Culture

[Goof]

so I dont totally get culture victories. I understand that culture is your defense and tourism is your offense but every game just seems like it just drags on forever trying to pull out the win. Its the only victory condition that I cannot win on immortal or deity. I'm always cruising right along until the end where my tourism can't match the opponents consistent growth in culture.

Is there anything that you can do to pull out the win besides warring with culture heavy states late game?

[Cryten]

Its actually one of the easiest to win once you get used to it. The key is faith. Not religion, but faith. Faith is the weapon to grab tourists. You use it to form national parks and rock bands, and you can also use it with the right government settings to buy out builders for ski resorts and beach resorts. The earlier you start building tourist destinations the better, as they build up each turn. But more importantly is rock bands. Rock bands steal defensice tourists and turn them into your offensive visiting tourists. And they can do it rapidly. They have a low survival rate but the spend on Rock Bands is always worth it as you dig away at your opponents defences.

Combined with open borders, trade, lots of wonders, buying works of arts off your opponents and creating as many tourist destinations as possible and you will find it hard not to win a culture victory. And if you play on monolpolies mode, the multiplier monopolies offers your tourism will turbo charge the victory.

Also a key is often to avoid tier 3 governments, as there is a penalty to tourism for each tier you go up that doesnt match your opponents government. Tier 3 doesnt offer much more in the way of card space, doesnt offer bonuses to tourism (only culture which you do not need that late) and comes with that penalty that is a negative multiplier applied to the total of all the rest of your bonuses.
Oh and it is normally best to avoid a religion when going for culture victory, without a home religion you suffer no penalty on tourism for different religions.

Tourism is easily the most interactable and actionable victory type. We only wish that faith and diplomatic victories where as well designed as these. There is always something you can do the expand your tourist destinations.

[Goof]

i had no idea t3 governments are the only ones that are effected by the tourism debuff. I've always gone democracy and taken the government penalty,
Good tips all around, serious thanks

[Cryten]

Actually I probably made a mistake. I was saying to avoid the last generation of governments, digital democarcy, etc. So I got my tiers mixed up. Democracy is fine and usually offers more card slots that you can make up the 20% penalty with from the government cards. Its just avoid the 40% penalty from the final governments.

You can game the system by staying on tier 2 for no penalties. But that requires a very early tourist push.

[plaguepenguin]

Cryten has already covered most of the specific tactics, but let me attempt an overview.

The higher the difficulty level, the less you can afford to prioritize theater squares early in the game, because you have to instead prioritize whatever you need at the moment to claw your way to the top of the tech and civics trees. The best way to ease the difficulty of the culture victory end-game is to unlock all the new sources of tourism and all the new tourism multipliers you get towards the end of the tech and civics trees as much ahead of your competitor civs as you can.

On Prince experienced players can claw their way to the top even before the mid-game, and so can afford to use a strategy that prioritizes theater squares early, so that they can get ahead in the race for great works from the very beginning. Of course on higher difficulty it is still useful to get great works the direct way, by having the theater squares and their buildings early. These both pile up points for the great people who make the great works and provide warehouses for those works, so go for that if that is feasible. But that strategy is rarely is feasible by the time you get to Immortal and Deity, because staying competitive and then getting ahead requires a more and more ruthless early prioritization on expansion and on yields other than culture. If you do succeed at coming out of the mid-game with a tech lead and many large highly productive cities, then you can build the great works warehouses easily, and stock them with purchased great works directly, or by purchasing the great people who make them.

The buy-later strategy is part of why high faith yields are nice, but gold is even nicer because it can be used both to buy your competitors' old great works and the current great people on offer, while faith can only buy great people. Neither come cheap, so until the late game it actually makes more sense to develop a massive output of both faith and gold to prepare for your tourism snowball than of culture itself, because culture isn't what drives a tourism snowball. Your competitors will sell you great works right up until the end-game, the point at which you are within a stone's throw of winning a culture victory. Even your main rival for a culture victory will sell, thus giving you a twofer.

It's nice to have lots of culture coming in every turn in the early game, but that's because you need to move up the civics tree, not because you can trade in any of it for great works or great people, as you can do with gold and faith. After flight is unlocked a lot of your old culture producing features will start to generate tourism as well, so at that point culture output becomes more closely tied to tourism output. It's also easy to conflate culture and tourism output because of all the new sources of tourism that become available in the late game.

Conquest is the only one-stop-shopping solution for the huge bonuses the AI gets at Immortal and Deity, since acquiring even just twice the land (so twice the cities, so twice the districts) gets you ahead of the AIs. But it has this downside if your long-term goal is culture victory, that every surviving civ contributes foreign tourists, so complete conquest of a civ destroys that source of the tourists that help you win. Conquest is so beneficial that if you can't manage to leave at least one of your victim's cities alive it's still worth it, but leave one city alive if you can.

National parks can be a huge addition to your tourism base. They require faith points of course, but they get much higher tourism yields the higher the appeal of the tiles they are built on, so the Eiffel Tower is a very nice use of the high production and great engineer point output you developed by prioritizing IZs over theater squares earlier in the game. The Tower, along with Redentor, helps your seaside resorts as well. You need a certain minimum appeal to place a park, so the higher appeal tends to greatly increase the number of parks that can be placed. In mid to late game expansion, settling otherwise less useful land near the poles becomes more useful as planned future sites of parks, and tundra is much more likely to have enough appeal for that use if you have the Tower.

And, of course, no survey of making culture victory easier on higher difficulty would be complete without mention of the Biosphere. If you don't mind winning this way, you just need to unlock the wonder earlier than the competition, and/or have a high production city and a wonder-builder great engineer to speed it along, then pave the map with renewable energy sources everywhere, and you're done.

Culture victory can seem front-loaded compared to science victory, because you can start accumulating foreign tourists in the early game, while you can't even start your first space race project until the late game. But that's a deceptive appearance. The new sources of base tourism in the late game, plus all the late game multipliers of that base, leave the early turn tourism you accumulated in the dust. Instead of worrying much at all about accumulating tourism early, higher difficulty forces you to prioritize in the early and mid-game whatever else you need to do to get to the late game ahead of the competition, and that's rarely culture or tourism. Fail to get there early and first, and unlike the competition in the space race, where each civ is running against the clock, in culture victory you're running against the other civs, and their late-game tourism boom keeps pushing your victory ever further away. You need to boom before they do to avoid a hard slog at the end-game, and science, gold, faith, and production developed earlier in the game tend to be far more useful than culture and tourism in the early and mid-game at landing you in the late game ahead of the AIs. All four of these yields then help you with that final tourism push.

[Goof]

Originally posted by plaguepenguin:

Cryten has already covered most of the specific tactics, but let me attempt an overview.

The higher the difficulty level, the less you can afford to prioritize theater squares early in the game, because you have to instead prioritize whatever you need at the moment to claw your way to the top of the tech and civics trees. The best way to ease the difficulty of the culture victory end-game is to unlock all the new sources of tourism and all the new tourism multipliers you get towards the end of the tech and civics trees as much ahead of your competitor civs as you can.

On Prince experienced players can claw their way to the top even before the mid-game, and so can afford to use a strategy that prioritizes theater squares early, so that they can get ahead in the race for great works from the very beginning. Of course on higher difficulty it is still useful to get great works the direct way, by having the theater squares and their buildings early. These both pile up points for the great people who make the great works and provide warehouses for those works, so go for that if that is feasible. But that strategy is rarely is feasible by the time you get to Immortal and Deity, because staying competitive and then getting ahead requires a more and more ruthless early prioritization on expansion and on yields other than culture. If you do succeed at coming out of the mid-game with a tech lead and many large highly productive cities, then you can build the great works warehouses easily, and stock them with purchased great works directly, or by purchasing the great people who make them.

The buy-later strategy is part of why high faith yields are nice, but gold is even nicer because it can be used both to buy your competitors' old great works and the current great people on offer, while faith can only buy great people. Neither come cheap, so until the late game it actually makes more sense to develop a massive output of both faith and gold to prepare for your tourism snowball than of culture itself, because culture isn't what drives a tourism snowball. Your competitors will sell you great works right up until the end-game, the point at which you are within a stone's throw of winning a culture victory. Even your main rival for a culture victory will sell, thus giving you a twofer.

It's nice to have lots of culture coming in every turn in the early game, but that's because you need to move up the civics tree, not because you can trade in any of it for great works or great people, as you can do with gold and faith. After flight is unlocked a lot of your old culture producing features will start to generate tourism as well, so at that point culture output becomes more closely tied to tourism output. It's also easy to conflate culture and tourism output because of all the new sources of tourism that become available in the late game.

Conquest is the only one-stop-shopping solution for the huge bonuses the AI gets at Immortal and Deity, since acquiring even just twice the land (so twice the cities, so twice the districts) gets you ahead of the AIs. But it has this downside if your long-term goal is culture victory, that every surviving civ contributes foreign tourists, so complete conquest of a civ destroys that source of the tourists that help you win. Conquest is so beneficial that if you can't manage to leave at least one of your victim's cities alive it's still worth it, but leave one city alive if you can.

National parks can be a huge addition to your tourism base. They require faith points of course, but they get much higher tourism yields the higher the appeal of the tiles they are built on, so the Eiffel Tower is a very nice use of the high production and great engineer point output you developed by prioritizing IZs over theater squares earlier in the game. The Tower, along with Redentor, helps your seaside resorts as well. You need a certain minimum appeal to place a park, so the higher appeal tends to greatly increase the number of parks that can be placed. In mid to late game expansion, settling otherwise less useful land near the poles becomes more useful as planned future sites of parks, and tundra is much more likely to have enough appeal for that use if you have the Tower.

And, of course, no survey of making culture victory easier on higher difficulty would be complete without mention of the Biosphere. If you don't mind winning this way, you just need to unlock the wonder earlier than the competition, and/or have a high production city and a wonder-builder great engineer to speed it along, then pave the map with renewable energy sources everywhere, and you're done.

Culture victory can seem front-loaded compared to science victory, because you can start accumulating foreign tourists in the early game, while you can't even start your first space race project until the late game. But that's a deceptive appearance. The new sources of base tourism in the late game, plus all the late game multipliers of that base, leave the early turn tourism you accumulated in the dust. Instead of worrying much at all about accumulating tourism early, higher difficulty forces you to prioritize in the early and mid-game whatever else you need to do to get to the late game ahead of the competition, and that's rarely culture or tourism. Fail to get there early and first, and unlike the competition in the space race, where each civ is running against the clock, in culture victory you're running against the other civs, and their late-game tourism boom keeps pushing your victory ever further away. You need to boom before they do to avoid a hard slog at the end-game, and science, gold, faith, and production developed earlier in the game tend to be far more useful than culture and tourism in the early and mid-game at landing you in the late game ahead of the AIs. All four of these yields then help you with that final tourism push.

great tips in there. Just tried on immortal again using some of these tips, but I still ended in a stalemate between my tourism output and the AI's uncanny ability to keep increasing their domestic tourism. I had a really good start too. 11 cities by turn 100 and 15 cities by 150 and I'm about to lose to science if I cant blow up their spaceport

I'll keep practicing but holding off on culture and tourism until mid to late was really really helpful

[Cryten]

An often under estimated tactic is doing trade deals with ai, especially the ones in the lead. Sell them strategic resources for gold over time and you are effectively slowing down the AI's progression. Both because it can buy out less of everything, but also because it might start to have gold liquidity problems causing it to dismiss military units and rebuild them later.

If you want to see someone pull off good culture victories at high difficulty, go watch some of potatomcwhisky older civ 6 playthroughs. Before he started modding the games starting scripts to make his games unrealistic. Try stuff before 2023.

[Evrach]

Originally posted by Cryten:

An often under estimated tactic is doing trade deals with ai, especially the ones in the lead. Sell them strategic resources for gold over time and you are effectively slowing down the AI's progression. Both because it can buy out less of everything, but also because it might start to have gold liquidity problems causing it to dismiss military units and rebuild them later.

If you want to see someone pull off good culture victories at high difficulty, go watch some of potatomcwhisky older civ 6 playthroughs. Before he started modding the games starting scripts to make his games unrealistic. Try stuff before 2023.

Isn't that cheating ? XD poor bots. They're already dumb, now they are dumb and scammed :D

[jmerry82]

Selling excess resources to the AI, or buying resources you need, is just using a game mechanic.

Now, trading 40 horses back and forth with the same AI repeatedly until you've got all of their cash (and the positive diplomacy modifiers for trades they like, and maybe some other fungible assets like luxuries or great works) - that's scamming the AI. It kind of tickles me that you can exploit the diplomacy system with literal horse trading.