This was a fairly late culture game, with some boosters already built by the AI, but I still feel great about the win because I took on Shaka early and won. I wanted to use the GP bonus for a culture game, but when I found Shaka and only Shaka in the first 20ish turns I knew I couldn't turtle this game: flat grassland, not a lot of production, and obvious Zulu expo spots on my front door.
A lot went my way early, so I don't know how repeatable this feat is for me. I took Consentient's advice: I attacked Shaka early, and never let up. I plan to keep trying because it worked for me at least once. I see Acken did something with 3 archers, but he's way better and this was a big deal for me. After two scouts, I went for an archer. I had already stepped on an Archery tech ruin and I upgraded my warrior to a spearman. I had the spearman over by Shaka looking for a chance to nab his workers and pillage. Then my first scout hits a upgrade too, and now I'm in business. I manage to steal both of his workers in one turn with my archer. I executed the one I couldn't escape with. Bloody times. Meanwhile, my second scout hits an upgrade ruin too, and my capital builds another archer for 4. I had to build another scout to actually find anyone else, but it's clear they weren't close to us by what the first two had already revealed.
I entered a period where I couldn't do any real damage to Ulundi, but I could capture every settler that was built. I used my captured settlers/workers as bait to keep killing his troops. I didn't want to go for full domination, and I decided to make a second city instead of enough archers to actually break through. I also decided to tech for Construction and try and take Ulundi before Impis ruined my day. I had no early science from trade routes and delayed every science boost with my early war, but I got to CBs in enough time to matter.
I planted my second city right between our caps to act as a forward base. Sigtuna was pretty strong all game with lots of grassland stone, pastures, and nearby freshwater tiles. It kicked out another archer for me when I needed it. Workers were never an issue for me, and I sold them regularly after a certain point for gold and to stay under the unit cap.
I reloaded 3 different times trying to get my troop movements right, 2 of those times going back a turn. I usually don't bother with worker baiting (it doesn't help during my late game domination runs and I skip it once I have the range or mobility to not take a shot from the city), so I'm not good at the dance. I tried to use it every turn against Shaka to kill off his unit spam. Sometimes he just ignored me, and sometimes he brought more than one unit and I would take a lot of damage keeping the operation together while not letting him settle a third city. Shaka even tried sending two settlers in opposite directions in one turn, but I had my scout-kilo-archers on either end and caught them both. Once I committed to capturing Ulundi, I lost one CB but it was worth it: he popped out an Impi 2 turns later from his second city! It almost destroyed the GG bomb I had planned to ruin his life, but it was too late for him. No one minded me taking one city early too much, and I stayed at war training until France killed him off so he never got a chance to denounce me.
So after all of this, I went for a 2 city NC, annexed Ulundi, and founded a 4th city. I didn't get Education until T127, but I still managed to hard-build Uffizi and PT. I managed to sneak in Eiffel too, but I got beat to every other useful Wonder, including the SoL, until Sydney started my late game Wonder blitz. Let's just say I got a lot of fail gold this game, and felt my slow start all game long. I added CN Tower, Neusch, Great Firewall, Hubble, and Louvre. I built the Louvre on T286, and managed to finish Exploration before the game ended. If I played out my winning turn, I had another landmark take my Tourism from 670 to 705. I needed every bit of that Tourism, because I was so late to the Internet. I ended up planting a bunch of GS instead of bulbing them because I needed the Tourism more at that point, and the WC had passed NHS and CHS.
I gave my second general to Kyzyl, and that really helped me catch up on my culture. I gave one GS away at one point, and it was worth it because I went from -5 happiness and only 500 gold to 13 happiness, 2 more CS alliances, and 4 more friendships by chaining resource quests. I kept 3-4 friendships going most of the game and it really helped me generate enough GWAMs to win. Really, my science was slow but it was never really the bottleneck.
In a very unfortunate turn of events, the WF came very late and the culture runaway (Darius) won, so I couldn't make up any ground on him (even with Internet/Airports) until it wore off. He had already won the IG. I bombed him with 4 GMs, two from faith mostly given to me by city-states. Darius also had gunboat diplomacy, so there was no realistic way for me to keep him from owning a good chunk of the CS's, including too many culture ones. It took every bit of tourism I could dig up to win, but after playing nice all game I bribed Darius into some late wars to keep him occupied and not building broadcast towers and the like. It took 3 more turns after my last GM bomb to finally seal the deal.
