BEGINNER HERE: How long does a game last

[Mania]

I started a singpleplayer game using the default settings.

I have had 300 turns and it's still going - is that normal?

I have conquered one enemy, overrun a neutral city and remaining friendly with the others. My civ is huge.

[RayeGunn]

Depends. Civilization is a very long game, the max number of turns varies with the timescale you are on. What year does it display? at 2050 whoever has the highest score wins, or you can end it sooner with one of several victory conditions. The specifics of which depend on if you have the Brave New World expansion or not, they've changed a couple of the victory conditions significntly in that, and added a new one.

[Garudazeno]

There is a max, check the additional information panel, it's somewhere there.

[Ryika]

Standard-Speed has a limit of 500 turns, before the "Score"-Victory ends the game (in 2050). If someone matches any other victory conditions, the game will of course end before that - which will happen most of the times, if you're not playing on the lowest difficulty.

You can check the victory conditions here:
http://civilization.wikia.com/wiki/Victory_%28Civ5%29
(The Culture-Victory is obsolete and got changed in Brave New World)

Normally, you'll want to work towards one of these victories and end the game somewhere between 1900-2000, of course also depending on map-settings and difficulty.

If you think these matches take too long, you can start your next game using the Quick game speed, if I remember correctly you'll end up with 330 turn then. But keep it mind that many things get even more compressed then. You can also tune down the map size and amount of civs.

[Mania]

I sort of prefer the longer games (building up the civ to the max) but it becomes too easy to lose track of what you're trying to achieve.

I started trying to win by being nice, but got bored so attacked instead.

Anyway, just found the 'additional information' page. Looking at my victory progress:

200 turns left (which will make 500)
I'm in 2nd on score, with 4 remaining, 2 wiped out
It seems you can win by Domination / Science / Diplomacy / Cultural

But looking at the details pages, no one has made any progress on any, except we have ALL achieved the first cultural stage - not very helpful!

[Mania]

I've also been upgrading evenly - so all my research and tech trees progress at the same speed. Is that wrong? Should i focus on getting one area to max first?

[RayeGunn]

Culture is almost certainly not a possibility, but with just 4 remaining, you could potentially go for Domination realatively easily, you don't need to wipe them out completely, just capture their capital, so you could be surgical about it. Science depends on how far into the tech tree you are vs the others, you may want to beeline to techs that give you spaceship parts and go for that. If you open the tech tree (when choosing a new tech to research there should be a button labelled 'tech tree' in the upper left.) Look for 'Particle Physics' towards the far end and select it, that should net you most techs for a space win along the way. Or if you have a lot of gold, a diplomatic victory could be done by buying influence with city states.

[Sabesaroo]

Mania it depends what you want to get. Example: You're at war very early in the game and have no siege units, you might want to research catapults as quickly as possible. Try to keep it balanced though, so areas of your civilization don't get outdated.

[Eoghammer]

it seems that you are playing either with vanilla or G&K

Cultural victory is the easiest to plan : you just have to produce the maximum culture in order to complete 5 Social Policies branch before being able to build utopia...

Domination can be achieved by taking the capital of others empire or by destroying them...

Science is the goal that can only be reached when you finish the tech tree (or nearly) by building spaceship part to send the spaceship to explore the rest of the galaxy

Diplomacy requires to have someone that have build the UN and to be elected planetary governator... it may be by having either a huge population advantage or nearly every one allied with you...

for the tech the tree is done so that you can't avoid to train nearly every science because there is some prerequiste that will force you to take a previously skipped science... So you can skip some part for a time but you will train them later to access later science

[Bobsmackerz]

The games lasts as long as you want it to. It could take some time since you have to play it smart and have many saves. Such as one for war test, science, and etc..