How do you win through culture?

[MxM]

I decided to try winning cultural victory on prince. I choose Egyptians and did not build any cities myself (though I did captured a few and created puppets) so that my price for policy would be small. I won the game by score, had all continent to myself since 1800s (small map) had all SC that generate culture allied (again since 1800s, but before I did not have money, because I had just one city) and still did not manage to open 5 polices by 2050. (First policy was tradition, second was piety). I think I had about half of policy tree left to open (3 policies), and then I would have to build utopia project.

Now, there is one caveat, I am playing at fast speed. So, may be it is not scaled properly for that, but otherwise, do you think I am doing something wrong? Should I rather go France and have 2-3 of my cities instead of just 1? (Egyptians are quite good at building wonders, which was my strategy in this game).

Related question, if one selects one city challenge (which I did not, though I probably could) can one have puppets?

[BeeRockxs]

I did it with India and two cities.
You need the Oracle, and Piety, for the "Culture for Happiness" thing and the "2 Free social policies" thing.
There's also 2 policies in the Freedom tree that are essential, and you probably also want all the Patronage ones.

[MxM]

I did it with India and two cities.
You need the Oracle, and Piety, for the "Culture for Happiness" thing and the "2 Free social policies" thing.
There's also 2 policies in the Freedom tree that are essential, and you probably also want all the Patronage ones.

Yes, I got all that, but may be single city is just too limiting, or "fast speed" is not calibrated correctly. Did you play on normal?

[fani]

My experience on cultural victory was on different settings but i'll just share it. I played greece on king difficulty, marathon speed, Huge earth map. I built 10 cities and had 2 capitals as puppets (throughout the game). The win came at about 1950 which i believe is quite early for a cultural victory. What i thought as key to the cultural victory:

-Ally with as many city states as possible (especially maritime and cultural, i was allied with all alive CS's, about 15).
-Use the patronage social policy tree (i also chose freedom and commerce and the last 2 trees were order and honor).
- Have as few cities as possible while hooking as many happiness resources as possible. I had 10 cities.
-Build stonehenge and have at least one wonder in as many cities as possible so as to utilise the 100% cultural bonus of free speech.
-make a cultural monster city using great artists and build the Hermitage there.
-Grow up your cities (via maritime city states) to compensate for the fact that you are a small country.I had huge cities compared to my other games and managed to keep the happiness at a +(around 20pop each and the capital hit my record so far of 32!)
-early on try to kill neighbors so they won't pose a threat later on. i had native americans and france which were dead pretty soon(Bc something..)

Game specific:
I was spawned in north america the land of which i claimed solely for myself. In south i had Gandhi who was annoyingly trade unfriendly but otherwise not a threat. By the time i built caravels the rest of the world was mostly dominated by Babylon and a few nations were still alive but utterly insignificant. My only concern besides actually attaining the cultural victory was an attack from Babylon. Not only because it controlled most of Asia, Europe and Africa but also because the guy just looks scary and threatening on that throne. That attack never came but i believe that i could have repelled it. Production wise i heavily relied on buying stuff so i made sure i had a lot of gold and golden ages for some more gold(GA's went at the culture city, GE's helped wonder construction,GS's popped key techs and everyone else burned for golden ages). Science came through population and some from city states(about 1/3).babylon was ahead in science but not by much, so i managed to get key wonders such as the Sydney opera. Culture production was at it's peak at about 800 per turn (more than 250 of it was from the culture monster city) and obviously all culture producing buildings were a priority. That's about it, i think

[MxM]

OK, I think I found the problem with my previous game. My initial city was not on the river - on the coast instead. This is HUGE negative, because a) I did not have enough good titles and only small amount of resources, and b) the gold output of it was very low, and because of the absence of river. As a result I did not have enough money to ally with any city state, until late in the game. And it was too late...