Fastest Victory

[Assault Potato]

If three different civilisations were to duke it out in a game, and each of them chose to go Scientific, Cultural and Diplomatic victories respectively, which one would win first? For example, is Civ A going to build the spaceship fast enough before Civ C gets elected the world leader, or Civ B surpassing their Culture with his Tourism?

I'm playing Poland for Scientific Victory, and having placed no emphasis on Cultural buildings and Wonders I'm getting this inherent fear of other civs springing a sudden Culture Victory on me when I'm 3 turns away from assembling the final piece of the spaceship.

Prince difficulty, second game.

[Austellus]

Potentially, domination. After all, you can conquer in any era, whereas diplomatic and scientific can only be achieved in the last eras. Cultural can be won early on, but typically early culture is far in advance of early tourism.

[cerberusiv]

The problem with the science victory is that it requires researching most of the tech tree, which takes time. Cultural and Diplomatic victories can be achieved more quickly - though probably not by the AI civs at Prince.

I normally play at King difficulty and love collecting great works (especially those from other civs by looting their cities) and have had to disable culture victory from my games in order to have a chance of other victory types as I was getting cultural wins before I could achieve any other type.

It is not a good idea to neglect culture as higher culture gets you through acquiring policies faster (important even with Poland) as well as defending against other civs tourism. It isn't enough in BNW to build the wonders and buildings, culture mainly comes from the great works within them - so you need to be generating those as well.

Open up the culture screen, go into "influence by player" and use the dropdown list to check each civ in turn. Where the arrow at the right hand end of the line is green and says rising if you mouse over it you get a tooltip saying how many turns it will take at the current rate to achieve influential culture. That will give you some idea of when another civ might achieve a cultural win.

Blocking a diplomatic victory is easy enough. As long as you are fulfilling CS quests and making money you can get enough CS allies to stop anyone else getting the votes for a diplo win simply by throwing money at a handful of CS's (open the Patronage tree and take the policy that increases the effectiveness of giving gold to make this easier).

[Lammot]

Tbh if you play for scientitifc, you can impair other victory types by getting the tech 1st and constructing crucial buildings. Overall, i'd say it's important to have some sort of a balance.

[Vinyl Scratch]

Diplomatic is the fastest of those 3 easily, all you need is a good economy.

Regardless though, it's a bad idea to ignore Science and Culture, no matter what victory you go for.

[biogoo]

Scientific victory is faster when more civs generate a lot of science, as you get a discount for techs already discovered. It is way faster in deity than on settler, because the AI have bonus from the begining.

Cultural victory is faster when only one civ focuses on it, as it has a counter effect. AIs usualy do gather some culture, so it is quite improbable that one of them gets it unless the others are crippled through wars. So you can have no culture but still be protected from the loss by the culture of the other civs.

All in all, cultural victory has the potential to be the fastest one, but requires the opponents to not focus on culture, or the few that do it get crippled by wars. Diplomatic is faster than science, as the tech requirement is lower, but requires an economical superiority (which gets harder as the difficulty level rises).