Ahriman
Tyrant
Ix already has Pundirice and Ginaz training school.
Are you sure? If so, problem. Ix should always be choosing to get its strategic resource (thinking machines / Ixian Weapons), which they won't have if they have Pundi rice and Ginaz contracts, unless they conquered them (only 2 landing stages per faction, except Ecaz).
Ah. You have to have many plots that have each been randomly converted twice. No wonder people have been saying it takes forever.
This isn't quite the issue. The extreme time for reaching condition is based not on the slow changing of plots, which can be rapidly sped up by building lots of reservoirs, but on the fact that only tiles with fresh water can terraform. So, you need to have a large empire in order to have enough space to have lots of tiles that can get fresh water access.
Its not that the tiles transform too slowly, its that the number of tiles needed was large relative to the number of potentially terraformable tiles.
Also, yes, cultural victory takes a long time, and the intermediate gains of attempting a cultural victory are minimal. Terraforming is worth pursuing on its own, because it leads to super-cities. And it requires very little human intervention/strategy adjustment: all you have to do is build well improvements and catchbasins/reservoirs, the rest happens passively at zero cost.
Whereas heavy culture output has relatively few benefits until it leads to victory (big culture on cities in the middle of your empire has almost no benefit), and it requires much more of a strategy adjustment (making productive workers/specialists into artists/nobles instead, who produce little except culture).
The difference should be that you can get a cultural victory entirely defensviely, from onyl a few cities, whereas terraforming will still require some conquest to get territory, and will make most other players hate you, so you should have to defend yourself much more aggressively.
It should be impossible to get a terraforming victory without building reservoirs, you just won't have enough tiles with fresh water access without the reservoirs.You really need Reservoirs of Liet to speed things up (I had the biggest empire by far while they were 2nd)--I didn't build any of them.
Hence, expanding the fresh water "range" of the reservoirs from 2 -> 3 is one significant way to make "convert X tile" victories easier.