Normally I wouldn't ask for a game I still have working without bying it on gog, but it has something to do with the most frustrating thing in the whole game.

100% of the time, you have to achieve certain statistics, in order to complete a scenario. And the most infuriating one is Culture. Occasionally the game will go down to 40 and only say 'You do not have enough buildings'.

Can someone tell me what that means? Because I had situations when I had even more medical and entertainment building than citizens, and it still didn't work.

Check the efficiency of those buildings. It doesn't count how many you have but how many citizens have access to them. So for example: you may have a one very nice district with a perfect coverage and several slums areas where people can only dream about such a luxuries. Then in overall the coverage is poor and hence your score is low.

If you don't have enough buildings, it means the service provided by that group of buildings is stretched out too thin. Simple solution is to just build a dump of buildings somewhere in a free space in the city, or to provide the service to your population. Your city expects to have a certain number of buildings for particular population levels (so a city with over 10k people needs a lot of services provided to cover everyone).

Also, when it comes to entertainment buildings, the ratio is generally one training building to one performance place. Sometimes, to raise the culture rating, you may have to build loads of performance places to match the number of training buildings (eg, loads of booths to improve juggler access, loads of bandstands to improve musician access etc)

Culture is determined by the following:

"Culture rating is pretty straightforward. Click on the advisor and add whatever he tells you need to raise the rating. What he won't do is tell you how many of whatever you need to add. You can add them blindly until the rating climbs or look at the advisor for that item. See how many people are served by one of the services you need, then based on that, add per your population. Health effect (physician, dentist, mortuary) is calculated based on proportion of people that have access to their services. Other structures use the ratio of working buildings per population ("working" means that it simply has labor; papyrus, beer or entertainers are not necessary for this sole purpose)." - This is from Pharaoh Heaven.

What I do is this- I use Grumpus The Elder's housing block - see my thread helpful links.

It allows me to use the juggler, musician and dancers, plus the residents have access to everything from doctors, to dentists, as well as priests, bazaars with beer and pottery.

Try to use housing in blocks, there's TONS of articles on Pharaoh Heaven (a source you should visit- the forums are still active) . Housing in blocks plus making sure you have plenty of roadblocks to keep the workers where they're supposed to go will really help.

Your advisor will tell you what building you need. If you need dentists, then check where dentist's coverage is lacking.
Importantly, and this can especially become a problem in very long levels, check that you do not have a worker problem. It doesn't help if you have enough culture boosting buildings of a certain type without enough workers to
man them.

This is my only real annoyance with the game. This especially happens if you tend to build really efficient housing blocks and therefore the game will assume you're not using as many buildings as you "should". The simplest solution is indeed to just mass dump the required buildings somewhere with labor access. The buildings don't need to actually service anyone, they just need to be employed and potentially "ready" (ie papyrus for libraries, beer for senet houses, etc).

Is there any way to mod the game files to get rid of the culture rating? I understand the house files have a Prosperity Rating, is there anything similar for culture? I.e. building a firehouse jacks up your culture rating to 100 or something.

No, there is not. Cheating the game will make you more likely to build cities sloppily and without any care to efficiency / money-making in the game. People should really learn to develop a strategy to play games like this, instead of doing a few missions, failing badly and then looking up the internet for every possible cheat / exploit to make the game easy.

My advice is to play through on Very Easy (or Easy) difficulty so that you have an idea of the mission, then play it through on a higher difficulty (like Normal): with VE, it removes most devastating things, making it easier to create a city and makes it somewhat easier to reach required goals.

But that's the thing, building efficiently in this case actually hurts you. If you build a sleek housing block that's completely satisfied on entertainment with only a few booths, the game will think you're doing something wrong and ask you to build more booths. Here's what Hetepsenusret looked like for me on Normal. Prosperity was at 100 and everyone's needs were pretty much completely satisfied. I had full coverage on nearly every metric and was solidly raking in money. Here's what my palace sector looked like:
http://i.imgur.com/uINzgi5.png

Here's what my worker neighborhoods looked like:
http://i.imgur.com/WHYT7SZ.png

But I still had to build a dump like this in order to meet a Culture Rating of 80. It's tedious as well. Not pictured: 3 Zoos and 6 libraries servicing no one.
http://i.imgur.com/UWwH6fW.png

Maybe it's because you are not building your housing blocks in an efficient way to be able to provide enough coverage. In one picture, I noticed very few training schools and more stages, which will obviously drag down your culture rating as the schools are not balanced. The general rule of thumb is that 1 school = 2 stages (when working at full capacity), however I see too many loops that make it impossible for all houses to be served.

Your housing block design is also very cramped and makes it difficult for you to increase culture ratings without placing culture dumps, space them out and give space so that you can actually increase culture rating, this is what my Hetepsenusret looked like at the end (although played on VE, it should still show you a more efficient way of building): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sq0_EuzCnDg

I don't think you're correct in terms of how culture rating is calculated. Based on how far my housing has evolved, entertainment needs were satisfied. But it looks like the culture advisor divides current population by the number of stages, and assigns it a value (e.g. Average, above average, excellent, etc). The culture rating in turn is calculated on that coverage formula.

I'm using a slight variation on this housing block: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPDdbrlRSg0

In Hetepsenusret for example, most of my housing successfully evolved up to fancy residences (the only reason you see modest residences is because my food supply was strained). But because the housing block only utilized 1 bandstand and 1 pavilion per ~2,000 people, the culture algorithm "thought" it wasn't sufficient, even though my houses were completely satisfied on the entertainment front based on how the block was designed.

At the end of my mission I had met all the goals and had palaces and fancy residences everywhere and people were totally stoked about living in my city, but my culture rating was only 40. I managed to successfully raise it to 80 without building a single new entertainment school, and only needed to add stages, libraries, and zoos in dumps not connected to any housing. Demolishing ALL my entertainment schools didn't change my culture rating at all.

Also, I watched your LP and notice that many people use the same design as yours. It looks very efficient indeed, but I'm not a fan of sprawl development myself. I end up spending hours figuring out how to cram all my housing blocks together just because it's more aesthetically appealing to me that way (not a fan of gaps). For example, here's what Sawu looked like for me at the end: http://i.imgur.com/VCi9uLD.jpg

So pretty :3
(although note the random Senet and library, along with the stage, work camp, and shrine dumps)

Correct, housing requirements and culture rating are almost completely seperate. Which way to Thebes has a comprehensive writeup on the mechanics with all numbers under the "Entertainment" link.

Building smaller housing blocks than what is strictly possible in terms of walker coverage helps avoiding those ugly culture farms. Like evolving the huts at the ferries to tiny settlements, by giving those few houses what they need it brings the rating up without being an outright culture park.

Shrine dumps? They have such high desirability, they could have helped evolve your markets and fountains, two market ladies might help with the supply problems you were having. Pretty city indeed otherwise.

Yeah, you're right about this. I fit in shrines where I can, but because of how efficient this particular block is (again) the gods get pretty angry. The only reason I have shrine "dumps" is because it helps me keep track of them and also allows me a convenient way of building them en masse. Desirability generally is not a concern for these blocks because of all the statues and plazas, but it definitely could be useful for upgrading bazaars. Thanks!


edit: Spreading out culture buildings throughout the city would help mitigate culture dumps. But since culture rating doesn't really affect anything except the end-scenario (the "entertainment bonus" generally isn't worthwhile), building culture parks at the end of a scenario is the simplest way I found to address this (although it really is tedious).

Lots of people seem to use that housing block, but I don't particularly like it because it just doesn't look "natural" and wastes spaces: in some missions, space is important. Plus, with cramped blocks, you increase the likelihood for people to start teleporting out of the housing blocks, meaning that housing and services will suffer: spacing out your housing blocks reduces the risk of this happening.
Culture rating is affected if there's more stages to schools, because there aren't enough entertainers using the stages, creating sporadic coverage and harming the culture rating. Building more schools will fix the balance, making it easier for you to build more stages without problems. A stage without any entertainers will not contribute anything to the culture rating.

The reason I say that is because the game [to my knowledge at least] also calculates culture based on the number of working stages and active shows: if you have lots of stages, but very little shows, it will drag down culture rating because the game thinks you "don't have enough X" (where X is an entertainer) which can be solved just by building more schools to that particular entertainer to increase coverage.
I looked at your Sawu, it's alright, but you covered up the major patch of farmland, causing you to have lowered production of Chickpeas and requiring other foods to offset the loss. You could have a look at my Sawu videos to see how I went about it (mine wasn't that great though, had ageing problems because I built too much early on >_>)

Would love to do testing, but I don't really play Pharaoh any more: I'm simply sharing my experiences with the game and what I found out from doing a full walkthrough of every mission in Pharaoh and Cleopatra :P