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Contents
Domination
Victory
Science
Victory
Cultural
Victory
Diplomatic
Victory
Points
Victory
Domination Victory
More so than any of its predecessors, Civilization 5 is a wargame. Domination is sort of the “default Victory.” Any Leader is helpful in a Domination Victory.
There are four priorities to Domination Victory:
1. Build Lots of Units
To get the Gold you need to grow your military, create a lot of Trading Posts and Trade Routes. Build Markets and Banks in every City.
Build Barracks, Forges, Military Academies to train your Units, but prioritize Gold-generating Buildings over these.
Conquest also rewards you with Gold. Since you don't know exactly how much a particular conquest will net, it's difficult to budget future Gold gains from war. Such income is best used as windfall money for extra projects, bribes, Unit Upgrades or to pad your reserves for a rainy day.
2. Keep Those Units Alive and Gaining Experience
Units retain all their special powers after Upgrade to a new Unit type. A Swordsman created from a upgraded Jaguar retains the Jaguar's special healing power, and a Longswordsman born from the same Swordsman still has that characteristic.
Powers gained via Promotion likewise carry between generations.
Because of this, it's important to keep your most powerful Units alive through the course of Civilization 5.
Learn the Military Tradition Policy as soon as you can. It doubles the XP bonuses from battles, rapidly accelerating development of elite Units.
As you discover Technology, check whether your Units are eligible for Upgrades.
Remember that you must be in friendly or allied territory to Upgrade. If your troops are engaged in a far-away land, use the borders of a captured City to Upgrade them, or use a “war city,” a Settler-created haven near the battle frontier.
3. Keep Ahead Technologically
Perhaps more important than the number
or quality of your Units is their equipment. Cold steel reigns supreme
over bronze spears, and hot lead lays low cold steel. Your soldiers
should always be ahead in the Tech curve.
As long as you succeed in war and manage your Happiness well, your rate
of conquest will fuel your Research points. The more Cities you capture
and pacify, the more Technology your Civilization will develop.
Learn Mathematics after you secure Mining, Animal Husbandry, Pottery,
Calendar, Masonry, Bronze Working, Trapping, Archery, Horseback Riding
and the Wheel. You'll need the Courthouses to get your conquered Cities
in line.
Most Technologies are helpful to war, but a few are especially
important. Archery gives you your first artillery and should be
researched early. Iron Working unlocks Swordsmen, the first infantry
Unit with real offensive punch. Rifling creates the incomparable
Rifleman. Dynamite increases the range of your salvos with the
Artillery Unit. Combustion gives you Tanks, which are game changers.
Flight opens up Fighters, which you want to have before any other
player produces Bombers.
Happiness affects Research, so keep the Golden Rule of Happiness in
mind. If your Happiness is dropping but you don't want to slow
conquest, create Puppets from your newly conquered lands, and annex
them later when you're better prepared to deal with the Unhappiness hit.
Policies are sort of a second Technology tree, and as such should also
be used to your advantage. Develop the Honor Policy tree first.
Learn Warrior Code and Military Tradition, then develop the remainder
of the tree. Your rate of conquest will make it hard to develop
Policies after the early game, so you'll want to secure these as soon
as possible.
Just because Policies will be difficult to develop doesn't mean you
should give up on them. Build Stonehenge as early as you can. The extra
8 Culture a turn can translate to almost 3000 Culture points by
endgame, enough to get you at least one more Policy than you would have
had otherwise.
4. Be Aggressive and Conquer
Attack a weak nearby City as soon as
you have three or four Units available. Subdue it, make it a Puppet if
you don't have Courthouses yet, and then move on to the next City in
the same civilization. Wipe the enemy out.
After the war, get your new lands in order with Workers, heal and
possible Upgrade your Units, and look for your next-most-vulnerable
neighbor.
Divide and conquer. Conspire with other civilizations against your
enemies. Don't be above bribing them into declarations of war against a
mutual rival.
Obey the forms, formally declaring war and honoring treaties whenever
possible. It keeps the AI players a little more pacified.
Try not to end up in a two front war against multiple enemies. If you
find yourself in such a situation, concentrate your offense against one
and weaken him until he sues for peace. Sign a treaty, turn your wrath
on the second conspirator, and then come back and finish the first guy
off.
It's not necessary to wipe out entire civilizations to win a Domination
victory. You only have to be the last nation to hold its original
Capital. That said, it is usually best to wipe out any rival you hold
an advantage over, as his captured resources will be of great benefit
to you.
The section on Military
Strategy has many useful tips for how to handle conquest.
Science Victory
The Science Victory is won by creating
the Apollo Program and then building a Spaceship.
Most Civilizations are well suited to a Science Victory, but China is
especially effective due to the ability to more quickly generate Great
Scientists using the Paper Factory.
The Science Victory is won by three factors.
1. Growth
Research is built on raw numbers. The
more Citizens you have, the more Research you generate. Buildings and
Wonders add important multipliers to this, but it's the population of
your empire that greases the wheels of Science.
Never stop growing. Settlement is a priority for the Science victory.
Each City founded should itself found a new City as soon as feasible.
Since you'll be expanding so much, be sure to keep a defensive army of
at least one Unit per City at all times to guard against Barbarian
invasion and foreign incursion, as well as a small but modern field
army for conquest or to respond to threats.
After each City Produces a Worker and a Settler, get up to speed with
the Granary and any available food improvements, and then prioritize
Science. Keep your Science buildings staffed with specialists.
2. Technical Supremacy
Build Libraries, Paper Makers,
Universities, Wats, Observatories, Public Schools and Research Labs in
all Cities.
Since you're building Libraries and Universities in every City, the
National College and Oxford University are natural choices for Wonders.
The Great Library is likewise a no-brainer.
The Rationalism tree is a natural Policy compliment to Science. Adopt
it and develop it in full.
Forge Research Agreements with friendly empires as often as you can
afford to do so.
Generate Great Scientists quickly by staffing Research buildings. Use
them to make new instantaneous discoveries or to build Academies.
3. Late-Game Planning
The ninth Tier of the Tech tree
contains a bottleneck of only two Technologies: Biology and Steam
Power. Up until the development of these items, all Scientific focus is
uniform. Every path eventually leads to these two, and there is no need
to speed forward toward Rocketry until reaching them.
Once these have been developed, focus on getting to Rocketry so you can
start the Apollo Program. You'll need Electricity, Replaceable Parts,
Radio, Flight and Radar.
While Apollo is underway, start on the Cockpit. In Research, backtrack
and discover Telegraph, Electronics, Computers and Robotics. Then get
working on the three Boosters you'll need. A Spaceship Factory or two
is also a good idea. Remember you have to have a regular Factory in the
same City to build one of these.
You can ignore the Railroad, Dynamite and Combustion branches of the
Tech Tree, focusing instead on Refrigeration, Plastics, Penicillin,
Ecology and Globalization. These will unlock Particle Physics and in
turn Nanotechnology, which you will need to build the Engine and Stasis
Chamber.
Because you've neglected parts of the Tech Tree, you won't have access
to Tanks, Jet Fighters, Modern Armor, Stealth or Nuclear Weapons.
Counter by building AT Guns, Mechanized Infantry, Fighters, Bombers, AA
Guns, SAMS, Rocket Artillery and Helicopter Gunships.
As soon as you finish the Spaceship parts, move them to your Capital
under a heavy AA umbrella and military escort. Game over.
Cultural Victory
You win a Cultural Victory by
developing enough Policies to
unlock the Utopia Project and then building it.
Cultural Victory is the most difficult Victory to achieve. Every City
you build or conquer makes the cost of new Policies increase, so you're
limited in the number of Cities you can directly control. This limits
Unit creation, Wonder creation and micromanagement.
Alexander and Napoleon are best suited to Cultural Victory. Alexander's
City-State Influence can generate a lot of Culture from allies, and
Napoleon's 2 Culture per City bonus before the steam age adds up to
quite a bit.
Montezuma's Culture bonus from destroying Units adds up to a small
amount of Culture even over a long game, making him a bit less suitable
than Alexander and Napoleon.
There are five main strategies to winning a Cultural Victory:
1. Start Early
The Cultural Victory begins at Turn 1.
In your Capital, build a Worker, then a Settler, and then a Monument.
Use the Settler to found a second City, and build a Worker, a Military
Unit and a Monument there.
Research Pottery and Calendar to unlock Stonehenge, and build it in
your Capital. If you need a Military Unit in the meantime, buy it with
Gold. Then fill out your early Improvements by learning Mining,
Masonry, Trapping, Animal Husbandry, the Wheel, and Horseback Riding.
After this, click the “Culture” focus tab in all your Cities, and check
in on their Citizen Allocations every now and then. Build a Granary and
then beef up your military to around six Units.
Settling more than three Cities really makes a Policy victory
difficult, so curb your Settlement after the third City and concentrate
on creating 3 super-Cities. Pour Food into your settlements with Farms
and Buildings.
2. Fight Wars
It's hard to create the Units
necessary to defend a Civilization from rivals with only three Cities,
and harder still to generate the Research you'll need to keep your
Technology competitive.
The answer to this dilemma is creating Puppet Cities. Puppets generate
Gold and Research but don't count against your Culture costs.
The moment you have the men to take a City, go pick a fight with a weak
neighbor. Subjugate his City, make it a Puppet, and use a Worker to
Improve the land surrounding it. You won't have any control over what
it builds, but the addition of Farms, Trading Posts, Resource
Improvements and Trade Routes will still benefit your empire.
You're going to need a lot of Puppets to survive into the late-game,
especially if your world includes a powerful, Domination-minded rival.
When playing for Cultural Victory, if you're at peace you should be
looking for the next weak neighbor to subdue.
3. Retain Units
Your Puppets can't build Units, so the
onus for creating them lies with your core Cities. Units in a Cultured
Society will be irreplaceable. You cannot get into an arms race with
rival states and win, so you must stingily retain, upgrade and promote
old Units.
You should also build Units with great frequency, sometimes as often as
every second project in a City, especially mid-game. You'll need them
for conquest, and perhaps more importantly for defense against a large,
aggressive civilization that threatens to weigh you down with the force
of sheer numbers.
4. Make Friends
Your large number of retained Units
will also be an important factor in City-State relations. City-States
trade Missions for influence, and a large number of these Missions are
military in nature. The more good soldiers you have, the more
City-States you can impress. Cultured City-States are a wonderful
source of Culture points, especially under Alexander and after
developing Patronage.
Don't be afraid to use Gold to buy City-State Influence as well, but
try to do it in 1000 Gold payments...it's much more cost-efficient.
5. Manage Policies
You'll be generating a lot of your
civilization's power via the Policies you choose. Unlock Tradition
first, then Honor, then Piety, and don't work down their trees until
all of them are unlocked. Then start to develop Piety. When Patronage
opens, begin cultivating its advantages. Redeem Freedom the moment you
can and make a beeline to Constitution and Free Speech, which cut
Culture costs.
You'll then have five trees unlocked. Fill them out, build the Utopia
project, and win.
Diplomatic Victory
The Diplomatic Victory plays much like
the Research Victory. You advance your scientific knowledge toward
Globalization instead of Spaceship technology, and you grow as fast as
you can to keep up with aggressive neighbors.
Alexander is the best Leader for a Diplomatic Victory.
Beyond focusing on Research and growth, there are three key strategies
for winning a Diplomatic Victory:
1. Aggression
Build an army and use it. Diplomacy in
Civilization 5 is decidedly carrot and stick with a focus on the stick.
Keep a large, modern military and don't be afraid to expand. Knocking a
couple of rival players out of Civilization 5 before the modern Era can
make winning the UN vote a little easier.
2. Appeasement
Throughout Civilization 5, you should
focus your efforts on earning Influence with as many City-States as
possible. Patronage is your key Policy tree and should be developed in
full. Follow up on all offered missions. Use 1000 Gold chunks to buy
Influence. A firmly Allied City-State will vote for you.
3. Artifice
City-States can be bribed for
Influence, but competing civilizations will not vote for you unless
they are liberated. Therefore, you may wish to arrange for them to need
liberation.
Rival Civilizations can sometimes be bribed into declarations of war.
Early to mid-game, it may behoove you to covertly entice your fellow
Leaders into attacking other weak Civilizations or City-States without
getting your own hands dirty.
Once that Capital or City-State is conquered by an enemy, you are then
in a position to liberate them. Declare war on the nation you hired to
conquer them and take back their City. Then choose to liberate it and
you will remain that civilization or City-State's favored nation until
the end of time, so long as no one else liberates it. Even if your
diplomatic relationship subsequently deteriorates, they'll still vote
for you.
Don't try capturing a City on your own, trading it away to a third
civilization and then taking it back to liberate it. The designers have
anticipated this and it doesn't work.
If you play your cards right, you should have votes to win ready by the
time you actually build the UN. Enjoy your status as world leader.
Points Victory
If you find yourself near 2050 and you
aren't likely to fulfill one of the four prescribed Victory Conditions,
you should aim for for Victory by Points. There are two things you have
to do to win this way:
1. Keep anybody else from fulfilling a Victory Condition.
The first is best arranged by making a
pain of yourself for anybody who appears to be doing well. Snatch
Cities, start brush-fire wars, and do anything that interferes with
peaceful things like building a Spaceship. You may want to start
bribing City-States to alter the voting equation.
2. Have the most points in 2050.
With these factors in mind, attack enemies and take their Cities and land. Build any available Wonders. Shift the balance of power away from your strongest rival to yourself. In the last turns, purchase Cities at ridiculous prices from anyone who might sell them to you. Rush and push and remember that scoring ends before 2051. You don't have to hold on to your conquests forever, just until the timer runs out.
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