On Towards the Stars: Tourism
[This post is part of a larger strategy guide for Civilization 6]
God I fucking hate tourism. It is easily the most complicated mechanic in civ and it has no right being this weird. At the end of the day it is not hard, but the UX is so poor and the concept so poorly explained that this just ends up being a head-scratcher every time.
I'm going to start with the key takeaway and tactics, before diving into how this all works. Note that I'm simplifying a bit to get at the main concepts without getting caught up in the math.
Key Takeaway: To win culture, your total tourism generated over the course of the whole game needs to be larger than the total culture generated by the enemy civ with the most total culture.
Tactics to win tourism:
You want to be getting tourism however you can as early as possible. Culture starts ticking upwards from turn 1 of the game. Early tourism can be hard to come by, but generally comes from goodie hut relics (if you're lucky), holy cities, and wonders.
Meet every civ as soon as possible.
Get a religion — you're going to need faith generation for national parks and rock bands later on, and you start generating early tourism from your holy city.
To a first approximation, another civ getting eliminated is really bad. You want to avoid civs being eliminated from the game, as it makes tourism generation much harder.
That said, removing the person with the most culture from the game is good if they have too much culture built up.
Plan for natural parks early on. Build them as soon as you can.
Rock bands are the key to victory. Send rock bands exclusively to the enemy civ that has the most culture (i.e. the one that is preventing you from winning).
Send at least one trade route to each other civ.
Try and have open borders or alliances with as many other civs as possible.
Tactics to stop tourism:
Jack up the amount of culture you are generating. Build theater squares, slot the appropriate cards, and run the right district projects.
Go to war and completely wipe out an enemy civ (but not the one with the most culture).
Generated vs Exerted Tourism
Above, I said that the tourism win condition is based on the total amount of tourism you generate over the course of the whole game. That's only kinda true. You don't just collect tourism, the same way you do science and culture. Rather, tourism is exerted on each civ that you've met. You may have a ton of tourism built up with every other civ. But you won't have any tourism exerted on anyone you haven't met.
The amount of tourism that actually matters is the sum of the amount of tourism you exert over every other civilization. If there's 8 civs in the game, and you've met them all, and you generate 100 tourism per turn, you might assume you are actually exerting 800 tourism each turn. That's a lot!
To balance the fact that you exert tourism on every other civ in the game, the amount of tourism you actually exert is equal to the amount of generated tourism divided by the total number of civs at the start of the game. So in practice, in the example above, I only exert 100 / 8 = 12.5 tourism on each opposing civ each turn. And assuming at least one other civ is generating more than 100 culture per turn, I won't be able to win tourism — the enemy civ will be able to outpace me.
Finally, note that I said that the divisor is fixed at the start of the game. If another civ gets eliminated, or if you never meet another civ at all, you do not exert tourism on them (and in fact you will lose all of the tourism you've ever exerted on them in the former case). Taking the example above, if one out of 8 civs is eliminated, even though I have 100 tourism generated per turn I only actually exert 100 / 8 * 7 = 87.5 tourism. That's a pretty brutal cut!1
So just from the way that tourism is actually calculated, it should be obvious why winning on tourism requires
creating tourism early;
meeting everyone ASAP;
making sure other civs are not eliminated.
Stealing Tourists: Rock Bands
Above, I said that the tourism win condition is based on the total amount of culture that your opponents generate. That's also only kinda true. The tourism that you exert on your opponents actually subtracts from their culture, for the purposes of checking the tourism victory. In other words, the more tourism I exert on a single civ specifically, the easier the win condition gets against that civ.
Let's take the same example as above.
I generate 100 tourism per turn, and there are 8 civs in the game. So I exert 12.5 tourism on each other civ each turn. If my opponent generates 100 culture per turn, then the amount of total tourism I actually have to exert is, roughly2, 87.5 per turn to eventually win — the 100 culture minus the 12.5 tourism I exert.
For the most part, tourism is exerted on every other civ equally. But by the end of the game, you really only want to exert a bunch of tourism against the civ that happens to have generated the most lifetime culture. Doing so will not only generate more tourism for you, it will also help reduce the stockpiles of culture that particular civ has against you. Relics, Wonders, Great Works, and Natural Parks will dramatically increase your tourism per turn, but their effects are all global — and therefore a bit neutered by the fact that you have to divide any tourism impact by the total number of civs.
Enter Rock Bands.
They have their own weird and complicated mechanics (see the wiki for details). Generally, the two key things to know are:
they exert bursts of tourism on a single enemy civ;
each performance is cumulative, generating tourism roughly equivalent to the sum of all previous performances — the longer your rock band survives, the more tourism it generates.
It's common to have rock bands doing bursts of multiple thousands of tourism. That said, rock bands are hard to keep alive, mostly to balance how strong they can be in the late game. Build many of them, but be very targeted about where you send them.34
National parks
National parks are notoriously hard to build, so first I want to explain why it's worth building these things at all.
The most consistent way to get tourism is from great works and themed museums. If you manage to get 3 different great artists who all match up on great work types, you can get a themed museum. That gives you drum roll 24 tourism.
That's…not a ton.
The long and short of it is, tourism is a bit difficult to come by, in part because of its multiplicative effect across everyone in the game, in part because more tourism also decreases your opponent's ability to prevent a culture victory. So when you do get tourism, it's really valuable. National Parks are simply the easiest way to get a lot of tourism.
National parks exert tourism based on the sum of the appeal of the 4 tiles in the park. Since each tile in a park has to be +4 Appeal (Charming) or up, you get at least 16 tourism per park. It's pretty easy to make this higher, though. Building nearby theater squares or holy sites or preserves, planting woods, getting some Great People, or building the Eiffel Tower or Golden Gate Bridge all increase appeal. It's not too hard to get up to 24 base tourism from a national park. And there are a bunch of modifiers that add on to that base tourism — for example, Computers and Environmentalism each give a 50% boost to all tourism.
So hopefully it makes sense why we would want to build these. I'm not going to talk too much about how to build a national park, except to say that it really has to be a conscious decision from early in the game. One thing I love about the national park mechanic is how it plays out like real life. Much like in the real world, you have to designate a part of your empire as 'untouched'. And then…don't touch it! This is hard to do, because often there are a lot of short term demands on your empire that make you want to use tiles for things like districts. And sometimes strategic resources will show up in places that you want to use for a national park. So you really do have to make a conscious decision to cordon off a bit of land for the future, akin to how national parks are designated today.
The easiest way to build a national park is to find a natural wonder and build off that, since you can't build on natural wonder tiles. Next easiest is to find a mountain chain and again build off that, since again you can't build on natural wonder tiles. After that, it's a bit of a crap shoot. Keep an eye on the appeal view throughout the game, and look for your appeal diamonds.
Understanding the Tourism UI
Back to tourism. Like I said, I think the UX for tourism sucks, but it's important to understand it so you can be informed while you play.
Thus far, I've been talking about tourism and culture as units. The game prefers to think in terms of 'tourists'. In particular, the game cares about 'domestic tourists' and visiting tourists'. 'Domestic tourists' are a function of the total amount of culture you create — one per 100 culture you generate. 'Foreign tourists' are a function of the total amount of tourism you exert on a civ — one per 200 * # of civs in play tourism that you create.
Hopefully it's clear why I mostly stick to tourism and culture instead of talking about tourists. Knowing about tourists doesn't change how you play, at all.
Still, the culture victory screen is denominated in tourists.
Above is an example.
There are a few numbers to be aware of.
First, the number of domestic tourists each civ has produced is next to the little suitcase under each civ name.
One way to read this is, Kongo has produced 38300 culture over the course of the game.
Next, the number of visiting tourists from each country is displayed in the middle column.
This is saying that Kongo has 27 visiting tourists from Russia. Since there are 5 civs in the game, Kongo has exerted roughly 200 * 5 * 27 = 27000 tourism on Russia. Russia in turn has 233 domestic tourists, i.e. it has produced 23300 culture over the course of the game.
The last number is the total amount of visiting tourists you have, against the amount you need to win.
This is saying that Kongo has earned 111 visiting tourists from all of the other civs (i.e. has exerted 200 * 5 * 111 = 111000 total tourism on all of the other civs). Kongo needs 237 visiting tourists in total to win. That 237 number is one more than Japan's 236 domestic tourists. Meanwhile, Japan needs 384 visiting tourists to win. That 384 number is one more than Kongo's 383 domestic tourists.
So, based on this, if I was Kongo I would start sending rock bands to Japan. Those rock bands will increase the amount of visiting tourists I get total, and decrease the amount of domestic tourists that Japan has.
Note that everyone in the game will have the same cut to their tourism generation. That said, other civs may be going for other victory types, so it's not great to be set so far back.
I'm being handwavy because it isn't exactly 1:1. Culture and tourism are both divided by different numbers based on gamespeed.
Note that because rock bands are so necessary for a culture victory, the game provides the music censorship policy card to prevent rock bands from entering your borders in the first place. If someone else is getting up there on tourism, use this card. It's worth it.
Note that you can't actually kill rock bands with military. They work a bit like great people in that they just respawn back at the owner's nearest city.