So, that was the process used to gain tiles and put increasing pressure on the AIs boundaries. Those squeezed in cities, when they hit a reasonable size would be pumping out over 100 culture (at least) per turn. I actually had three cities over the 50k mark and some that would be there very soon (culture levels of 72k, 2x69k, 45k, 35k) ... all putting out over 400 culture per turn (max culture per turn was at Lyons - 736 - an early border city!).
replay pictures
I kept track of the number of tiles I owned and plotted that against the turn counter. The red line is the domination threshold. The chart actually forms a fairly straight line and if I had bothered to plot this during the game, I could have made a fairly good estimate of when I would hit domination. You can actually see it speeding up a little at the end as I turn up the culture slider.
The rest of this page is dedicated to funny pictures or info that I noticed during the game. Here is the Mongal capital just after it flipped to me. Notice that the culture has reset to ZERO but it will hit the 10 level (border pop 1) after 1 turn as it is putting out 30 culture per turn. This is one of the benefits of picking up a fully developed city with commerce on tap!
I felt that I had missed an opportunity here ... Osaka flips to me and the Globe Theatre remains. Unfortunately, I hadn't build my Globe so having it here knocked it off my queue. It would have been interesting to see what the game would have done if I already had the Globe in another one of my cities ... would it have been distroyed during the flip riots?
This happened a number of times and made me laugh. Monty had spies out sabotaging my pig pasture ... a pasture that use to feed one of his cities.
Here is a very late game religion spread ... notice that I have lots of religions (actually all of the holy cities) and even managed to take Monty's holy city away from him.
I did play on after the end of the game and this is in 2104 ... about 65 years after winning. I thought the culture map on this picture was very strange.
