sometimes the ai sure has a great timing in trying one.

Mind you, I'm watching his research(that's why I gave myself the gspies in wb - at 1st I though he just raises cash for upgrades) for more then 10 turns. And despite my stack taking his cities, he keeps on trying to get a cultural win!

Shouldn't they just stop when declared?! Anyone having a power graph like justinian would have better things to do then amassing culture imho...

if you go for a cultural win and stop half-way, I think you're pretty sure to lose the game. And the problem with cultural in turning off research and lagging in military techs. If you start researching again after being invaded you're not going to be able to do anything useful. So the best general strategy might well be turtle up, hope to weather the storm, and keep building towards victory...

well, the funny thing is that he started going cultural 5 turns after I've declared; if it'd be much earlier and I'd have 10 times his power, I'd agree. But as seen in the graph, his power was ok, and he... started going cultural after being declared. Which is downright absurd coding...

He was probably trying to overwhelm your invading forces with the power of culture, hes secretly been reading the Attacko Culture Defence strat guide.

Once I was going for space race in a less-than-optimal game and Willem was going all cultural on me on a separate continent. Doing the math with his culture rising each turn I found I wasn't going to win in time, so I quickly scrapped together an invasion force.

When I invaded and landed, I wasn't able to get to his culture cities, but he was smart enough to turn off culture during the war to research for better military. When peace was finally declared (he had some cities on my continent...) he turned the culture back on but I had stalled him enough to win space with less than five turns to spare.

So yeah, while it helped me there because I wasn't able to capture his culture cities... the AI isn't always dumb enough to keep the culture on in a war.