Culture approach?

its not really possible to win by culture alone becasue your enemys planets would take a long time to rebel and they could easily wipe you out before you could make enough of their planets rebel. winning by culture also isn't possible because cap ships repel culture so if your enemy has any capital ships (which it will) you won't be able to take its planets.

even if you had enough ships to hold the enemy advance and you kept the enemy caps at bay winning by culture isn't possible alone. you need ships to take out the enemy colony ships and you need military presence. so winning with culture alone is impossible. it may be a viable stratagy to have enough culture to harass enemy planets near your borders and make them lose tax money for the reduced loyalty. but other than that i don't think culture can really be used to dominate the galaxy

Unless you happen to be playing as the Advent with maxed culture research and the Manifest Dominion artifact and have Desert planets scattered evenly across the galaxy filled purely with Communion Temples, victory by culture is practically impossible.

Culture, aside from dropping alleigance, can also delay or prevent enemies from recovering lost planets, since they cannot recolonize planets that have revolted or are heavily under your culture's influence (until your culture centres are destroyed, that is). Its also useful to give your fleets bonuses at locations where your culture has reached and to deny the enemy of their bonuses at territory under your culture.

While a Culture-only victory ISN'T Impossible, (If your a pro-turtler and you got time on your hands)

It's better to use it to hamper, using it to keep planets away from your foes and giving yourself the bonuses like Shiled Mitagation and Weapon attack bonuses.

Those are fuuuun...
;D

You'll have a hard time winning by culture alone, but if you can use it to your advantage you will be able to gain bonuses in your own space and lower the enemies allegiance, maybe even keep them off a few outer planets.

Culture is a good way to defend your planets. An enemy will have to destroy your broadcast centers in order to take planets under your culture.

does culture spread faster if you have multiple broadcast centers in your system?  Does having multiple broadcast centers help to repel enemy culture? 

Yes to both. Culture stacks normally, so the more centers you have the more you generate so it spreads faster. Culture wars are basically decided by the rate of generation between you and the enemy, so if he's shoving 16 culture/second down your throat, you'll need at least that much to break even (although it will take a long long time for 1/second to cross the phase lane if you only have 15 or something). You can see how much culture planets generate by looking at their info card. I think for enemy planets, you need visibility (ie, a scout/probe/ability) in its grav well before it will show you its culture output in exact numbers.

I personally think culture in this game is broken.  What I mean by that is that YOU CAN'T win with culture and the bonuses you get aren't all that fantastic.  Further more, in the unlikely event you do acutally have culture supremacy, it takes forever to make an enemy planet go to 0% and you don't gain the planet, it just uncolonizes.  Every other game I have ever played (which isn't many), when culture goes to 0% the other person gets control.

As a side note, I want everyone to look at my shiny new avatar.  It's bigger than yours.

Size doesn't matter Besides, yours may be bigger, but mine is better!

But mine is mysterious...and straight from clip art, so there.

What is your of Hdudt?

Also, I claim win.