how do I win a cultural victory?

[Hawe Hawe]

or..... just wait till latish game and go nuts on millitary. guess you could steal a few high cultural cities and maybe few surrounding ones ....ivenever done it but hey could work

This surely does not work because, all culture generated by another civ will be lost, and even the cultural infrastructure will be destroyed or lose its culture effects (wonders).
But war and culture are not contradictory, but it must be a war for ressources, you can later transform into culture with the corporations. see my post above

 

[ButSam]

AAAARGH!

I tried to win a cultural victory as the khmer and after awhile I realized I wasn't going to make it.

One other key point I forgot to include: Stick to your game plan. You may get discouraged thinking you can't make it until you are ~100 turns away. Here are snapshots of my culture cities at various points in time:

Turn 134 - 475 AD:
Macchu Pichu - 614 cp/26 per turn
Tiwanku - 1462 cp/42 per turn
Cuzco - 1627 cp/62 per turn

Turn 156 - 920 AD:
Macchu Pichu - 5494 cp/81 per turn
Tiwanku -2627 cp/65 per turn
Cuzco - 2499 cp/46 per turn

Turn 245 - 1675 AD:
Macchu Pichu - 16161 cp/318 per turn
Tiwanku - 12353 cp/277 per turn
Cuzco - 12354 cp/267 per turn

Culture Victory in 1914 AD.

This was my first time for culture victory, not optimal play. Still, as you can see, one of the primary keys of a culture victory is to stick with your game plan (unless you can't build most wonders AND can't get a religion in your borders -- then you are probably out of luck).

Sam

 

[thomson_2001]

This surely does not work because, all culture generated by another civ will be lost, and even the cultural infrastructure will be destroyed or lose its culture effects (wonders).

sounds great to me. do over the culutural opposition in order to be number one. not the optimal strategy but would defo work

 

[DomA]

One additional bit of advice : cultural strategy is peaceful in essence, but do not neglect your military, defensive nor offensive, and keep an eye on the victory conditions screen. Along the way you may have to conquer or raze rival cities to prevent a rival from reaching a cultural victory before you (you should have seen Ramses coming a long way before he won). Also be on the lookout for signs that a rival has gone into full cultural victory mode (eg: in one of my games, Elizabeth's teching rate suddenly took a major drop - she had put everything on culture and military build-up. She was my best ally in the game and I was counting on her to get a diplo victory but I rather had to capture 3 of her cities to prevent her cultural victory, as she had two back-up cities not far behind her main three (London was way ahead, the five others nearly equal, which I discovered only after capturing her third leading city, and again, and again. I finally vassalized her.). Another early sign is when they start spreading 3-4+ religions to all their cities to build cathedrals). In BTS, they're much wiser in their use of cathedrals and cultural buildings - either building them in the border cities to prevent cities switching to rivals or else concentrating them in 3-5 cities for a cultural victory.

Another bad sign is when they start to expand oversea like crazy but it doesn'r seem likely they could reach domination. I've seen Elizabeth and Isabella do this, but without creating colonies until much later. I've wondered in a game how Bess could have so many cathedrals with the cities she had, and I guess that's how she did it : earlier she had her oversea cities (maybe 12-15 in all) build all the temples they could and released them only once she had built the cathedrals at home.

 

[TheWilltoAct]

I am actually trying for a cultural victory in the Monarch lvl game I'm working on right now... large scale war gets boring and tedious imo and space race is really hard lol, so sometimes it's just nice to hunker down and try for the ol cultural win.

My game situation is quite interesting:

-2 cities on rivers with fertile plains (****ing ownage!!!)
-I built the sistine chapel... the +2 culture per specialist is super awesome
-After reading an intriguing article about corporation use on the forum I realized I was in an ideal position to found Sid's Sushi: in my case + 6 food, and like 24 culture or something!!! Food is great for adding an extra specialist or two (my big cities will take 4ever to take advantage of it, but it's still super cool), but the raw cultural value is the real draw. I only put it in my 3 main cities to minimize costs.

I actually only really went for the cultural victory at the very end... I sort of had it in mind as a back up plan, but I didn't switch to all out culture until what is probably going to be the last possible second lols. I am playing as Saladin and I'm #1, but just barely: the dutch are just insane! The dutch dude is going for like a space race/ cultural victory action o.O Anyway, I finally amped my cultural slider up to 30% (yea... I'm poor lol) which gave me enough happiness to support caste system (yey ) so pure artists, coupled with Pacifism... we'll see what happens ^.^ I have a massive military and about 30ish turns to victory.

 

[Endwar 005]

I found it worked well to keep a powerful civ at war with tiny (but cultured) civ....put me ahead in tech lead, which is a big bonus in Next War mod...
But that's my opinion.