Don't understand Culture Victories

[TheAtomicBomb-Ghandi]

I have around 600 hours and culture victories take so long for me. I currently have 900 science 3700 culture 1488 faith (playing as kongo) 23000 gold 2400 tourism 1234 diplo points and its turn 330 with me sitting at 543/576 tourism. I'll win soon but it took way too long. I have resorts, literary where wonder in the game, and 200+ great works. What am I doing wrong? Thanks.

 

[Bibor]

Not sure, I just recently achieved my personal record, a T160 cultural victory with Seondeok. Tourism is a race, because you compete with other civ’s internal tourism.

Helpful video

 

[UWHabs]

Yeah, there's some good tutorials out there detailing the basics. The main key is that, generally speaking, you're racing against the next biggest culture threat. So whatever you "need" to win you notice is what the second place civ "has". So needing 576 tourism is a lot, so I expect there's another civ out there who also has a ton of tourism. One strategy is to simply remove them from the game. So, for example, if you have 80 tourists in their civ, by wiping them out you would lose those 80 tourists on the counter, so you'd be down to 463. But if the next highest civ in culture is only at 420, then you'll win because you're already above that.

The other point is to pay attention to some of the multipliers. Sure, grabbing more great works is nice, but sometimes a single trade route to a civ can give you +50% or more depending on great people and policy cards, which can have a massive impact.

 

[Linklite]

I'll just point out that Rock Bands with the Dial It Up To 11 promotion are your best friends.

 

[Vargas1]

How many civs are you playing with, and if you have a bunch of wonders and great works, how does the second place person have 575 internal tourism? That seems incredibly high if you're dominating the usual sources of tourism.

As to your question, often the longer the game goes the harder it gets because other civs do increase their domestic tourism, which makes getting the victory harder. The sweet spot for a cultural victory (in many of my games) is the 175-225 turn range - by that point you're developed enough to have lots of sources of tourism, but usually other civs don't have a huge amount domestically yet.

As @UWHabs said, the other thing to pay attention to is multipliers - trade routes and policy cards that increase tourism for certain conditions are super useful. Also making sure you have open borders with every civ, since that gives a multiplier too.

 

[reddishrecue]

I'll just say, take care of the capital from incoming rock band influence. Even AI can destroy a good source of tourism in the capital. If you hear a lot of rock music going on in your civilization, take care from concerts and their sudden increase of tourism which can do damage to the culture.