adopting social policies with the culture you bank. So implementing any one of them, say monarchy, for instance would be much more difficult in a society composed of 10 cities than it would be for a 2-3 city nation. That makes sense to me anyway.

Is monarchy even a social policy in Civ V? anyways, I disagree... I think implementing a monarchy would be easier with a larger empire than a single town.
We aren't arguing your logic and conclusions, but the so called "facts" you base them on. You seem to think that implementing a social policy is easier the smaller your society is (how that works out with puppet cities btw? which contribute culture but don't increase costs? apparently slaves are excellent sources of culture, but free citizens only hamper your ability to advance your culture, too funny!)

 

[Cptobvious]

How do you end the turn without having to click "Adopt Policy"?

 

[CreepyD]

Just right click the notification to remove it.
Yes I tried Siam in my last go, they are very powerful once you have 3-4+ city states giving you food and culture. However limiting my number of cities to 3-4 meant I didn't have enough gold to get more city states. Siam's UB is also awesome, +50% science in every city..
I'm definitely not going to use the 'exploit', I want a true culture victory!

 

[Bolka]

How do you end the turn without having to click "Adopt Policy"?

Indeed, I haven't tried to work around it, I always thought you HAD to use your policy point right away.
With this said, I find it very difficult to win a culture victory...

 

[stormerne]

Has anyone tried Siam for a cultural victory? I'm guessing the +50% culture from cultural city states is huge.

Yes. And it is. It can easily account for a third of your total culture points.

 

[Qin Shi Huang]

keep everything about the culture the same but when you reach the (for example) 1800/1800 culture you gain the ability to adopt a policy and it goes to 0/2200 or whatever and also losing cities in anyway way doesnt decrease the amount of culture you need to get the next policy as people can sell cities or declare war and purposefully lose cities tbh i cant see a 100% perfect solution to the culture flaw

 

[Paeanblack]

Another way to combat this would be to have Social Policy costs calculated on the most number of cities you have ever owned at one time instead of the current number of cities.

 

[Duo]

I remember in Civ4 they kind of tried to fix it by making it so that 1 big city could be just as good as 2 smaller cities. But this didn't really solve the expansion issue, more cities were always better. In this game you can win potentially with 4-5 cities, and that was unheard of up till now.

You could win with that many cities in IV at almost any difficulty, it really is not a new thing. Also, more cities are still better than less in V, but unlike IV there is now no real penalty to always expanding, not even a short term one which would force you to consider tactically interesting trade-offs.

 

[CultureManiac]

Why do we want to make it more difficult to get culture wins? CiV is already skewed enough toward constant war. And even for big empires, if they want to save up their culture and unload it once they get to Order, I'm fine with that. What's wrong with saving up culture? You can save up your gold. It's tough enough getting an immortal cultural win even by saving up SP points until I get Cristo. Let's not push the builders completely out of the game. The OP's exploit is not different than those who want to play ICS. Let them play that way. Let some of us keep our 1-2 city wins.