So, what do we do now? Well, that's about it for the scoring. I'll do what I can from here to land a speedy cultural victory, but I won't be surprised if I fall back a few places in that category. I have one seriously suboptimal cultural city location, I only got two wonders and few regular buildings built in time for 1000-year doubling, and I haven't really run a good Great Artist farm.
I'm now beelining to Communism. There's little need to care about economy in this game. I'm already easily staying ahead of the Prince AIs, and we don't have any spaceship to speed or anything to gain by a tech military conquest. Better is to focus on production to keep building religious and cultural items (we did get access to four religions), and we've got loads of watermills. So I'm pushing right to State Property for the hammer bonuses. (The purported food bonuses are really hammer bonuses in disguise, since you can get the same food by using farms instead.)
Also, pushing to Sci Method now brings us towards Electricity to boost the watermills and towards the last two scenario wonders as well.
The Kremlin went in my capital for the Great Artist points, and my cities turned into an embarrassing whip-fest. The combination of Kremlin, Org Rel, and a Forge means that the cost of a whip is only 1 population for up to 99 hammers, and the bug means that such a whip actually credits 132 hammers. 132 hammers for 1 population is just a wee bit insane!
The other limiting factor for whipping is supposed to be happiness, but I had a HUGE supply of happy faces from resources and temples and cathedrals. Montreal here has six whip penalties, and is smiling right along with plenty of headroom.
Presently, Toronto's mess of wonders popped a Great Prophet, who had nothing to do -- no shrines available, no lightbulb available, no Golden Age as my next several GPs would all be Artists from the capital. So he just settled in Montreal to help out with a couple hammers. Then I got the Scientist from Physics, who probably should have paired with that Prophet for a GA, but instead had to lightbulb towards Biology.
And Ottawa shifted to full GP mode, running five artists (it built the Globe Theater solely to hire the artists). Those artists settled in Montreal, then later started Great Working there. Vancouver, the Heroic Epic city, cranked a steady stream of longbows, muskets, grenadiers, and riflemen.
Little happened for quite some time, except for Germany getting destroyed. Germany got piled on by Japan, Russia, and Aztecs all at the same time. I didn't want to try fighting all of them at once, so I just let Frederick go. At least Monty adopted some builder civics, so he's going to digest Spain and Germany for a while rather than coming after somebody else (such as me).
I researched towards Radio while filling in trades along the Chemistry line. Radio hit in 1724 AD for the Modern era. Biology came next, and then I revolted into the end-game configuration for culture: Caste System and Pacifism. Yes, Caste System - we definitely want to run max artists in all three cultural cities, especially the National Epic capital.
And here's an overview shot presently in 1734 AD to show you the tactical layout, which will become very important momentarily.
