The Challenge

[spride]

I am not a war-monger. I'm a long time lurker on these boards and had set myself the challenge:

Build three cities, conquer NONE, Raze none and win the game.

Yes it's at lowly prince level, but it's still a feat.

(the fourth city on the map is a very late cultural takeover of an original Persian city that was over run by France.)

I fought two wars. One against the marauding Romans and one against Persia. The French I kept busy against India in the south and then I sicked them on the Persians when they came after me. Really, Cyrus, that was a bad idea.


I didn't choose Russia, it was set to random
Now if I could only figure out how to win on Monarch.

[Diadem]

Looks good.

I play a lot of OCC (One City Challenge) games. Obviously a cultural victory is out of the question then. But you can still win with spaceship or conquest. What you are trying, what we shall call TCC (Three City Challenge), is somewhat similar. Except of course that a culture win is now possible

There is some room for improvement in your game though. You should be able to get much further into the tech try by 1972. Being further into the tech try helps your culture a lot, since some of the later wonders can really help a lot for your culture. And having broadcast towers earlier of course means you have their usefulness earlier.

Perhaps you should focus less on generating great artists? They are nice for culture, but suck pretty much otherwise. If you get a lot of other great ppl, and add them as super specialists, you might have a bit less culture early on, but your cities will be much stronger, allowing you to go through the tech tree much faster, with all associated benefits.

[Diadem]

Oh by the way, if you play on a small map, you only need 3 of each required building to build things like national wonders and those cathedrals. That'll really make life easier on you!

[spride]

Oh there's definitely room for improvement in my game

I've actually found that the end of Cultural Victories are dull. You spend most of your time just hoping nothing will happen.
You also tend to turn off tech research for the last 50-75 years - once you get to mass media, the culture bar is up at 100%. This game would have finished a lot sooner if not for the Persian invasion. (I told him it was a bad idea)

The small map tip is a good one. In my previous culture victories, having pagoda equivalents for all religions in all three cities (and the option to build oxford and the like) has sped the game along.

I'm a relative newcomer to Civ IV. I did work out the slingshot strategy early on, but I've only been playing for about a month now. Whenever I play above Prince, my units all get taken apart by Barbarians (despite defending in the woods) and the AI develops a monster tech lead.