[Spoiler]Capria Crusadin' Crew - Bannor

[Mist]

Let's all get along. Please?

[NobleHelium]

So, I'll dedlurk you if you update more often than in PBEM 2.

[Mist]

In that case I shall try my best

Having said that, this should be a bit more interesting attempt than the Doviello. If I was to give it a title....

"Cultural Victory - A study of the Impossible"

...would do.

( To Sareln, once you read this. Hope this provides you with enough material to make this victory condition actually achievable. )

I have a backlog of SG's to go through now, I'll post more once that's out of the way.

[Selrahc]

Earliest I've managed to get Cultural victory in FFH is somewhere in the early-mid 200s. That's pretty much achievable in the timeframe of a PBEM.. but I was running a near pure builder game. I think the necessary military commitments in multiplayer make cultural a *lot* more challenging than other peaceful victories like Luonnotar or Mastery.

I'll be interested to see how well you do.

[NobleHelium]

So, assuming you're serious about this cultural victory thing...I imagine it involves many towns and the slider for most of the grunt work?

[Mist]

So, assuming you're serious about this cultural victory thing...I imagine it involves many towns and the slider for most of the grunt work?

That kind of jumps on you, doesn't it? But it doesn't really work. My test game ( victory on turn 250, using slider on cottages until I started to tinker with stuff ) proved decisively that it's a sub-par approach. I will spam cottages, both to rip through the tech tree ( CV requires a lot of techs ) and to make people wary of my worldspell, but they loose decisively compared to properly set up bard specialists.

But, first thing first.

Meet Capria



She's Spiritual ( free civic swaps, cheap temples and better priests ) and Industrious ( cheap forges and half-price wonders ). She is *not* the best leader for a cultural victory, that honour goes to someone from the group of Cassiel, Varn Gosam and Cardith Lorda. I'm not sure which one is the best suited, but if I was to hazard a guess, it's Cardith. All three are banned in this game though.

She leads Bannor, who have a lot of goodies hidden at Fanaticism ( read late ), and tend to get insanely good at causing harm to people once they get there. Crusade, Demagogs, Donnal Lugh and Flagbearers sum to a warmongers dream. But I won't use any of that until forced, if I wanted crusading, I'd pick Sabby ( google for Unwashed Crusade at civfanatics if you have time and want an amusing read ).

I picked her because :
*She has no anarchy civic and religion swaps, I expect to do a lot of those.
*She has cheap wonders, I will wonder-whore, both to get where I want and for denial.
*She has powerful Priests, and I need something to keep me alive in the meantime. Priests will fit the bill nicely.

To win cultural, there's few thing I must have, few things that are nice to get and plenty of fluff.

Must haves include :
*Liberty - +100% culture in all cities, unlimited Bard specialist
*Caste System - +2 culture per Bard
*Theatre of Dreams - +2 culture per Bard and Great Bard
*Hall of Kings - +2 culture per specialist

Nice stuff includes
*Sylvein's Perfect Lyre - +100% culture in a city
*Republic - +25% GPP, +20% Culture
*National Epic - +100% Great Person points
*Grand Menagerie - free carnival in all cities
*City of Thousand Slums - three tile city radius
*Octopus Overlords holy city
*Fellowship of Leaves holy city ( and Song of Autumn )
*The Great Library - +2 breakers per specialist

Everything else is fluff.

If you count all the bonuses, it's pretty clear that all Caste System Bard after Theatre and Hall provides way more culture than fully grown town on 100% culture. Therefore my three cultural cities need to be found to maximise potential food, have enough hammers to push out crucial wonders ( and any other that present a target of opportunity ) with commerce being a secondary concern. This also determines my religions, I need to start in OO for early culture, collateral and Stygian Guards and then switch to leaves for food and health ( I'll avoid chopping forests preferring lumbermills instead ).

[NobleHelium]

So did you pick the Bannor for the civ, or because you thought you had the best shot at a cultural victory with it? I'd have thought Arendel of the elves would be better.

[Mist]

So did you pick the Bannor for the civ, or because you thought you had the best shot at a cultural victory with it? I'd have thought Arendel of the elves would be better.

I picked leaders I thought had best shot at CV out of the given pool - Industrius and Philosopical. No leader had both ( Cassiel is banned ).

Forced to choose between one and the other, I rated Industrius slightly higher due to amount of wonders required to build ( will save me 500h on Hall, Theatre and Lyre alone ). This gives

Capria, Arturus Thorne, Os-Gabella, Sandalphon and Perpentach on a lucky roll.

From this set Perpentach is unpredictable, Sandalphon is squishy and his specials lie in recon line I won't touch, Os-Gabella requires arcane/melee focus I also want to avoid, Arthurus has a big handicap in Vault mechanic and Capria has a big target painted on her back. Nevertheless being Spiritual she has nice priests and cheap temples and I'll be doing *a lot* of religions ( each temple is +20% culture ).

So ordering by amount of hurdles to jump you get my pick of Capria - Arturus - Perpentach

Arendel is by no means better. Creative saves you stunning total of 180 hammers in all three cultural cities and provides 500 culture each in the desired time-frame ( up to t250 ). Besides, elves need to be left alone for a long time, I can't expect this will happen.

[NobleHelium]

Creative is pretty weak, yeah. But it's mostly Spiritual + the elves that I think is attractive. I had mixed the Bannor leaders up and thought Capria got Organized as her other trait. Industrious is definitely better, but I think elven production gets you better wonder building capability regardless.

I don't see what exactly is so weak about the elves early game...they're about the same strength as every other non-rush civilization. I guess they start with two scouts instead of a warrior, but that's hardly significant in most cases. The elven hero is earlier, and while you don't want to cast your worldspell, it's there once you reach FoL. And Creative does have some early game value, both for a minor boost to cultural defense but more significantly the ability to have better city placement, catching resources in the outer ring.

The main thing though that the elves get is late game ability to power bards while working towns. You get an extra food per tile, and basically no happiness cap. How does the Bannor compete with that?

You know, Perpentach is actually not so bad. I think he might be better than Capria. Not really because he gets three unpredictable traits that can align and be superb, but because the Balseraphs have quite a few civilization-specific culture features. I really think you focused too much on leader traits and not the civilization they come with. Oh wait, he can't be better than Capria, he doesn't have Spiritual. I love Spiritual. But I definitely think he's better than Arcturus.

Also, can you post a list of all the players and leader/civilizations in the game. Most subforums really lack such a list for no good reason. Everyone just talks about themselves.

[Mist]

I don't see what exactly is so weak about the elves early game...they're about the same strength as every other non-rush civilization. I guess they start with two scouts instead of a warrior, but that's hardly significant in most cases. The elven hero is earlier, and while you don't want to cast your worldspell, it's there once you reach FoL.

The problem with elves is twofold -
1) getting FoL takes time ( better part of early 100 turns actually ), even more so on Immortal and doesn't put you even a step closer to main aims ( outside of Mercantilism, Drama and Feudalism paths ).
2) you can't skip FoL because you're dead without it.

I know there's Uberfish's game in PBEM II, but that's not a good example of what might happen, since he popped a very early GScientist out of the Pyre and that distorted his teching ratio.

The main thing though that the elves get is late game ability to power bards while working towns. You get an extra food per tile, and basically no happiness cap. How does the Bannor compete with that?

Happiness cap is not an issue, once you go all out culture moving the slider gives you all the happiness you need from Theatres. And farm over forest ( the highest elven food tile ) is no better than normal farm with Calendar and Sanitation. There might be arguments about value of extra health and hammers, but my gut feeling is that with more expensive wonders and extra time to get started you end up taking more time.

But I definitely think he's better than Arcturus.

I don't know, Arthurus is much less squishy early on ( dwarven trebuchets are powerful early deterrent ) and once you actually overcome the early gold problems he becomes something of a monster in hammer production. Perpentach is nice. Just slightly to erratic.

Also, can you post a list of all the players and leader/civilizations in the game. Most subforums really lack such a list for no good reason. Everyone just talks about themselves.

That's because all them other people are boring

And seriously, yes, I plan to do that soonish. Existing selection of opponents will have an impact on strategy.