Episode: 4340
Title: HPR4340: Playing Civilization IV, Part 7
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4340/hpr4340.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 23:19:28

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4,340, for Friday 21 March 2025.
Today's show is entitled, Playing Civilization Roman 4, Part 7.
It is part of the series' Computer Strategy Games.
It is hosted by Ahukah and is about 14 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, we demonstrate how to win a culture victory.
Hello, this is Ahukah, watching you the Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode.
In our ongoing series on computer strategy games, and we're continuing with Civilization 4.
Now, we've done a number of shows so far looking at some of the mechanics of this, but it probably is a good idea to put all of that together and see how you can use all these ideas and practice.
So what I did is I took one of the new victory types that Civilization 4 introduced, which is called a cultural victory, and I went through a kind of a sample game, not detailing every single move, because these games can be 400, 500 turns long,
depending on how you do it.
I mean, you can have 750 turns, and if I did it one turn by turn, it would just take forever.
So instead, what I'm going to do is sort of hit the key decision points along the way, so that you get a sense of how to do this.
Now, as I said, culture victory is one of the new ones introduced in Civilization 4. It is a very interesting approach.
Now, when you're playing the game, you probably want to see where you stand with all of the victory conditions.
So to do that, you go to the icon of a raised fist in the upper right. Now, on that screen, you will see where you rank.
So I set out to win a culture victory, and the condition for that is to have three cities with legendary culture.
Now, what's legendary culture? That's defined as 50,000 culture if you're at normal speed, but it does vary by speed.
So here are the totals by different game speeds. For a quick game, 25,000 culture is sufficient.
For a normal game, 50,000 culture, for an epic game, 75,000, and for a marathon game, 150,000.
Now, the idea is that faster speeds for these longer games, you have more turns to game culture.
So the amount needed goes up correspondingly. Also, the costs of researching and building the improvements tend to increase as well with game speed.
Now, you can see a breakdown of this at the civilization fandom wiki, and I put a link to that in the show notes.
Now, for my game, I decided to do a game at epic speed. So I will have 750 turns to get three cities to 75,000 culture each.
Then I had to choose the game map. Now, I went for archipelago as my map, which means I am less likely to encounter early opposition.
As it happened, I ended up with a fairly large island all to myself.
Archipelago maps are maps with lots of islands, as compared with continents, or Pangaea, which is one large continent.
Now, if I were going for a conquest victory, I would choose Pangaea instead, because I could start in on the conquest as soon as possible.
Of course, if you want to challenge yourself, you could reverse these. But if you're just getting started, there's nothing wrong with giving yourself a small edge.
Now, my next decision was to choose the leader. I chose Catherine.
My reasoning was that I didn't need the protective traits since I chose archipelago for most of my protection.
I went with Catherine for the imperialistic trait as a gamble to get the increased production of settlers.
This paid off handsomely when I got a large island all to myself. I cranked out settlers and settled the whole island.
Now, if I was on a smaller island, I would have focused my research to get sailing.
So, the first thing you research there is fishing, and then after that, that opens up sailing, and then build galleys so I could try to settle nearby islands.
And if there were no nearby islands within reach of my galleys, I would probably just start a new game. This is supposed to be fun after all.
There is no sense in playing when the deck is stacked against you.
Now, my first hundred or so turns were devoted to getting my empire settled and my cities built up.
Obviously, the cities I found first were the ones most built up, but many of the early choices were the same.
I tried to get granary as my first city improvement to help build up my population, then city walls to help with defense.
Libraries and monasteries help with early culture gains, and of course, libraries also help with science.
Remember, you need to have a balanced development strategy to some degree, and keeping up your research is important for any victory condition.
Also, I went for monotheism to get the religion Judaism.
Now, instead of four, as we discussed previously, no particular religion is better than any other, but I wanted to have one so I could get my holy city and have state religion.
A holy city gets additional culture, and state religion gives you culture and happiness bonuses, and if combined with the Sistine Chapel, even more culture bonuses.
And while the early development was pretty similar for all of my cities, as I passed the turn 100 mark, I started to think about specializing.
Now, obviously, I would need to choose three cities to promote for culture, but that implies other cities will need to push military and science.
Once I had settled my island, I no longer needed to think about settling more cities. I had 15, which is quite enough to win with, but to think about specializing I needed to see what options I had.
Military production cities should be ones with a high level of production, so you might look for cities that have a lot of minds.
Now, part of your early development strategy should be to first crank out settlers to found new cities, and to crank out workers to build terrain improvements.
Now, for terrain improvements, I generally build farms on any tile that is suitable for it, so that I could increase my population and get some specialists working in my cities.
On hills, I generally build mines, and when I get the tech windmills. On tiles that are flat but not suitable for farms, I will build either workshops or cottages.
Workshops add to production, and cottages will develop into important money makers over time as they grow to hamlets, then villages, and then finally towns.
Now, you can see how this works at the Siv fandom wiki, and again a link to that in the show notes.
I try to always get at least one or two cottages within every city in the early game because a good cash flow is very important.
Now, you can see how your cities are doing if you go to the icon of a house on the upper right. You will get a concise summary of these statistics for each of your cities.
I started by looking at the culture production to select my top three culture producers.
My capital was within the top three, not surprisingly, and was also the top production city and the top science city.
Now, that's not unusual since it is the oldest city and therefore the most developed.
But once I chose my three top culture cities, I intended to start specializing, which means that the city improvements, specialists, wonders, etc. will start to diverge.
I set my capital to produce the Sistine Chapel and another city to produce Notre Dame.
Now, that does not mean I won't be generating culture in other cities, but the emphasis will be different.
So I picked out three cities other than the culture cities that had high production and designated them as military cities.
Finally, I picked out three more to be my science cities.
So to help keep track of these, I went to rename my cities.
Now, to do that, you just open the city screen, click on the city name and you can rename it.
Now, I added a capital C inside of parentheses at the end of the name for my three culture cities.
A capital M in parentheses added to the end of the names of my military cities and a capital S in parentheses for the science cities.
You will probably start by what you see in the city screen, but as you get more familiar, you can start to analyze the map and see how cities can develop over time.
Meanwhile, you can change these assignments at any time if the situation changes.
Now, military cities will produce units to defend your empire.
You will want defensive units in all of your cities, particularly ones on the border or coast.
But I tried to have city walls and two good defensive units in each city.
As your research progresses, you will want to upgrade your units to the latest military technology.
Now, you can sometimes do this with cash upgrades if you have a strong treasury.
But some units don't have an upgrade path that way and you will need to produce new units.
When that happens, the military cities should be the ones producing them and sending them to the other cities.
You don't want to divert the attention of your culture or science cities unless you are sorely pressed by an enemy.
And you will make sure that the military cities get all of the production enhancements and military buildings as soon as they become available.
And if you get a great general, you should use it in one of your military cities and put it there to make any of your specialists in the military cities to boost productions.
For example, I got a great engineer in my capital city, but I had already designated it as a culture city.
So I moved the great engineer to one of my military cities and created a super specialist to increase my production there.
Science cities should of course focus on science and build city improvements that add to the science output.
And they should look to building wonders that add science as well.
Any great scientists should be used in the science of cities and any specialist you create there should be scientists.
And of course in your culture city, you should focus on building the city improvements that add culture.
Any great artists should be used in the culture cities and the specialists they create should be artists.
Specializing your cities in this way will produce much better results than just building things willy nilly wherever you happen to be at the moment.
Ordinary specialists can be reassigned of course.
If I am building a wonder for instance, I might want to reassign a specialist to become an ordinary city and assign them to a tile that produces some hammers because that's going to help increase your production.
Once the wonder is built, of course, you can then reassign them back to being an artist, a scientist, or whatever.
And speaking of wonders, at this point in the game, I had each of my three culture cities working on wonders that are cultural.
Sistine Chapel, Notre Dame, and Chichen Itza.
Now there's no guarantee that I would get all of them, but maybe I would get one or two of them.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained after all.
And right now they are the only wonders available to me.
And to increase my chances, I went into each city screen and moved some citizens around.
The default programming tends to assign them to producing food as the first priority, and that is usually a good idea to build up your population.
But since I was building wonders, I elected to move some of them to tiles that added more production, and that cut down the number of turns needed to complete the wonders.
So this is a good overview of the basic strategy I had in mind to achieve a culture victory.
I'm going to continue this in the next show and see some of the more of the decisions that I made.
But this is enough for now. So this is a hookah for Hacker Public Radio, signing off, and is always encouraging you to support free software. Bye-bye.
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