Welcome to the forums gavenkoa! Yeeeeeeah I had a big gripe about this when I encountered it. The revolt risk in newly conquered cities is truly crushing. Karadoc confirms this is WAD, but that doesn't mean it's uncontroversial. BiC is right that the culture war is more about output than BTS where you are relatively ok after popping borders a couple times. Neighboring cities also play a bigger role. Trade routes even give a bit of culture.
I would assume the design philosophy is that most players know most cultural buildings are a wasteful luxury (unless going for culture victory), so he made culture more important to buff them. That makes total sense, but the problem is, I at least believe this has backfired on Emperor+. The AI is building a lot more soldiers AND it's eager to dogpile. In BTS if your diplo game is on point you can generally afford to be weak whenever you're not about to attack. In KMOD temporary weakness can and will lead to getting DOWed, which can quickly snowball into a dogpile and a game over screen. This means you have to have a lot of production and you need enough commerce to cover the unit expenses and keep up in mil tech. This doesn't leave a lot of room to go on a culture building detour. In BTS you could justify a couple of niche culture buildings in border cities, because once you pop the borders twice that city will be in passable shape (and that's a worthwhile tradeoff). That's not enough in KMOD because that's not how culture works in KMOD. You might stay afloat if you really prioritize culture in the border cities ASAP, but this comes at a big opportunity cost -- and even then I doubt it's enough to stop something like this Gandhi quad-religion horror show you've got here. You kinda have to accept that your border cities are going to be garbage and the solution is to keep conquering so those border cities become core cities. Just realize that your newest border cities will also be garbage and try to minimize how many of these you're left with after a war. Part two of the culture shenanigans is newly conquered cities that are under culture pressure (most of them) will be utterly swamped with revolt risk, and there's no good answer to that. Building cultural buildings in the newly acquired Indian cities may be a mistake. A monastery will not fix those newly conquered cities, only conquering Delhi and Vijay will. And after you've conquered Delhi and Vijay the cultural bonus from the monastery is pointless.
I'll end on a positive note. In BTS typically pangaea and smaller maps are easier than larger maps or isolated starts. KMOD's design balances this back in the opposite direction, making map types more comparable in difficulty. Larger maps means a smaller percentage of your cities are culturepwned. Pangaea is hard, because if you spawn in the middle you might basically only have one good city (your capital) and Isolation is easier because you don't have to build any military units / cultural buildings. When you finally escape isolation you may find yourself fine tech-wise, because the AI has been fighting a bunch of total wars with medieval units which slowed down their tech rate. The advantage from not having to fight a war or build a deterrent force may outweigh the negative of poor trade routes / delayed tech trading.
