Thank you Zigeuner, for pointing me to that.

I just finished a 10 hour normal game as the Knights Templar (Elizabethan English, to get both traits the guy recommends), and was in the middle of slaughtering my opponents for the heck of it when I won a culture victory.

Yes, it was only Noble, but I won.  Not only did I win, but I felt like I was in control and understanding how the game was working the entire way.  Maybe there's hope.  I got a culture victory in the 1980s and got a score of 17,000ish on Noble, so I was pretty happy with the score; highest win in BtS so far.

Things I've learned:

The first few turns when nothing appears to be happening in your city are hugely important.

Specialists in your cities, especially early on are giant.

The special bonuses for spaces are not gained if you settle on them.

Religion, which I'm shamelessly hooked on, will *#$@ you hard, avoid them until you are powerful and then take them away from those less deserving.

Now...in following the strategy, I did the best I could but the Romans popped two city radii from me.  My capital had just gotten its second culture expansion when Augustus plopped Antium next to me.  So, being extremely lucky in having copper pop within my capital radius, I axe-rushed the Romans and then the Spaniards who were fairly close too.

That left me a continent all my own...which made the tech race rough at the beginning but let me expand to my little builder's heart's content.

Man, I needed a good win.  This strategy might not work all the time, but it gives me some baseline to work with that I know is sound.  Woot!

Stand by....

I would also suggest to give every one a month of play time for every game. So if you post a game on the 14th set the end date on the 14th so every one has enough time to finish it. Some of the games you posted only lasted 2-3 weeks which is rather short IMHO.