Can someone explain total culture to me?

Hey, CivAddict2013 here. So I was playing a game with Poland where I had 700 tourism and around 800 culture per turn. Yet when I looked at the end game graphs; Gajah Madah had more Total Culture than me.

I don't understand how I could have more culture and tourism than Gajah Madah; yet have less total culture than him.

starts from turn 0, influence due to starts from when you first meet them and are generating .Who won the World's Fair and when? If it wasn't you or was late then it has less of an impact if you had won an early World's Fair.

total culture starts accumulating from the moment you settle your capital, but tourism only starts when you generate it later on in the game. culture per turn is not the same as culture in total, and the same goes for tourism; it's likely that the early culture will be very high for the AI.
Also note that the total tourism you generate is the accumulated tourism for a target civ, where the modifiers are all applied; so you can have different total tourism for different civs, but your total culture is only dependent on what you generate.

Because you were playing on Deity and the Deity AI 'cheats'.

If you're NOT going for a culture win, can you afford to neglect tourism? Since tourism is offense for a culture victory and culture is the defense against another civ's CV, couldn't you just create enough culture to hold them at bay and focus on your desired VC's main drivers?

Holding them at bay isn't really good enough. You can be producing twice as much culture as other cdivs are producing tourism and still succumb to ideological pressure.

For example, let's say you go Autocracy, with the goal of rolling the map for a domination victory. Two of the other civs go Freedom and five go Order -- and three of those Order civs are pumping tourism like mad, and are nearly Familiar versus you (30% cumulative tourism vs. your cumulative culture) and on their way to Popular (60%). Let's say they also pass Order as the World Ideology, further pressuring you. If you have neglected tourism, such that you are Unknown to the other civs, then you will find your citizens' unhappiness rising quickly, from Discontent straight to Revolutionary Wave, potentially forcing you to change Ideologies and/or losing cities that flip to other civs. Yes, in this example, Autocracy offers many happiness tenets, which is helpful, but the main purpose of those tenets is to help manage unhappiness from conquests, as you roll the map, and less as defense against ideological pressure.

If, however, you churn out enough tourism to get Exotic and then Familiar on some or all of them, your ideological unhappiness will fall significantly and you can conquer with confidence. (Same goes, of course, for other ideologies and victory conditions.)

A wonder that works really well in most of my games when i don't go for culture is Eifel Tower. It does give you a small amount of happiness and some tourism, is in a major tech path (on the way to plastics) and rarely built by AIs. It may look small, but that +12 can be enough to avoid the dreaded Revolutionary Wave with only very small support from a few artifacts.

Of course, if you go on conquest, you probably have great works from captured cities but in science or diplomatic games it can really help you.

Sedwick said:

If you're NOT going for a culture win, can you afford to neglect tourism? Since tourism is offense for a culture victory and culture is the defense against another civ's CV, couldn't you just create enough culture to hold them at bay and focus on your desired VC's main drivers?

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If you're not going for a CV then Tourism shouldn't matter, as even on Deity, the AI is never going to win a CV much before T300 and you should be done long before that.

If you're going for DomV it doesn't matter because you will control so many of the wonders.

If you're going for DiploV it doesn't matter because you'll have insane happiness and gold.

If might count a bit if you're slow in your SV, but if you're a full era ahead of them, then by the time they get much of an ideology going, you're starting to save money for the spaceship parts.