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I spent all day playing Civilization V today, completing my first cultural victory in any game with the Brave New World mechanic that actually makes it fun. I really enjoy the vertical investment of cultural victory and not having to micromanage a bunch of cities, which is especially awful in the mid-late game where you've got 50 infantry and 20 Panzer but no bombers yet and every war takes about sixty turns to resolve despite being fought over the same five tiles of land.
The actual chain of events that led to this victory was pretty comical. I was playing as Napoleon, on a map with three continents. In the early game I was allied with both the Songhai and the Japanese, before Japan asked me to assist them in destroying the Songhai in the late classical era. Japan took Gao and razed the second largest Songhai city, which I no longer remember the name of. In turn, I took Jenne with a bunch of free spearmen and swordsmen I had obtained from a strategic "Terracotta Warriors" wonder completion, which was positioned below Paris and Orleans in a sort of upside-down triangular formation, and was right next to Sydney, a city state which I was allied with. When Japan declared war on Riga soon after, I placed my soldiers around its borders and waited for it to be weakened, so that I could finish the job and turn it into a puppet state (which I would fully annex later). I was thinking that I'd seriously lucked out by landing on a continent with only Japan and Songhai as competitors, because while being militaristic, Japan isn't expansionist. This meant I'd have plenty of time to settle over all the luxury resources on our continent without worrying about rushing settlers.
One thing I wish they kept from Civ IV is tech trading. Around this time, I unlocked the "Defensive Pact" perk and wanted to use it on Japan, before realizing we needed open borders first, which in turn necessitated mutual embassies for both parties. While I already had an embassy in Japan, Oda Nobunaga had been so hyper focused on refining the pointiness of his sticks that he'd neglected the discovery of writing. My first Great Person was Alexandre Dumas, followed by Ki No Tsurayuki both born in Orleans. Though great people are randomized, I thought it was fitting considering the history of the continent in game. Japan began scheming around this time and declared war on my civ, so Japanese Belisarius and French Winfield Scott engaged in an extended standoff at the border between Riga, Osaka, and the city state of Monaco. After demoralizing Oda Nobunaga enough that he filed for a peace treaty, I used Winfield Scott to place a citadel, forming a critical chokepoint at the border that was so effective it allowed me to play at attrition and barely spend a thing on troops for every future war with Japan (there would be three rather one-sided conflicts, for the friendship between Napoleon and Oda never recovered).
Getting the win condition was easy enough against Japan and the Iroquois (who were also attempting a cultural victory AND ended up adopting the same ideology, which made them a valuable ally when it came to passing resolutions). I had basically established my supremacy by 100 AD, and the only real conflict was the occasional Japanese attack, which I could repel easily since my eastern border had the citadel and my western border had Sydney, the city-state with the highest defensive stat for most of the mid-game. Casimir III's Poland was the real pain in the ass: not only was his culture sky high, he was Catholicism when I was Shintoist, and he went for autocracy when I'd gone for freedom, which lowered our mutual tourism influence. Just when a swift cultural victory was in arms reach, he cancelled our open borders and international trade routes and kicked out my diplomat. He then sent a fleet of destroyers across the sea, which might have made a dent if not for the fact that I didn't have a single coastal city. Casimir and I played at Cold War: he had a naval fleet that couldn't reach my cities, and I had an infantry army that couldn't touch his ships. Neither of us wanted to bother with escalation. As a result, the Franco-Polish war achieved nothing on either side other than delay my inevitable cultural victory by around sixty turns.
The actual chain of events that led to this victory was pretty comical. I was playing as Napoleon, on a map with three continents. In the early game I was allied with both the Songhai and the Japanese, before Japan asked me to assist them in destroying the Songhai in the late classical era. Japan took Gao and razed the second largest Songhai city, which I no longer remember the name of. In turn, I took Jenne with a bunch of free spearmen and swordsmen I had obtained from a strategic "Terracotta Warriors" wonder completion, which was positioned below Paris and Orleans in a sort of upside-down triangular formation, and was right next to Sydney, a city state which I was allied with. When Japan declared war on Riga soon after, I placed my soldiers around its borders and waited for it to be weakened, so that I could finish the job and turn it into a puppet state (which I would fully annex later). I was thinking that I'd seriously lucked out by landing on a continent with only Japan and Songhai as competitors, because while being militaristic, Japan isn't expansionist. This meant I'd have plenty of time to settle over all the luxury resources on our continent without worrying about rushing settlers.
One thing I wish they kept from Civ IV is tech trading. Around this time, I unlocked the "Defensive Pact" perk and wanted to use it on Japan, before realizing we needed open borders first, which in turn necessitated mutual embassies for both parties. While I already had an embassy in Japan, Oda Nobunaga had been so hyper focused on refining the pointiness of his sticks that he'd neglected the discovery of writing. My first Great Person was Alexandre Dumas, followed by Ki No Tsurayuki both born in Orleans. Though great people are randomized, I thought it was fitting considering the history of the continent in game. Japan began scheming around this time and declared war on my civ, so Japanese Belisarius and French Winfield Scott engaged in an extended standoff at the border between Riga, Osaka, and the city state of Monaco. After demoralizing Oda Nobunaga enough that he filed for a peace treaty, I used Winfield Scott to place a citadel, forming a critical chokepoint at the border that was so effective it allowed me to play at attrition and barely spend a thing on troops for every future war with Japan (there would be three rather one-sided conflicts, for the friendship between Napoleon and Oda never recovered).
Getting the win condition was easy enough against Japan and the Iroquois (who were also attempting a cultural victory AND ended up adopting the same ideology, which made them a valuable ally when it came to passing resolutions). I had basically established my supremacy by 100 AD, and the only real conflict was the occasional Japanese attack, which I could repel easily since my eastern border had the citadel and my western border had Sydney, the city-state with the highest defensive stat for most of the mid-game. Casimir III's Poland was the real pain in the ass: not only was his culture sky high, he was Catholicism when I was Shintoist, and he went for autocracy when I'd gone for freedom, which lowered our mutual tourism influence. Just when a swift cultural victory was in arms reach, he cancelled our open borders and international trade routes and kicked out my diplomat. He then sent a fleet of destroyers across the sea, which might have made a dent if not for the fact that I didn't have a single coastal city. Casimir and I played at Cold War: he had a naval fleet that couldn't reach my cities, and I had an infantry army that couldn't touch his ships. Neither of us wanted to bother with escalation. As a result, the Franco-Polish war achieved nothing on either side other than delay my inevitable cultural victory by around sixty turns.
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