In terms of research, note my unusual choice to head for the unboosted Cartography, which had a lengthy 20 turn research time.

Cultural victory on Turn 241. For Civ3 and Civ4, click an image link in the left or right side bar of any page to go to a current game release page for your Civ version. Furthermore, I had no need for anything else on the tech tree at present. In the nine turns since reaching Radio on Turn 228, I've gone from a base tourism of 852/turn to 1366/turn, and that's before adding all those trade route modifiers. Even those pricey archaeologists could be bought quickly when making over 200 gold/turn. any page. The early turns were pretty quiet, as I finished the slinger in the capital, trained a builder who improved three tiles for the Craftsmanship boost, then produced a settler. Standard map, Shuffle, 7 AI Opponents

A cultural victory requires a lot of cities, as each one can only build a single Theatre district to house Great Works and artifacts. Here's an unexplored goody hut I found near German territory, along with a whole bunch of barbarian units. China, Prince Normally the AIs fall all over themselves to surrender after taking a city or two; from a balance standpoint, this was a welcome change. There were six more AI civs out there that I needed to meet, and I couldn't even start sending them tourism until making contact. Ouch, what a waste of precious early game production! Much of the Realms Beyond community seems to be uninterested in Civ6, and getting the new Epics off and running in the face of widespread indifference has often felt like a Sisyphean task. On the tech tree, I was heading for Industrialization and the all-important factories and +1 production on mines. Come on Firaxis. This game is really weird in that regard, where the AIs can be complete patsies in battle at the same time that the barbarians are murderous monsters. I wanted to get my districts down on the map and locked in place before the costs scaled up too much. It makes the whole competition look foolish.) I wanted Social Media on the civics tree to open up another one of the big policies for a cultural victory. That was a needlessly provocative site, and it was clear that this situation wasn't going to be resolved through diplomacy. This was the Russian homeland on Turn 125. I had guessed that this would be Mvemba of the Kongo, since he gets doubled Great Writer/Artist/Musician points. The cultural victory was essentially at the halfway point. When I was browsing through the Civ6 forums at CivFanatics, I happened to see the subforum for the Game of the Month competition and decided to drop in and take a look. One thing that did work out was landing my pantheon of choice: God King delivered God of the Open Sky for +1 culture on pastures on Turn 39. But the main point is that by and large there hasn't been as much interest in Civ6 as I expected at Realms Beyond, and I've been in the strange position of having to drum up interest in the game on a Civilization enthusiast website! I immediately Opened Borders again and sent a new trade route to Greece for the total +125% tourism bonus. Anyway, I declared war and took the settler for myself, founding Novgorod on the very same tile. My core cities wouldn't even have to stop their endless infrastructure building projects. I was running the God King policy to get my pantheon as soon as possible, while training another builder for the second city. Then the workshop produces +2 production, and if there are any Industrial city states on the map, they will kick in even more production. And besides, what else was I going to do during these remaining turns? This was the most inefficient part of the game I played. There were five such tiles at my first two cities alone, and many many more in the surrounding area. Current Games: I have pages and pages of old reports documenting how atrociously bad the AI was in Civ3 and Civ4, if anyone's curious.

In practice, most of the artifacts end up coming from the Ancient era and so theming the museum simply means picking three from different civs. By the time that the scouts could be upgraded into rangers and arrive to do the actual city capturing, I should have a siege just about done. Seaside resorts must be built on the coast, they cannot be constructed on hill tiles, and they can only be built on grassland/plains/desert tiles - no tundra or ice tiles.

(I had an unused trader just waiting around for a few turns until the foolish AI leader would talk to me again.) I had not been expanding in the past few turns, although with some key projects finishing up I planned to push out a few more settlers in the upcoming turns. Sixteen turns later, I had added two more cities and had another settler about to head north into the big bananas cluster near Mohenjo-Daro. BtS BOTM 239 They were more about building up your own civ and less about manipulating the rules to amass tourism in sneaky ways. I killed one barbarian horseman after another, always to be replaced by more of them. I would put my gold income towards purchasing archaeologists for some time to come. Rangers upgrade from scouts, and they continue to use the recon line of promotions. Even though I like the overall idea of the cultural victory in Civ6, any competition badly needs some controls on it to prevent the whole thing from devolving into yet another "who can kill the AIs the best" game. I had a trade route to everyone other than France, which remained too far away to reach. Cleopatra had denounced me for having a "weak military", and it was just a matter of time before she attacked me. The resorts also require the tile to have "Breathtaking" appeal or greater, and there can't be any improvements or resources on the tile before building the resort. I intended to launch an Inquisition with my first apostle and use that to protect my religion from foreign interlopers (along with converting Smolensk back to the true faith). I reached Cultural Heritage civic on Turn 174. There's nothing fun here - it's all busywork. Now I just needed to deal with Greece. Emperor difficulty It's easy for any CFC member to join this friendly competition: The current games are listed below, with their submission deadlines and links to their forum discussion threads: Menus of links to all the details for Civ3 and Civ4 competitions are provided in the left and right margins on every page. The first one is visible in that screenshot above, and the units would terrorize me for ages to come. The sooner that I could take her cities and stop her from producing culture, the faster that she would stop accumulating domestic tourists and I would win the game. This was a very inefficient use of my limited science output, delaying seaside resorts and the tourism that they provide. Peace was reestablished as soon as possible, so that I could get Open Borders again for the tourism bonus. I was using most of my income to cash-rush builders every few turns; since I already had Feudalism researched and the Serfdom policy in place (+2 builder actions), that was arguably the most efficient way to speed up my development curve. Well, with Gustave Eiffel in hand, I wasn't going to take the same risk with Cristo Redentor and rushed about 2/3 of the wonder with this Great Engineer. Uh oh. I also need to read up on the rules for how tile appeal is determined; one of the players in the GOTM results thread mentioned planting additional forests on the tiles behind the coast to increase tile appeal, which sounds like a very useful tactic. If you tally up the compilation picture above, I was producing 18,670 total tourism on this turn. I began training slingers (to upgrade into archers) and warriors. Well, as some of you already knew, rangers cannot capture cities in Civ6. It was a bit intimidating, I'll be honest. Even with the massive accumulation of domestic tourists that Greece had managed to put together in this game, it wasn't going to take too long to achieve victory. With the privateers turned into submarines for escorts, I could sail off for Greece and start putting their cities under siege. Not bad at all. Get one for the Radio tech boost, and that should be more than sufficient. (There are old writeups of both games here on my website.) Even after the factory/power plant change in the latest patch, just about every city still wants an Industrial district. I had a situation where an archer was safely healing in my territory, only to have a pair of barbarian horses suddenly appear out of the fog and kill the unit in a single round of combat. Tourism from seaside resorts is even worse because the number does not update mid-turn when a seaside resort is planted, only updating the following turn, and by then it's hard to know what caused the overall number to increase. I've said before that the whole "storage" system for Great Works and artifacts is needlessly micromanagement-intensive and should be scrapped entirely. That was admittedly a long way off at this point, but it's always good to have a general plan for the future. And in addition to the Commercial districts and their buildings, my trade routes themselves were also highly lucrative. Tomyris built the wonder instead. (Check out my awesome fully revealed minimap!) Online Communities provides +50% tourism to other civs provided that you have a trade route with them. I also learned a lot about the importance of seaside resorts for a cultural victory, in particular from whacker's game where he had an astonishing 1768 tourism as early as Turn 176 (!) I reached Rifling tech on Turn 217 and upgraded all my scouts to rangers. That's one of the big ones for a cultural victory, since it opens up Cultural Heritage policy: +100% tourism from Great Works of Art and artifacts. Even on this map with no city states immediately available, the Industrial districts were great because they make constructing all the subsequent districts faster. Click a title to open the thread. I had seven cities at this point and would found an eighth before hitting Turn 100. That is some sad stuff. That's one of the more useful beliefs, and the AI had ignored it in this game. Please read the Terms of Use. The fastest finishes came from players who attacked and crippled Greece early in the game, as I had known that they would. Submit by Jul 23

Regarding the seaside resorts themselves, they also have some odd mechanics that aren't explained very well in-game. It's not like the interface or Civilopedia in Civ6 provide any information about what units can capture cities and which ones can't, and it's not like the units in the recon line of promotion are internally consistent. The GOTM does a great job of identifying the optimal strategies, which are exactly the things that I intend to mess around with in future variants. I've highlighted my tourism with Egypt to demonstrate the power of those lategame trade routes: the base tourism value was only 764/turn but I was getting 1604 tourism/turn with Cleopatra, more than double the value at the top of the screen. Longtime readers of the website may know that the first competitive games of Civilization that I played online were not with the Realms Beyond community, but with the CivFanatics Game of the Month (GOTM) tournament for Civ3. I knew that the fastest route to success would come from invading Greece and stopping Gorgo from producing more culture. The series has done an excellent job of reducing the micromanagement insanity of older games, when we would be managing 35 cities and 100+ workers every single turn in Civ3. Exploring the immediate surroundings shortly revealed that there were resources scattered everywhere around the map. They could only shoot if they were right next to the horses, and there was no opportunity to retreat to safety. As a rule of thumb, it's bad design to create systems that the AI can't understand or use properly.). All rights reserved. This was apparently an archipelago version of the Shuffle map script, with most of the other civs located on their own islands. This was the first game where I built seaside resorts in any kind of numbers, and I'm still figuring out how they work. As I've said in other reports, I had reached terminal velocity for the cultural win. Kudos to Greece for removing a Great Person that I had no intention of recruiting from the list. That was a bit of poor luck. My archers had no trouble shooting down the Egyptian warriors, followed by taking Akhetaten a few turns later: The incentives for early warfare are still too strong in Civ6. Peter of Russia In a strange twist of fate, I now find myself in the reverse situation. I've become a bit of a connoisseur for the Cultural victory condition in Civ6; now that I understand how the mechanics work, it's turning into my favorite victory condition. I dislike the way that all of the victories in Civ6 are so adversarial in nature, everything other than the Spaceship heavily rewarding warfare. For the moment, I needed to keep exploring and getting more map information while building up my own civ. The city fell on Turn 65: Egypt was left with a single city located just to the north. I felt bad about attacking them, only to find out eventually that I didn't have to do so.