Yeah, I did it! My first emperor win! It seriously felt like an impossibility 2 weeks ago. Cultural victory in 1999.
I should note I had some luck
- Early access to marble allowed
Oracle (and my COL religion, which I never converted too but used to make bank and culture)
Parthenon
Sistine Chapel (never went free religion in part because of it)
Great Library
(which lead to ridiculous PHI + Parthenon + Pacifism + National Epic + 2 constant scientists)
-Shaka and Breneus deciding to attack Sitting Bull instead of me.
Gave me 2 cities and I was on good terms with Shaka and Breneus the whole game. Especially Brenus, we were buzum buddies. I forgot to count the totals at the end, but it was ridiculous. We had a defensive pact for centuries. I never got along with those 2 before.
-The early marble went so well with Pericles. The Odeon is nothing to sneeze at. +3 extra culture, +2 happiness, +2 slots for artists. And if you take over a city with a Colosseum you get automatic starting culture (in addition to the +2 creative culture.) Not to mention it's a cheap building atainable early (and along a tech path you probably want anyway) and it's doubly cheap with Pericles. The cheap libraries and unis helped with culture and with taking the science lead / not falling too far behind.
-An aggressive Monty and Shaka always starting beef with the true tech leaders Wilhelm and Frederick on the other continent.
-Got an engineer 20 turns before combustion (not all luck, as I was always running an engineer in my GP farm. That + PHI means you should get one eventually. Still not a guarantee though.)
-Got a great merchant in time for Sushi (again not all luck, I was running all merchants, but there was still a chance it could have been something else._
-Dido with artist for Jewelers. Again, not all luck since National Epic and Sistine chapel and running artists made it the most likely GP. Still it was serendipitous that I got all 3 in the order I wanted.
-Sitting Bull, the complete joke of the world, founded Mining Inc. - meaning no one else could so I eventually took the production lead.
Some notes
-MKLh was right, I wasn't specializing my great person farm enough (Athens). So...I take it your GP farm should always be a farm over cottages city? Part of the reason I made Athens my GP city was that it had great library and it already had 3 wonders, which for great person purposes, acts as specialists, right? That's a hard thing to ignore. Also, since it was my great library city (and my secondary money city) I liked all the coins coming in from the towns. Not the ideal situation perhaps, but what would have been better? Should I have made Argos my GP Farm?
-I busted the security bureau, the broadcast tower, and two religious multipliers in The Hague (the Dutch's 3rd culture city.) This had them drop from 500 culture a turn to 300 - pretty significant seeing how close the race was.
-I eventually put my slider to 40 or 50% - but i couldn't get myself to do it until after advanced flight and laser. I eventually became UN Head and the world never voted on Nuclear Non Proliferation treaty (did this have something to do with the difficulty? The AIs usually go for it - less than half of them were in this game - funny enough it Shaka, Brenus, Monty and me wanted it to pass.) I thought it was possible that I would have had to raze Amsterdam, so I really wanted these two techs. After I did up the culture my weakest cities went from 28 turns to 18 or something like that which was huge because ...
-Brenus launched his spaceship when my weakest city still hd 7 or 8 turns to pop to legendary. Good thing I went in and busted his cockpit with a spy a few turns earlier - that slowed him down a little bit. Needless to say that 007 saved the day.
-I foolishly was trading uranium to Wilhelm for bonus fish and iron (to make Constructions and Sushi more culturally potent). I stopped this trade eventually, after realising he didn't have any uranium of his own. How dumb would I have felt if later I went to war with him as I was anticipating and got the bombs dropped on me?
-I built nuclear plants in all my cities. My capital had a melt down (the same turn it earned legendary culture, funny enough.) It would have been disastrous if it happened to one of my 2 weaker culture victory cities. All in all though, it was a good move. This is the second game where I had nuclear plants in all my cities. So that's 2 full games with nuclear power plants and one melt down - well worth it. I made it a point to get ecology earlier than usual, which was actually fine because I was doing abnormal moves on the tech tree anyways to trade. It seems no one trades coal, ever. So what options are there besides hoping for 3 Gorge Dam or taking over some coal? On higher difficulties this is not often plausible. I realize maybe I've been lucky with this 2:1 games played / meltdowns had, but still, I didn't see any other choice.
Thanks again Feralminded and MKLh.