My only cultural victory in civ-5 before this was an OCC (with india), so it was a welcome change to try out the mass-puppet strategy, as well as trying out France. I got a good start (with a well timed Acoustic slingshot) and despite a few mistakes it went quite well with a culture victory in 1700 AD (turn 250) and a score of 9900.
My first mistake
Looking back, I should have founded at least one more city. I only founded one in addition to Paris and it produced huge part of my culture.
My second mistake
Not knowing the map I thought that I needed the ability to travel on ocean tiles to reach the other continent. This cost me at least 20 turns in the rush to conquer the eastern continent. Though I'm not sure how much that actually impacted on my final score. But it sure was a fun war with Siam and his mighty elephants!
My third mistake
I wasn't aware that the Sydney Opera House required sea access so I wasted a lot of turns trying to time something which I couldn't build. Had I known this, I probably would have settled a 3rd city with sea access early in the game. Or annexed a good one.
The Christo Wonder and SP path
I went Freedom/+100% culture with city-wonder first and then completed most of the Patronage tree. Then after Biology I got the 3 central SP's in the Order tree. And then I saved everything to be used after building Christo. But I'm really not sure if that was the right strategy for me. It's not clear to me how much I actually saved on this compared to unlocking some of the culture generating SP's early on.
So if I were to play the game again I would settle one or two more cities and not worry too much about saving everything for the Christo wonder.
In the end my stats were something like: 1000 science, 1600 gold (GA), 550 culture. The gold income was unlike any civ-5 games I'd played before, mostly due to all the puppets having gold-focus as defaults.
All in all a very entertaining game!
Spoiler :
My first mistake
Looking back, I should have founded at least one more city. I only founded one in addition to Paris and it produced huge part of my culture.
My second mistake
Not knowing the map I thought that I needed the ability to travel on ocean tiles to reach the other continent. This cost me at least 20 turns in the rush to conquer the eastern continent. Though I'm not sure how much that actually impacted on my final score. But it sure was a fun war with Siam and his mighty elephants!
My third mistake
I wasn't aware that the Sydney Opera House required sea access so I wasted a lot of turns trying to time something which I couldn't build. Had I known this, I probably would have settled a 3rd city with sea access early in the game. Or annexed a good one.
The Christo Wonder and SP path
I went Freedom/+100% culture with city-wonder first and then completed most of the Patronage tree. Then after Biology I got the 3 central SP's in the Order tree. And then I saved everything to be used after building Christo. But I'm really not sure if that was the right strategy for me. It's not clear to me how much I actually saved on this compared to unlocking some of the culture generating SP's early on.
So if I were to play the game again I would settle one or two more cities and not worry too much about saving everything for the Christo wonder.
In the end my stats were something like: 1000 science, 1600 gold (GA), 550 culture. The gold income was unlike any civ-5 games I'd played before, mostly due to all the puppets having gold-focus as defaults.
All in all a very entertaining game!