I'm one of the people who voted for "no CV wonder" so I'd like to chime in as well.
Civ 5 is a game that resembles history and reality imperfectly in every way it tries; this is not surprising, since a more accurate portrayal of reality would push the complexity to levels impossible to achieve. Since much of the discussion here seems focused on semantics I wanted to point that out because I don't think that a discussion of morality is particularly useful in this context, especially since "immoral" actions are the bread and butter of gameplay anyway; when you decide to build a Barracks before a Granary you implicitly accept that some people might starve just so you have better soldiers; if you check the "do not grow" mark on a city you forcibly implement a two-child policy; if you invade a neighbor and annihilate his army to capture that city with all the nice resources you need, you killed and subjugated many people to serve your strategic needs; if you choose the "Lebensraum" tenet you implicitly declare the superiority of your "main race" followed by forced expulsion and basically enslavement of other peoples (this was the idea behind "Lebensraum": that Eastern Europe would become the farm lands for the Aryan master race)...I could go on and on with this. Gazebo succinctly summarized the point I'm trying to make here while I was writing this:
It’s a game, though, not a philosophical platform.
G
Like someone else in this thread pointed out (too lazy to dig up the quote) the only victory that comes without messing with other civilizations is science victory...turtle up and build your space ship (and then prepare for war on the new planet as the other civs will be joining you shortly....Civ BE incoming
). I don't see how culture victory could mean anything positive; if it is simply "having great ideas and art that will be discussed by others" then that is not victory at all (go ask the Greeks how victorious they feel these days...not trying to disparage the Greeks btw but I think it gets the point across). Culture victory has to mean "global cultural domination", which necessitates the suppression of all other (non-victorious) cultures against the wishes of billions of people.
There is a problem with this concept, however, in that this type of "victory" realistically cannot be attained without (military) force. Hitler with his ideas of "Welthaupstadt Germania" was certainly intent on conquering the world (or at least very large parts of it) to allow for the spread of his "master race" and subjugate everyone else in order to make Berlin the capital of the world; the Soviet Union killed plenty of people and invaded plenty of countries who didn't want to accept their utopian vision of world wide socialist revolution and an important part of the West's "delivery" of "Freedom" to the world is the invasion of other countries. That these "schemes" don't really work even with military force can be perfectly well observed in the Middle East today; it is ridiculous IMO to think that any sort of "Culture Victory" is possible without military force and even with it the effect would be more akin to the already existing military domination victory (just a more thorough variant of it)....which brings me back to my original point: this is a game, not reality, and culture victory exists because we have fun when we play to attain it (or prevent it) and we need incentives to pursue tourism and culture in our civ. Personally, I would actually like it if there was no CV and instead the tourism and culture thing was simply expanded a bit to have more influence on diplomacy, espionage, trade, happiness, warfare etc. than it already has so that a strong culture and tourism simply make it easier to attain the other victory types (and harder for the weaker cultures) but this would require massive changes that are certainly beyond the scope at this point.
So far for the "rant" part, on to the productive comment part:
I agree that sudden, early CVs can be annoying and that sometimes one doesn't want to win by CV but is "forced to". The latter can be fixed by creating a national wonder that becomes available when the civ is influential with everyone, follows the world ideology and maybe a certain WC delegate percentage is reached; I like the idea of ideology specific wonders but I have spent too much time writing this comment already to elaborate much, especially since I also don't care much about the names ("Welthauptstadt Germania", "Palace of the Soviets" and "EPCOT" are my favourites, though). The former can be partly fixed (and maybe it already has) by adjusting tourism and having the tie-in to ideology and World Ideology. Overall I'd be fine with no wonder requirement as well, though, especially since someone as OCD as me can't just say "no" to building a wonder that would win me the game just to have another win screen; alas, there are other people who may like that kind of thing.
