Cultural Victory?

[Lord Maxwell]

Has anyone achieved a cultural victory? In my last game (which I won by spacerace) I had more culture than the other civs combined from 10 AD until 1920 when I launched my spaceship.

My only theory is that you have to have a 3:1 cultural ratio to each and every civ for a set number of turns or something like that. But I think I had that for atleast 20 turns a row in my last game...

[Sarxis]

You win a cultural victory when you hit a certain number of culture points. You can look in the Cultural Advisor's screen to see how many your civ has gained.

I think once you reach 80.000 or 100.000 (I have heard both numbers for the past month), you win, so long as you have at least twice as much as the runner up.

Very hard to do I think, but not if you 'deprive' (smash, demolish) the competition. heh heh

[Jvstin]

I did it last night. Ironically, I had picked the Germans because I wanted to try a more militaristic strategy, but the games I play seem to devolve into long periods of peace followed by world wars in the 20th century when entangling alliances start to collapse.

Anyway, I was playing on a cold, 5 billion year old Pangaea, with England, France, Russia, Egypt and Rome. I expanded quickly with England to my East (toward the colder section) and everyone else to the West. I never did get into the War, but I noticed that in my previous games, I had managed to steal some opponent cities with culture.

So, even though I was using the Germans, I built temples, Cathedrals and such like mad. I did pick off a few cities, English mainly, and kept pushing the culture as much as I could to steal more, to push for Oil and Iron. Finally, in the late 1980's, England started to attack me, and the house of cards of alliances for once was on my side...and everyone starting attacking England. I was considering picking off a couple of juicy cities when I suddenly discovered that I had gotten a cultural victory.

[Sarxis]

Jvstin-

How many points did you need total to achieve the victory? Was it 80.000 or 100.000?

[Eli]

Something is not right here.

I remember reading that it was needed to get a city with 6 tiles sphere of influence to win a cultural victory. Or did they make another last minute change?

[Sarxis]

You can win culturally both ways: either get one city to 20.000 (6 tiles) points, or your whole kingdom to 80.000 (100.000?).

[Jvstin]

Originally posted by Anunikoba
Jvstin-

How many points did you need total to achieve the victory? Was it 80.000 or 100.000?

100,000. I was actually at 99600 when England began their War with me, but with all of the stuff I had in all of the other cities, even though I lost a couple of cities, I went right over the top. Truth be told, I didn't even really look at my total culture rating until you asked, I loaded up a saved game from before the war started and checked.

For the record, I didn't have any cities even quite make the 10,000 level, much less 20,000...but I had a half dozen cities running in the 5,000-6,000 range. Quantity, rather than quality.

[Sarxis]

That makes me wonder just how hard is it to get a 'quality' cultural victory.

Probably not real hard if you built all of the wonders in one city.

[CygnusZ]

Yes, I too achieved cultural victory.

And BTW, congradulations on building the Space Ship, that seems to me to be the hardest way to win.

Anyway, 20,000 in one city or 100,000 for your Empire. It isn't that hard to get 20,000 in one city, but it's still a challange. Not reccomended unless your a OCC kind of guy.

[Diety]

Perhaps it's a good idea to implement a change where you can turn of victory condition during the game. Kinda cheating, I know, but when you're three turns away from launching and you win with Culture...

[Lord Maxwell]

I think that military domination on large maps will be the hardest victories to accomplish on deity.

Spaceship probably being the most common, with cultural as a close runner up. (The AI is brilliant at attacking, but still builds city improvements like a drunken monkey.) Not to belittle that I actually beat the damn game once atleast. Though not on deity. Working on it now.

Does the amount of culture points you need vary with map size? I sure hope it does... Getting 100k culture on a tiny map where 15 cities is a gigantic empire would be really rough. And on a huge map it would be pretty laughable.

[Shiva]

The game I'm playing right now im in the 1700's and will probably win via cultural by 1900 short of someone taking out my capital.

[Lawrence of Arabia]

Does the amount of culture points you need vary with map size? I sure hope it does... Getting 100k culture on a tiny map where 15 cities is a gigantic empire would be really rough. And on a huge map it would be pretty laughable.

It does in a way. In order to win with 100 000 culture, you must have more than 2* as much as the next highest civ (ie. next civ has to have less than 50 000 culture for its whole empire) The 20 000 culture per city dosn't change.

[Sarxis]

Originally posted by CygnusZ
Anyway, 20,000 in one city or 100,000 for your Empire. It isn't that hard to get 20,000 in one city, but it's still a challange. Not reccomended unless your a OCC kind of guy.

My problem is that I usually have 4 or 5 cities that are all pretty well built, and so I distribute my wonders around them. Going for 20,000 in one city will mean putting 'all your eggs in one basket', which can be devastating if you somehow get invaded. And trust me, the AI knows when you leave your cities ungarrisoned!

[CygnusZ]

You know, I was thinking during my last game of Civ, that if I just had one city the game would have different, but not necessairly harder. If you play on Monarchy, one metropolis will support 8 full units. That's is a fairly large defensive force, and it would take quite an effort to bring such a city down. In addition, you could just pay for the rest of the armed forces if you had too.

So, I think the nature of CIV3 is that OCC is not a terribly abstract idea.