Oni said:
I routinely win cultural victories at Monarch. The cultural slider is based on your commerce. So part of maximizing culture is about maximizing commerce.
Just a few things - don't move the cultural slider early in the game. You need tech more than you need culture. It is acceptable to use culture to control unhappiness (assuming you have theaters and/or coliseums built. but most of the game, your slider should be at 0% culture. Then when you are 100 turns or so away from winning, jack it up to 90% or 100%.
In my finance-based cultural wins, I often have only 2000 culture in each of my 3 cities at 1600 AD. Yet, I win at 50,000 culture per city at 1900 AD. Here's the important stuff (in order of importance, in my estimation):
1) High finance. This means lots of cottages. Don't do all farms.
2) Great artists. Each great artists is worth a minimum of 4000 culture. Pretty powerful stuff.
3) +% culture improvements. Cathedrals add +50%. You can get cathedrals for every single religion in your borders, whether you found it or not. So you want religions to spread to your civ. And you want to develop them even if you didn't found the religion. The Hermitage (national wonder) adds + 100%. Several late game wonders and structures add % culture (Rock n Roll, Hollywood, Broadway, broadcast towers/Eiffel tower).
4) +culture buildings. Theaters, monostaries, temples, etc all add up.
5) Wonders. Yes, some wonders give you a small boatload of culture. You should build them if you can. But a developed cottage on grassland by a river will give you +9 commerce, which at 100% culture slider is worth a +9 culture/turn wonder.
