This combo is fragile and one of those things that works at Emperor on down but not so well on Immortal and Deity. I am trying a Sacred Sites tactic, on Immortal using Boudicca, with limited success that is allowing for ICS but not the super finish times produced here.
All it takes is one Piety-focused AI to beat you to Sacred Sites or 2-3 Religion-focused AI in the game to snarf up all the Faith buildings and the tactic crumples. Not broken. Glass cannon.
Game: Civ5 GOTM 66
Date submitted: 2013-08-06
Reference number: 29455
Your name: tomoliop
Game status: Culture Victory
Game date: 1953AD
Turns played: 373
Base score: 1420
Final score: 1918
Time played: 4:45:00
Damn, some of these win times freak me out, I thought there was no way to do a culture win this quick...
while this is a replay, I did not use any previous map knowledge (well, poly at islands map.. you don't need map knowledge) so basically just putting self-limitation (not using sacred sites).
Emperor AI, especially at islands map, is just too slow. I had to wait several turns so that I could do RA before entering renaissance .. (most of them were classical....) I could do only one and had to pay 3gpt more for the next one. I think I did 3 RAs during the game and not sure they helped.
GL-NC and 3 cities. cargo ship to boost pop at 2nd city, and when granary is done I sent food cargo ships to cap. 2 food cargo ships to cap till archaelogy - after that used cargo ships to boost hammers in all cities.
Wonder-building fest at cap: GL NC HG national epic HS Sistine ironworks Globe theater Alhambra Hermitage Uffizi Eiffel (Pisa GE rushed)
2nd city built oracle and 3rd city built Pisa.
Tech: t98 education - printing press (acoustics meanwhile for rati open) - t153 (not sure)archaelogy - sci theory - t169 radio (oxford) - refrig. planted 2 GS and burned 1 for electricity and 1 for refrig.
SP: full tradition - pat right 1 (consulates) - aes open (oracle - dumb mistake. forgot to delay it...) - rati open and secularism - aes finish
Game ended before 2nd world congress. I proposed world religion (really important) and bribed 3 other civs that could not found religion (use diplomat and pay about 1 lux price) so that I could win that proposal by 5-4.
I was thinking about getting 4-5 galleass, but it was not worth it - AIs were so slow and they did not have great works for a while and not that many wonders either. I took indonesia cap at the very end of the game so that my GM did not need to swim 6-7 turns more to Morocco. I sold indonesia cap to Morocco and GM bombed - game was over at the next turn. I timed 1st GM so that I get it right after rush-buying hotel at the cap.
As you can see in the screenshot, I did not even have public school or museum at 2nd and 3rd cities. Opera houses were built only b/c I needed hermitage at cap.
This strategy is basically capital all-in. You build all important wonders at cap and all guilds at cap. I regret that I forgot to turn off automatic purchase and bought cathedral at the 3rd city, using 400 faith. Without it, I could have bought 1 faith GM (well, that would have saved 2 turns I think).
two food cargo ships will guarantee enough growth at cap. with free garden and national epic, you can get great people very fast. Also, in terms of culture, it's better to have all guilds at cap so that I could get hermitage+alhambra multiplier.
I did not even have time to build Louvre.
My strategy basically ignores all gold buildings (I only had one gold building, market at cap) and focus on sci and hammers. I use most cargo ships for internal use and send only 1-2 for trade route 25% bonus.
I'd say ICS is more to blame, although sacred sites definitely needs some tweaking.
They could easily fix ICS by making a requirement that to found or annex a city, your existing pop must be >= N+1 where N=number of cities. It would not delay initial expansion very much but would eliminate ICS. So for city5, your average pop needs to be >=6 in existing cities. For city 10, your average pop needs to be >=11, and so on.
from the screenshot, I got 12 art+artifact - 1 from indonesia cap and I think I got 3 artists and one free artist from uffizi. so I guess 7 archaologists.
Are you sure you know how to distinguish between balance issues and exploits? Because if you haven't noticed, "exploit" is quite the strong word to throw around.
I played in a top-end raiding guild in WoW for a long many years, so my definition of what an "exploit" is comes from that linage.
To me, something that is merely "imbalanced" will give you a small to medium, but measurable advantage. However, this advantage is not so great that it becomes the only viable approach to the problem (in this case, winning the game as fast as possible).
With Sacred Sites, the level of imbalance is tremendous and was clearly not envisioned by the game designers. This is the land of exploit.
When people abusing Sacred Sites finish games 100 turns sooner than people not using it, that is an extreme and profound difference. This goes well beyond the "balance issue" territory and deep into the "abusing something that is clearly broken" territory. The fact that this Sacred Sites strategy involves spamming as many size-1 cities as you can just further illustrates my point.
I predict Sacred Sites will be nerfed into the ground. I doubt the designers will choose to merely rebalance it. I suspect that they will tie the bonus to some technology (e.g., the bonus doesn't kick in until Radio or some Industrial Era tech). Or they might just redesign it completely. We shall see.
PS: I have no problem with people choosing to play using Sacred Sites. After all, it's fun to play a completely different type of game than normal. I just think you need to call "a spade" a spade.
the first game I finished in BNW. I read about the sacred sites strat and gave it a try (I currently don't have enough patience for a 300+ turns game). A bit slower than needed, I think. Around t120, I realized that I won't be able to beat marocco culturally, so I sent my army over there. Somewhere around t150, the other nations followed me culturally and in t169 I eliminated the last marocco city.
If I have enough free time before the next GOTM, I might replay this without sacred sites. I want to know how cultural victory is supposed to look like.
Had same problem, chrash on turn 12. I had three units in water by this.
Updated to lates Nvidia drivers for my GFX 670 card, and game could run again.
I dont have any polynesia experience. The statues seems quite underpowered, but wanted to see if they have any use, so decided to put statues anywhere where there is no resource and where more than one can be linked.
Furthermore, I wanted to do a modified version of the sacred sites, tourism from buildings purchased with faith. therefore needed early religion and prioritezed shrine and stoneheng, and to get a pantheon that would give consistent faith per turn. Only real possibility was faith from silver, but that is only one per turn, so I realized fast that I needed Stonehenge and either a natural faith wonder or a second faith producing wonder.
With polynesia and the advantage og early water accsess I made two scouts more than I usually make. (more ruins, and a few hopefully will get upraded).
BO: scout x 3 , shrine, granary, worker, stonehenge, library, settler, archer, settler.
Stole worker turn 30 from a CS, no penalty towards other civs.
Policies: To get fast border expand for statues + base culture I opened tradition, then straight to complete piety.
I was second to pantheon, faith on silver. First to religion and enhanced at 85. Got pagodas and Mosque, as well as 30% further spread and 2 gold per city. Since this is a water map, cities are far apart and to spread quikcly I need to use missionaries. Delayed NC, avoiding the increased faith cost, to purchase for my now 4 cities both buildings and missionaries for 160 faith cost each.
Gold is still ok, happiness also,, but science I am dropping behind. Plan is to send out cargo ships to catch up, but havent bothered yet cuz barbariens have been controlling the seas.
Second ewonder I wanted was the Borabura something + faith and 3 missionaries, but lost it with 2 turns to someone. Really big setback. It was turn 125 and 0300 in the morning, work at 0700 and well, good time to take a longer break and look at the total picture with fresher mind and eyes tonight.
Another complicating issue, some of my planned exps to silver spots are camped by barbs, and the 2-4 tiles all have a barb on them. This has been somewhat delaying city spreading.
I never done a BNW culture game and I learned alot. I never made more than 3-5 cities either, so this was different. The game freezes on turn 312, consistently. Not sure what is happening, it just hangs. Anyways, as a sacred sites approach seeing I am at turn 312, well it isnt going great.
The opening was very good til about turn 125 where I lost the above wonder. I ran out of exp. places and had solid faith per turn and close to 20 cities by turn 150.
I was pressing the next button waiting for the what I believed was the soon to come victory. By turn 170 I discovered the culture button, and the modifiers. I didnt have open borders, no shared religion and my trade routes was set up to whomever gave the most money and science, not to each civ.
science wise I was getting dragged down by 20 small cities without even libraries.
I started rearrange trade routes and negotiatin open borders. Indonesia was around turn 200 way ahead, but I now had controll on the other civs. Sent my first musician over, but the tour didnt help much. He was still way off, by several thousand. Assyria attacked at this point and had to relocate defense up west, and kinda forgot about indonesia, thinking I will get him sooner or later. But, by 240 I wasnt advancing. Spent the next 10 turns trying to figure out where he is getting all that culture, having only that puny little island. That is when I discovered the three CS allies he had, and with 100+ more than me in rep. I was ally to most CS, but I only had thought of happiness CS and military CS for units. Since I didnt think I need the culture I had totally not thought about preventing others from the culture per turn party.
Faith was coming in by tons, more than 10k faith at turn 300 and nothing to blow it on. Most of the map was happily practiing Taoism, but with 20 cities, the amount of culture needed for policies was just not making me move down any of the trees at any rate. By 260 indonesia, portugal, brasil and shoeshones DOWed me. I had no problem fighting them all, really weird AI, like portugal surround a city with 5 frigates, and none to take the city over. Slowly killing them off.
At this point I was mostly saying to myself: I wonder why I didnt try a test game before doing my first BNW culture game on GOTM.
But I learned that:
1. get open borders fast.
2. prevent cultural CS from opponents.
3. Get trade routes fast to each civ.
4. maybe take out the AI cultural runaway. Removing indonesia with my galleas fleet mid 100 would have solved my problem really. Still, I like to play peacefull, and even worse, chubby indonesian guy was like superfriendly. Thanking me left and right, offering friendship and aid. Couldnt get myself to hurt the guy...
Thanks again for the map and learning experience..
Edit 12.08.
Replayed the map correcting the above mistakes and staying peacful. Victory turn 228.
My opinion is that ICS one pop spamming is broken. There should be something to inhibit that type of play. I think you could find a formula to balance it properly. I was just giving n+1 as an example, but you're right that would make trad>lib. Of course, some social policy trees are already over-powered/over-used compared to others so I don't think you will ever balance them all. I wasn't intending the AI to be limited by the same rules...wouldn't be the first time the AI gets slack on something that affects the player.
Sacred Sites is broken in its current form also...any suggestions or guesses on how they will nerf it ?
I'm glad you played the game again without SS and acheived sub-T200. Good write-up. Hoorah. I usually play as one city with no intention of competing, but the food trade routes are clearly powerful and I may start trying 2-3 cities in science/culture games.
This probably isn't the thread to be discussing this issue in. However, I did start one the day after this GotM started over in ideas/suggestions that might be a more appropriate to discuss Sacred Sites. So far there's been 128 views, but no-one has posted their thoughts.
By itself, I am not convinced that it is a problem because there are already a lot of things that limit ICS (in a vacuum):
1) You need to spend a lot of early hammers on Settlers rather than developing any kind of science or economy.
2) ICS empires have poor science early.
3) Each new city adds 4 unhappiness (3 from the city, and 1 from the pop) so you need to keep finding new Luxuries to offset this.
4) You are likely to get negative diplo modifiers from expanding near other civs and them coveting your lands.
5) You are spreading yourself very thin early. An aggressive neighbor could easily take advantage of this weakness. Note that this particular scenario was an island map with you as Polynesia so there were a lot of built-in ICS advantages already.
ICS isn't an approach that works by itself. It only works as a "combo" piece with something broken. In this case, the other piece of the combo was Sacred Sites. But in my opinion, it is Sacred Sites that is the issue and not ICS.
Has there been a single G&K TSG where ICS was a problem?
Game: Civ5 GOTM 66
Date submitted: 2013-08-07
Reference number: 29470
Your name: Warden USA
Game status: Culture Victory
Game date: 2009AD
Turns played: 429
Base score: 2695
Final score: 3170
Time played: 11:00:00
Submitted save: WardenUSAWIN.Civ5Save
Renamed file: Warden_USA_C506601.Civ5Save
Looks like I might be the slowest to win =P
I enjoyed this game, and learned a lot. I didn't really like the tiny islands map, because it seemed that once I got submarines the AI didn't know how to stop me. I learned so much from this game and it was very very sloppy. But I'll take my win! Was interesting for me too because I thought I had to go to war with people to take them out if they got too much culture. I now know that unless you eliminate them they keep all their culture. Lots learned!
Game: Civ5 GOTM 66
Date submitted: 2013-08-07
Reference number: 29471
Your name: marekb
Game status: Culture Victory
Game date: 1840AD
Turns played: 290
Base score: 1960
Final score: 3379
Time played: 7:46:00
Submitted save: TGS66_end.Civ5Save
Two things I learned, culture victory is a lot different than before--It looks like culture is only to enhance cultural traits, not to win a culture victory. Second thing is Polynesian traits create raiders of ruins, I must of had 40 0f them.
Victory around turn 350, already forgotten the exact turn. VC finished when I eliminated Indonesia.
- What did you think of the new Culture VC?
Its an improvement. But I think its one of the easier VCs now. Domination and science are harder. Diplomacy is probably the easiest though.
- How many cities did you build? How many did you end up with?
Only settled two and conquered the rest. Annexed one (for the 3 factories to get an ideology) and the rest were puppets. Total of 15 or so cities by the end.
- How did you use religion or spying to your advantage given BNW? Are these element more of a factor, or less?
My religion was not dominant, but I did get world religion in almost as soon as possible. 100% tourism is too nice not to get a religion for the cultural victory. it got revoked later, but at a time that it didnt matter (only indonesia remained uninfluential, and I was working on eliminating his last cities).
Spys helped to keep up with science. I was lagging behind until the Industrial and spys helped alot here. The diplomats are ok, but 25% tourism a nice freebie, but a bit boring compared to getting techs or CSs.
- What Social Policies and Ideologies did you select and how did they support your goals?
Tradition at first (only had one city for a long time)
Partonage (helped to get World religion)
Aesthetics (of course)
Exploration
Freedom ideology, although autocracy might have been a better choice
- How did diplomacy go with your neighbors?
Had an early war with Shoshone with few diplomatic penalties as I got Indonesia to attack with me. For a long while Portugal and Indonesia were on my side. They attacked Morocco while I attacked Shoshone and then Brazil.
- Were your UA and UU helpful in achieving your goals?
I think the Moai helped and the UA helped to found World congress. But the warrior, not really useful here.
- Were any AI runaway's in your game?
Indonesia went autocracy and was the most culture by far. He was also my friend until he backstabbed me ( I saw this coming and he was easily destroyed thanks to subs)
That reminds me, I went freedom to try it out. I lost most of my allies because they didn't pick Freedom. Anyone have any advice on how to stay friends with people that pick different Idologies then you if you have to pick first.
That reminds me, I went freedom to try it out. I lost most of my allies because they didn't pick Freedom. Anyone have any advice on how to stay friends with people that pick different Idologies then you if you have to pick first.
If you're the first one to pick an ideology, control the world congress and have enough votes you could propose your ideology as the world ideology. If you can get that done quickly enough, then most of the AI's will likely pick it. Plus if your tourism is high enough with them they're more likely to pick the same ideology you did so they don't get dissidents.
This site uses cookies to help personalise content, tailor your experience and to keep you logged in if you register.
By continuing to use this site, you are consenting to our use of cookies.
