Earliest Cultural Victory

[Itrade]

Continuing the theme of the fastest science victory and largest city threads, this one's about how to achieve the earliest cultural victory. You'd probably want to start in a coastal city next to loads of jungles and a desert tile with a mountain nearby. Then you can get the culture from jungles pantheon and build Petra, SOH, and Neuschwanstein. Playing as Siam would probably be best, with a bunch of Swedens about to speed up Great Artist generation. Allying with cultural city-states will fill have you popping policies very quickly, especially if you're only going to play with one city.

Of course there's always the method of playing a hotseat game against yourself and creating a huge empire to puppet, but that might require a bit too much time for the purpose of this experiment.

[aguliondew]

Well for me a culture victory takes the most amount of turns to win with. The Fastest I won with cultural was around 330 on immortal with siam.

[GoodSarmatian]

I think I got my earliest one just today. It was in 1776 (turn 399 epic) with the Aztecs and only oen city (OCC). I got almost all wonders I wanted and finished before I had even researched the tech for Cristo Redentor.

[GreedysMaximus]

The earliest i got was with Egypt at turn 298, and today i had a really good one with Siam at turn 302, BUT i missed the Oracle only by 4-5 turns and lost one policy, so it should've been a sub 300 game. The Siam game was pretty much a faceroll, i had the highest score(Augustus) and the highest everything(science, food, production,tech, only military was prolly a bit weaker. Both games played on emperor.
City placement(luxuries/terrain) was really easy in the Siam game, this fact will always help with faster times, RA's were a problem though as they usually are for me, even if i'm peaceful i'll prolly only have 2 trade partners, at best three, which slooows you down considerably.

[Mesix]

I can generally pull off an early Industrial era cultural victory. I have never really paid attention to the number of turns played. I like the cultural and domination victory conditions because I find the science and diplomacy victory conditions to draw the game out too much. I enjoy the early game into the renaissance and early industrial eras, but find the late game to be boring. Even when going for a later game victory, the game is generally decided much earlier and playing through the late eras seems tedious to me.

[ifinnem]

T270ish is the earliest I've seen / achieved (Immortal-Emperor level)

Check this thread out
Cultural VC

[Zednaught]

Just got one at 305 as Egypt, but that was only on Prince. I could have definitely shaved some turns off of it as I'd thought I needed an to plan for some of the later wonders, when in fact I won before even needing Cristo.

[Harv72b]

If you just want fastest possible, you're obviously going to want to play on Settler.

Two directions I could see going in:

1) Siam, largish map with few (one?) AI & max CS. Explore like the wind & hope to pop as many culture ruins as possible, plus glean enough cash to get some early cultural CS allies.

2) Songhai, same setup but with raging barbarians. Each camp captured = another unit to hunt camps...all those barb kills should make up for the disparity in CS benefits, at least on the culture front.

Either way it should be achievable pretty early, maybe even BC on marathon speed.

EDIT: Played through most of a Songhai game on huge continents, max CS, 1 AI (Japan) while going with a one-city approach. Despite a less than impressive start location & absolutely horrible luck popping culture ruins, I was on track to win around 500 AD while having constructed every single world wonder to that point...the issue I was having was getting enough science going to reach the Industrial Era before I closed my 4th policy tree. With that experience, I think the overall settings are right but a 3-4 city approach would work much better. My thinking on continents vs. a pangea-type map is that this way I won't have to deal with the AI civ much (if at all) during the game & get a whole huge continent to myself for barb hunting...the drawback is that I won't meet most of the CSs until well into the Renaissance Era.