Cultural Construction [Idea, hard]

One issue with Culture is that it's use is relatively marginal in small amounts.

You can push your borders, you can go for cultural victory -- but if you aren't going for a cultural victory, your central cities culture doesn't matter.

So here is an idea...

What if cultural production was used to build some buildings and wonders?

For this to work, the ratio would have to be tweaked, and the insane cultural multiplication effects of some wonders/etc would have to be brought under control.

Then the cultural victory standard would have to be rebalanced around lower max culture bonus's.

So... Start with the cash-rushing ratio for Cultureroduction ratio for selected buildings. I thin

Half the +% culture effects of effects (ie, +50% goes down to +25%, +100% goes down to +50%).

Figure out what can be built with culture -- by default, every city improvement and wonder?

Limit the addition of production via culture to the amount of raw production -- this keeps the effect under control, at most doubling your productivity.

Boost building costs by how much? We don't want to make buildings trivial to produce...

Should buildings that produce culture have their price increased, due to this higher benefit?

Actually, another spin on how to increase the effect of culture could be to require that a city can only create a certain building if they have a specified amount of culture. Then you would not have to mod the cultural multiplication affects, and those buildings with said affects could have a necessary cultural amount to create. For example, the statue of liberty could have a low amount of culture needed (taking into account inflation), while the pyramids could have a higher one. This could make overpowered buildings or wonders less powerful without changing their affects and make culture into a more important factor.

That would make culture more important -- but it might be even harder to tune, to figure out what cultural cut-off a given building should require.

But, unless the buildings in question are important for a non-cultural victory, it removes the "culture is a resource like any other, and building culture benefits your civilization in ways outside of special cases, like victory conditions and contested borders" feature I was hoping for.

Space race is about getting technology and production.
Conquest/Domination is about having a large army, and using it to dominate.
Score is about building your empire's raw power and size.

All of the above are in a sense "natural", and going part-way along the path to any of the above victory conditions helps you quite significantly along any other victory condition.

Culture is the red-headed step-child...

The problem with requiring a certain amount of culture to build some wonders is that it leeds to "Rhys syndrom", in which you have to do really artificial behaviour in order to produce a desired outcome in time for it to matter. :/ I much prefer "natural" feeling effects.

What I need to do is poke at my cultural production levels vs production levels in cities in multiple save games...

Great Ideas Yakk and Mike, I will implement them them in my [BTS][MODCOMP]Construction Mod which already allows you to construct buildings/units with Gold, Food, Stone, Iron, Oil. it will me a small matter to also include Culture as a production resource

sounds like a pretty good idea.