Hm, dunno what to say here. WTF ?
My capital is the biggest city in the game at that point (by far).
My population is highest , even with 4 cities and without tradition.
About the monument - of course I had monument since t18 or something, how exactly would I get teh culture otherway?
The small greek city was settled near me, and my cap was growing in the other direction. I bought the useful tiles anyway. There was no problem with this, I had more than enough tiles to work the whole game. It would be nice if you suggest how to avoid that.
And lastly, did you even look at the demografic screenshot before posting this ?
It was quite clear that I can take whatever win condition I want this game.
And I kinda find that CV somewhat meh. To win it, I had to clear Poland and decimate Greece as they DOW me at some point. Because of that, I delayed the tech to the internet a bit, as I needed some more military stuff, and at the end I could win by science at least 15-20 turns earlier, if I had bothered to make the apolo program.
Or the other option was to wipe everyone out, as they were too far behind. Bismark entered the Atomic 1-2 turns before the end, and I had the internet since 20 turns or something ...
I also ended with like 15k unspent faith ...
After re-reading my post, I realized my tone was a bit gruff, sorry about that. No offense was intended.
I know that CV's have been made much easier in BNW, but you need to be making a lot more culture at that point in the game, you still have a lot of policies to go and the last few will take a very long time. You need to be under 10 turns a policy.
There is no simple quick answer to your questions, it is all about the synergy between cities, policies, religion, and tech. A 4 city empire is a tall empire. At that difficulty level, you should have all cities over 20 and the cap pushing 30 at that point in the game. For this many citizens, you need all of your 3ring. Tradition gives the extra boost to border growth to ensure that. Tradition scales for the entire game for small empires the same way liberty scales for large empires.
You have 70 citizens in 4 non-occupied cites, liberty gave you 4 happiness and -3.5 unhappiness for a total of 7.5, plus 4 gold. Tradition would give you -10 unhappiness and 10 gold. Liberty starts have more cities with lower pop. So say you have 15 in the cap and 15 in a settled city, and 5 more cities at 8 pop. For this you get the same 7.5 to happiness plus 7 gold, with tradition you would get 7.5 to happy and 7.5 gold. Liberty also gives a huge bonus to settler production which adds up when you crank out a lot of settlers and do so for a large part of the game. With 4 cities you stop using the bonus after three settlers and the policy is wasted from that point on. The "free" worker is nice, but you get them for free by DoWing a CS anyway, you can even get two if you don't make peace and wait for the CS to pop a second one. With a wide empire you tend to hold pops down to manage happiness so aqueducts are not desirable early if at all. With a tall empire you want the majority of your growth to happen before the hard to make buildings come on line, so you need aqueducts early. You really want at the min 12 pop when you get universities, and you really need aqueducts to continue to grow at that point.
Settling 3 cities with tradition increases policy cost by 45%, settling 3 with liberty increases it by 30%, this difference is compensated for by getting the free culture buildings early when they have the greatest impact. By contrast settling 6 cities with tradition increases policy cost by 90 instead of the 60 with liberty.
In every way liberty scales if your empire is at the least 6-7 cities and its best benefits are lost if you are less than 5. In the same way, tradition scales for empires of 4 or less cities.
Ok, for the rest.
15k unspent faith means you wasted a lot of hammers or something getting it. 15K faith = 6 great people. Sometimes this just happens though, it has happened to me at times. Getting religion on immortal or deity is something you usually have to work at, and its easy to keep working at it when you should be working at something else.
Hitting ~1000 beakers with 4 cities is pretty standard for a science game. You get this by simply having a high pop, run all specialists, and plant ~6 or more GS's. So you need universities up as first priority, and you have to work the specialists the moment they go up. 8 turns after the last lab is up and you are running at max science, just buld each GS as they pop to get through the modern/info era. You should also always settle next to fresh water and get gardens up as soon as possible. Its also not uncommon to win games with under 800 bpt on deity, but not on lower levels.
I grant you are #1 in most everything, but this only means you need to step up to another difficulty level. Not meaning to offend, but in this case its like the one eyed man being king in the land of the blind. Keep moving up in difficulty until you don't steam roll the game any more.