Just to tell the end of the story I started... (this was a standard size pangea map)
I went to war with Mapuche. It took a fair bit of work. I didn't hit iron early to upgrade to immortals. I ended up having to pump out massive amounts of archers. One of Mapuche's final cities had some iron in the 3rd ring so I bought tiles, improved it, and started getting immortals online. He never got his UU so I was ok.
I then had 7 cities I think. 2 of mine and 5 from Mapuche. Something like that at least. France had pushed up to my borders. I never know what's best to do in this situation. I've got a big army and I'm behind on districts and infrastructure, seems like the right answer is to take this time of peace to move the army into position to push back against France. So I did that.
My armies were better upgraded and larger than France. Once I took one of her cities an emergency was called. Korea and France joined. Now fighting on two fronts slowed me down from finishing off France, but eventually I got her. Korea was a pain. I had to just dig in, build some walls, and hold the line. Kind of disappointing the AI basically tries to walk through your land to get to the city that needs to be freed. The could have pillaged me a lot. I met Egypt, ugh, but Egypt was cut off entirely from my now huge area of land by a mountain range. They were going to have to take down a city state first to get to me so I knew I had time.
Since the emergency was still going and my main force was no longer preoccupied I thought I might as well see what I can do to damage Korea. Again being really far behind on science made me worry she could run away with a victory or out tech me and cause me a lot of grief with war later. I tired to push on Korea, but I couldn't make much progress. She had one city sort of by itself which I was able to take quickly. She had her unique field cannon and I was still trying to upgrade all the early archers I had to build into crossbowmen. I was getting one shot or taking like 99 damage hits so I had to get peace.
Between a little expansion I did for a Petra city and to grab some strategic resources I now had 15 cities. Being Persia I wanted to try the culture victory route. Luckily Korea was pinned into her area. She only had 6 cities (eventually she settled 2 more), but I didn't think I needed to worry to much about 15 cities vs 6 in the fight for science. Early on I had built mostly campuses to try and keep my army up to date. Now I started pushing hard for culture. I totally neglected faith. I built a couple cities up for production hubs, went commercial for my 3rd districts and just started trading everywhere. I got the Great Zimbabwe and set all my trade routes to originate from that city. It grew to something gigantic, maybe 24 population? I started pumping out tons of builders from the Petra city and the Great Zimbabwe city and plopped Paradisas(sp?) everywhere I could. I also had the Cakhotia (sp?) city state unique tile improvement also. It provided tons of gold and amenities.
Egypt ended up being my main competition. She went for science. Korea did make her push for space a little interesting, but I think she lacked production. Once time went on and my war weariness faded and the rest of the civs all liked me I pretty easily coasted to the culture victory. With so much fighting on my continent I spammed archaeologists to grab all the relics everywhere. I think I had 12 ish themed archaeology museums. To speed me up a little (I felt a little cheap) I bought some religious relics off of Egypt to fill in the few holy sites that I had inherited. It wasn't a game changer though. Ooooo I also lucked into the great scientist that gives 300% tourism from relics. I probably could have also won science victory before anyone else as well. The Dutch, The Ottomans, and I'm forgetting the other civs didn't stand a chance. Interesting side note - Mapuche had a great prophet that he never got a chance to use before I killed him so the game was missing a religion.
