The Problems

Ok, so most people I've seen agree that this Victory is both overpowered and uninteresting, for several reasons:

• It comes online far too early. With one of the first civics in the era, you can immediately start spamming explorers and it is not outlandish to win outright victory with this path in 30-40 turns or so, I've even seen wins on like turn 20-something- far lower than the other paths which should be theoretically equal, which is a serious balance issue.
• Despite being called Culture Victory, it has little to do with Culture output itself! As previously stated Natural History is one of the starting civics, and the only other relevant civic is Hegemony, which is useful but not necessarily required. This means Culture as a yield in the Modern era, is suboptimal, even for this victory path you're better off optimizing Gold/Production to get more explorers and then build the World's Fair (or if you're playing Mughal, to just buy it, lol).
• The minigame of Explorers, unlike some of the others in the game, is just not very good. All you do is occasionally research (but global vision of researched sites means sometimes it's better to just camp across the continent and let others research) move them to digsites, unearth an artifact (which have a brief flavor pop up but are all mechanically identical), and repeat.

I am a bored idiot during reading week, so I whipped up a rework concept. My goal is to fix these issues and make the Culture path more interesting and balanced, but not necessarily to overhaul it completely. In my opinion, a better Culture Victory mechanic would include things like Artistic Great Works, National Parks, etc in addition to Artifacts like in Civ 6, but for the sake of Implementation I'm going to mostly stick to Artifacts, with light use of other things that are already in the game.

The Rework

So the current Geographic Society legacy path requires any 15 Artifacts in any 5 Museums or other locations with Great Work slots. All artifacts are functionally identical. This means the optimal strategy is simply to get Natural History, then vomit explorers across the map, hoping to snatch all the globally revealed dig sites. I intend to change this, by making civics relevant, Explorers limited, and dig sites player-specific:

• The first crucial change is no more explorer spam. Instead, they are unlocked by civics. Natural History grants the ability to train ONE explorer. Hegemony, and Globalism each unlock the ability to train a single additional one, for a maximum of THREE.
• Another crucial set of changes, is to the way research/digsites appear:
  • With Natural History, you may only research Exploration sites, and they will appear for YOU ONLY. You may also only excavate the sites within your own or neutral territory at first, unless you are able to get Open Borders, which Archaeologists are now bound by (this adds a bit of a diplomatic element early on).
  • With Hegemony, you may research Antiquity sites, per continent. Once again they will appear for YOU ONLY. Archaeologists now ignore open borders; you may now excavate sites anywhere.
    • You also now gain an Espionage Operation: Steal Archaeological Findings, which will give you knowledge of other civs' research as well as dig sites they have completed.
  • With Globalism, you gain access to the Global Survey special project, which can be done by an Explorer at a friendly University/Museum and takes a few turns. This will reveal all unrevealed dig sites on the map.
• To compensate for far less explorers being active, the actual excavations can take a bit less turns to complete. Furthermore, Natural History gains a Mastery option, with the simple effect of making excavations take even less time.

Next, the Scoring. Rather than a flat 15, I propose a somewhat drastic change to the way the path works, making digging for artifacts actually interesting by making them more unique, truly calling back to previous eras, and re-implementing a light version of Civ 6's theming mechanic. This is not meant to be much more complicated, rather, it's to actually take advantage of things that are already present in the game:

• Currently, there are various artifacts that can spawn, most of them themed around war or economic activity. You can also get artifacts from overbuilding, but these are also just from the generic pool. My idea is, what if there were categories of artifacts based on the different victory paths, showing the different aspects of history and society?
  • Also, because of things I'll explain later, there should be many MORE Artifacts/digsites than currently- it makes no sense to be locked out of a cultural victory because the world literally runs out of historical artifacts- that's just silly and annoying.

This would make artifacts a little more meaningful than \"oh boy I'm at X/15 now\". You could even have narrative events for unearthing unique ones, like a special Codex or Relic generated by one of the civ-unique Great People

• The artifacts are also already tied to the Civ that produced them- you can see this in the popup text when you collect it, e.g. "The Abbasid Soldiers of the Exploration Age were here, whether victorious or not"
• And finally, to tie it all together, theming, which will govern points earned towards the now far expanded Legacy path. This will add a little bit of RNG, but it's controllable by virtue of what dig sites in what locations and civs you are actually researching. The theming and scoring could work as follows:

Obviously, would need playtesting for exact balance, this is just an idea with numbers out of my ass. Possibly, there could even be a bonus point or two for building or displaying Artifacts in Wonders? Also possibly, there should be no bonus multiplier for your own past Civs, as those will be the easiest ones to acquire artifacts for.

Note that you can theoretically complete this path with the same amount or even less than 15 Artifacts, if you gather exactly the perfect ones, BUT:

• It is not likely you will get the perfect artifacts to do it in this matter unless you both plan very strategically which digsites to do and get a bit lucky as well.
• Recall that Explorers are far less numerous, limited to 3 and gated behind culture output, and far less omniscient, requiring civics to find every dig site. So this path, will be a lot slower than currently, hopefully, it would be around the same length if played optimally as the other victory paths, as that is ideal balance in a game where each path leads to ultimate "Victory."

Overall, I believe this system would make the Geographic Society a lot more interesting and balanced than it is currently. The artifacts will have more flavor, there will be a legitimate strategy in what digsites to go for for theming purposes, rather than just rushing to every single one you see, and finally, this path won't be an auto-win even on Deity in a very short number of turns, but comparable in length and difficulty to the others. If you made it this far thanks for reading and please drop any feedback or other ideas!