Okay, so this is my first time trying to evaluate a game that i didn't play, so you can probably take what i say with a small grain of salt, but here goes;
My idea here would be to try and build a city engine, with probably a few oracles and hamlets thrown in because they are easy to get in the early game and can sort of help your engine. You can assume that the cities will eventually be activated due to the presence of cultist, but i wouldn't mark down piling out the ruins early as something you should go for early, especially when your opponent opens with talisman, which could indicate that they are going for gardens.
So, i would;
open silver/silver
get count ASAP
get a few cities
get a few cultists to run out the ruins, if my opponent hasn't already done so
pick up some hamlets and oracles along the way
and, of course, if my opponent goes heavily into gardens, thats OK, i'll just upgrade them into cities
as for candlestick maker... why? How does it contribute to your overall strategy?
The other option i see is going straight cultist-BM, although by your opponents opening buys, i would be suspecting them to go into gardens, so giving them 10 free cards isn't likely the greatest of ideas. The third option would be going straight for gardens, as this set has no less than 4 clear enablers of it. However, i suspect this as losing to the engine. However, the biggest point here is that it looks like you had no real game plan; a bad plan is better than just muddling through the game.
So, turn by turn (for the first 21 turns of the game):
3: Buy count, not cultist
5: ^^
7: buy Hamlet, not candlestick maker
8: you seriously need an count...
12: candlestick maker really isn't helping your engine here
13: more candlesticks to clog up your engine? this isn't good...
16: you might have been better off to discard the ruins and trash the estate for an oracle
18: i'm really not sure a hamlet is worth 2 coin tokens at this point.
19: you shouldn't have discarded the estate for a buy. The chance you need an extra buy is small at that point, and you might have drawn an upgrade with it.
20: Again, there was little reason to discard estates for buys here. It gives your opponent unnecessary information while providing almost no benefit to you, and possibly reducing the upgrade targets you may have.
21: the game is close enough to ending that you should probably be buying duchies over more cities.