How to get a Culture Victory in Civilization 7

A Culture Victory in Civilization 7 may not sound as dramatic as a Military Victory or a Science Victory, but it’s no less exciting. You’ll be building beautiful buildings that survive through the ages, spreading your religion to other countries and bringing the world together with one of civilization’s greatest achievements: the World’s Fair.

In this Civilization 7 guide, we’re going to give you a broad idea of how to get a Culture Victory and then give you an age-by-age walkthrough on how to make it happen.

How to get a Culture Victory in Civilization 7

In a Culture Victory, you want to build unique buildings that increase your Culture yield as much as possibly. If you’re using a civilization like the Greeks, you can use their unique buildings together to build an acropolis district, which will net you some bonus gold, but will also give you extra culture via the odeon and parthenon buildings. As you advance through the ages, you’ll unlock temples, and theaters, and all kinds of buildings that will help you increase your Culture yield further.

Having a high Culture yield is critical, as it’ll help you rocket through the Civics Tree early on in each age. Not only will this give you an advantage over other civilizations, as you’ll be able to customize your government with powerful perks far sooner, but it’ll also unlock the ideas you’ll need to explore in order to eventually achieve victory.

Wonders, for example, are often locked behind nodes in the Civic Tree. Because Wonders are unique (there can only be one of each per game across all civilizations), you can get a Wonder taken away from you by another player if they complete theirs first. So unlocking the ability to build something like the Colossus — which is deep in the Antiquity Age Civics Tree — before anyone else does gives you a head start. (This is also true for religion in the Exploration Age and especially true of explorers in the Modern Age.)

Your ultimate goal in a Culture Victory is to construct the World’s Fair Wonder, which you unlock by finishing the Culture Legacy Path in the Modern Age. If you become the first player to build it, the game ends — and you win.

Culture Victory walkthrough in Civilization 7

As described above, a Culture Victory is all about wowing the world with the soul of your civilization. That sounds corny — and it is — but it’s also the way the game treats it, to an extent. You are trying to become what people consider the ur culture, the way folks look to the Greeks now as one of the most ancient and storied civilizations of antiquity.

Below, we’re going to give you a bit of more structured advice for each age to help you push through the game’s objectives and complete the Culture Legacy Path, which will help guide you to completing the World’s Fair Wonder in the Modern Age.

Before we get started, here’s a snapshot of what the Antiquity Age looks like for a Culture Victory:

In the Antiquity Age, your entire life revolves around building Wonders, the great buildings of history that have stood the test of time for centuries. These Wonders give you a variety of strong bonuses, but really the most important thing is that you build them first.

Wonders work differently than other buildings in Civilization 7. While you do unlock the ability to build them via the Tech Tree and Civics Tree, only one Civilization can have each Wonder. That means if you and another Civilization start building the Colossus, and they finish first, your project will be cancelled. Thankfully, you’ll be offered a refund for the yields you spent building that Wonder, but you won’t ever be able to build it again — it already exists in another Civilization.

This means that building Wonders is a sprint, not a marathon, which keeps the Culture Victory relatively high pace and competitive (for Civilization 7, anyway). To combat other civilizations, you need to prioritize two yields: Culture and City Production.

There aren’t a ton of big Culture buildings in the early Tech and Civics trees (barring civilization-specific buildings). It’s worth pursuing the Masonry Tech upgrade early on, as it’ll get you the Monument relatively early, as well as the Pyramids Wonder. However, consider that your Tech tree advancements will be much slower than your Civics tree ones, as you’ll likely fall a bit behind on Science in an effort to increase your Culture. Going from Mysticism into Public Life into Entertainment is a good early start for the Civics tree, which is your main focus.

To start getting Culture quickly, you’ll want to do Cultural Exchanges with other civilizations that you meet, and settle on resources like silk, which offer significant Culture boosts to cities they’re slotted into. As you’re waiting for more Culture buildings, expand your empire with new settlements and build buildings that boost productions in your cities.

Once you’ve unlocked some Wonders, pick one that you don’t think other civilizations will have access to yet (ideally one late in the Civics Tree) and build it in your main city. Repeat this process until you have seven Wonders, which will complete the Legacy Path for you. One alternative strategy here, if you’re able to swing building two Wonders at once, is build a more advanced one in a city with lower Production (as it’s less likely to get sniped away from you, so it’s okay if it goes slower) and build one of the quicker unlocks — like the Hanging Gardens — in your city with the fastest Production. It’s a risky play, but you could end up sniping a Wonder away from another player and losing them some Legacy Points.

Before we get started, here’s a snapshot of what the Exploration Age looks like for a Culture Victory:

Once you move into the Exploration Age, you need to quickly become obsessed with religion — which is done by studying Piety in the Civics Tree and then building a temple in any city of yours. Going forward, your main job is to spread your religious ideas around the world to as many civilizations as possible. Based on the tenets of your religion — which you’re able to found yourself — you can give yourself some powerful boons, like increasing a yield for every settlement that’s not a part of your civilization that follows your religion.

The most important thing to consider when crafting your religion is how you get relics. Collecting and displaying relics is how you complete the Culture Legacy Path for the Exploration Age, and so you need to generate as many as possible. You need to choose a Reliquary Belief that fits your game. The Icons Reliquary Belief — which gives you +2 relics for the first-time conversion of a City-State — is great if it’s still early in the age and you can convert multiple city-states before they become swallowed or conquered by other civilizations. But if you’ve already met a bunch of other civilizations, and the Antiquity Age was competitive for Wonders, you might want to go with Apostolism, which gives you +2 relics for the first-time conversion of another civilization’s settlement that has a Wonder in it.

Once you found your religion, your main goal is to spread the word with missionaries. Sure this is great for the boons you can earn to your yields, but really you’re going for relics.

It’ll take you a bit to fully grasp the missionary “war” game that goes on in Civilization 7, as each unit has charges you can spend to try and convert other societies. But the general idea is that you should spend a charge in a rural district and then an urban district of a city in order to take total control — which is usually how you generate a relic based on your Reliquary Belief.

Follow the Reliquary Belief doctrine you set for yourself and make as many as possible. Note that some Civic Tree upgrades — like Theology or the Mastery for Imperialism — will just give you a single relic for researching them.

Once you have relics, you’ll need to display them in your towns via temples, your palace, or in a Wonder like the House of Wisdom. After you place 12 relics on display, you’ll finish the Culture Legacy Tree for this age and gain a bonus toward the next one.

Before we get started, here’s a snapshot of what the Modern Age looks like for a Culture Victory:

In the Modern Age, you want to rush through your Civics Tree and the Culture Legacy Path as quickly as possible, even more so than in other ages. This is predominantly because of the explorer system and the ability to unlock the World’s Fair Wonder at the end of the Culture Legacy Path.

To start, you must study Natural History as quickly as possible, as this unlocks the explorer for you to train. Then, set your sights on the Hegemony unlock in the Civics Tree, as you’ll want to unlock it before the other civilizations. Start training a few different explorers spread geographically across your empire. You’ll also need to build at least one museum, which you also unlock via the Natural History node.

With your explorers trained and your museum built, send an explorer to the museum to research artifacts for the continent you’re on. Doing this will create several tiles around the map that have little digging icons on them, signaling there is an artifact there. Send your explorers to different artifact tiles to dig them up before any of the other civilizations do. Once you acquire an artifact, display it in your various museums around your empire. You must have 15 artifacts on display to complete the Culture Legacy Path and unlock the World’s Fair.

For the rest of the game, you’ll want to take your explorers around the globe, researching at museums on other continents to find artifact dig sites. The original offering is limited, as you’ll only be able to find artifacts from the Exploration Age, but once you’ve researched Hegemony, your explorers will be able to do more research to find Antiquity Age artifacts as well.

Once you’ve collected and displayed 15 artifacts across your empire, you’ll unlock the World’s Fair Wonder. Once you’ve done this, immediately cancel whatever your city with your highest Production was working on and build the World’s Fair Wonder. Now all you can do is wait until your final Wonder is built. After the World’s Fair Wonder appears on the map, the game will end and you’ll be declared the victor over all of the other civilizations.

For more Civilization 7 guides, read our guides to all Legacy Paths and all victories or our detailed walkthroughs on how to get an Economic Victory, a Military Victory, or a Science Victory.