I'm not into balancing my mods for niche goals at a difficulty/set conditions where you're sure you're gonna win.
I've seen this sort of comment more than once about HoF games over the years.
Except it doesn't hold as true.
A few weeks ago I started up a Demigod map. I built warriors as scouts and had them out exploring. A Byzantine spearmen walked near my capital, which was my people's only city. And in 3000 BC it walked into that city and we were finished. Perhaps if I had poprushed a warrior (or spearmen if I had traded for Bronze Working, I don't recall), we could have survived.
A few weeks ago, I accidently held elections playing in a Warlord game. And lost elections.
Also, there have been an abundance of times where I've started up and I'm not even sure that I will finish the game. Or I lose interest. Or get distracted and not come back to the save. Or I believe that I decided to test something about the save instead of keeping previous saves intact by not moving units around.
And then there's the whole matter that I need to have had the settings correct, which didn't hold for someone else recently, or wouldn't have even if they had used an official version.
There doesn't exist any such certainty about the future like that.
Cultural victory the way the game is designed is not really feasible in a competitive difficulty. It was something Firaxis threw in there as an afterthought.
The Conquest of the Month compeittion had a 100k
loss somewhat recently by Stalintag. Milr had one in
a previous event (154). I find a record of
two 100k losses here for the fourth Game of the Month. So, on the contrary, in reality, cultural victory can be feasible for AIs when playing the human player.