Cultured Brutality: fast social policies, large military.

I am trying to get a good understanding of how the game works on Emperor difficulty. Not doing extremely bad so far, having almost-fnished 2 games and losing one game by points.

I'm not going for the most efficient win by turn N. all I really want to do is role-play and be competitive with AI while keeping things interesting (not losing by a mile and not winning by a huge margin either).

My new strategy is to go for large population/science and military. I would also like to be able to produce as much culture per turn as possible to access social policies quickly.

How would you proceed with this plan? Number of cities, military expansion plan, building/wonders essential for this to work? Any kind of advise. Would it also be possible to generate good GPT or am I trying to hug a tree?

Also note that I usually set-up the game to run in 'quick' mode instead of standard and I mostly play on Standard size maps, although I do like Large as well. haven't tried the largest setting yet.

Assuming a non-culture victory game, my strategy to maintain high culture is something like this:

- get writer & artist guild up relatively early and work specialists
- use 1 artist & 1 writer to golden age/political treatise timed to hit secularism policy
- save rest for world fair (propose as 1st vote)
- ally all cultural CS prior to world fair (exploration is important here)
- win world fair, use golden ages and burn political treatise at the end of the 20 turn double-culture period. should have 2 writers that give 1 entire policy each.

Winning world fair as the 1st vote is key. This should come right at the time where the extra culture helps speed through rationalism and your ideology tenets. So, logicallly it follows that you want to be the one founding the world congress. So you want to get printing press early-ish and make sure you're exploring to meet everyone.

The other key is the city states. Meeting them early to open their quests is very beneficial. So again, exploration is super important.