Civ 6 Adventure 1: China!

[scooter]

Any chance you'll finish this report? It looks like you managed the fastest Cultural victory, and I'd be interested to see your strategy here since I went the head-bashing route. I considered going with a cultural attempt, but the mechanic itself seemed so vague that I just wanted to try killing things.

[The Black Sword]

Yeah, I should finish it, just been very busy recently, and have felt more like playing than reporting when I was free.

I did take some periodic saves during the game to come back and report though. Here we are on T165.



This is the culture victory screen. I still don't quite know how it works to be honest. At the time I focused on getting both culture and tourism. I now suspect that the culture does not directly affect your ability to win. Rather, your culture determines the number of domestic tourists somehow, which is essentially a defense against others winning. It also indirectly helps by advancing you through the culture tree. I think the tourism number is the only thing that attracts foreign tourists to your lands.

In this screen I need to attract 27 foreign tourists to win and I've currently attracted 6. The other civs need a lot more tourists because my culture is higher, so I have more 'domestic tourists'. You can see in the top right, between the trade routes and the gold a 120 number. That is how much tourism I currently make per turn. How that translates to capturing foreign tourists I'm not sure. I'm pretty confident you need contact with other civilisations to get tourists from them though.

In the early game, tourism is pretty hard to generate, It pretty much comes from wonders(which I spammed a few of luckily) and perhaps an early great work(which I didn't).  My major tech target since my last report was Flight, which is just behind Industrialisation, so I got to unlock a couple of Factories too. 



Any improvements that provide culture now provide that much tourism as well. This is great with China's Great Wall, which is generally a 2 culture/2 gold improvement. Even better, I don't think you actually have to work the tile to get the tourism boost, I think I counted up my tourism at the time and checked that. This was the first major boost to my tourism.

Next up my plan was to supplement my tourism output further with Seaside resorts, the Eiffel Tower and the Cristo Redentor. You can see I'm currently teching Ballistics on the way to Steel. The theory was then to build the wonders while I tech Seaside resorts.

The Eiffel Tower would be built in one of my two best cities Taiyuan:


I would speed the build using a Great Engineer and chopping those forests/jungle north of the mountains. I also had two factories in range of the city with a bunch of hills. I would really abuse the forest-chopping mechanism to build the Cristo Redentor out in the wilds:



These late game cities were very focused on the culture victory and not much else. I'd just chop rainforests into population and start working Great Walls. You can see one more settler in the north of this screenshot, heading to the river, which would be my last city. Anyway, my plan was to use any remaining forests around to build the Cristo in Shanghai. Beijing built a factory here because it was in range of 4 cities, but that was only my 3rd Factory IIRC, while almost everywhere got a theatre district. Factories would snowball my hammers but what was there to snowball into? On the other hand Theatres start generating great people for me which snowball tourism.

I built the Chichen Itza in Shenyang, which was pretty cool, but probably not worth it:


It's a bunch of culture, but the problem is that it's not technically from an improvement, but an enhancement to the tile. Thus it doesn't given tourism. At least the wonder itself gives some though. That's a stealth buff to all wonders when going for a culture victory. Speaking of which, I built a ridiculously late Co

400h seems pretty expensive for an extra trade route in general, but they get better late game and it's another 6 tourism per turn.

[The Black Sword]

Then here we are on T196, 30t later. Cristo is built:




As is the Eiffel Tower:


and Seaside Resorts have been spammed.



How does this work? Seaside resorts can only be built on tiles with appeal 4(breathtaking). They also have to be beside the sea(not always obvious for a Civ game). They provide double the appeal yield in tourism. Again, I'm pretty sure you don't have to work them. I don't remember seeing that 6g documented anywhere either btw. The Eiffel Tower adds +2 Appeal to all tiles, making pretty much every tile eligible for a resort and increasing the tourism output of those that are. Then the Cristo doubles the output of any tourist resort. So this resort is bring in a whopping 24 tourism! Remember the Colossus was only bringing in 6. People obviously prefer the beach to a dusty old building.

We've almost won at this stage:


I didn't realise how quickly the game would end to be honest, I thought it would take a few more turns. But between finally meeting the last 2 civs, the seasisde resorts, teching computers and the Great Work spam, my tourism exploded very quickly. A glance at some recently recruited great people:



and their effect in tourism points:



That settler from the last screenshot is all grown up btw, complete with Great Walls and Theatres. These cities out on their own surrounded by Great Walls look pretty cool:



I did mess around a bit with religion to see what it was useful for too.





It wasn't really that interesting. Spend faith to get faith. I tried to snowball a bit then just focused on using my faith to purchase Great People. I want to play a game for a religious victory to really explore this aspect.

Anyway, the coup de grace for the culture victory was teching Computers:


This comes pretty quickly after unlocking Radio for the seaside resorts. Doubling culture output is pretty massive. I think I said at some stage that I was running out things that felt useful to tech but that wasn't really the case in the end. I wasn't sure what to target after computers but the game ended shortly anyway. I probably had an excess of culture instead, but that was partly due to emphasising culture thinking it had a direct affect on the victory condition. There were good items in the culture tree, particularly about leveraging Great Works, but they didn't feel quite as powerful as these ones in the science tree.

Here's a glance at my current government

I won the game on ending turn 197. Sean Bean wasn't very impressed though and I was ranked as Ethelred the Unready.