T349 diplomatic victory. Despite my many hours in civ, I was still a little hazy on the details of the diplomatic victory. If I understand it correctly now, the timing is determined by the founding of the the world congress, and then once the player hits information era, a world leader session will be held after the proposal that is currently in congress (or atomic era in case half of the players are there, but that would be a long wait with Prince AI). I think in the America thread someone mentioned reaching Telecommunications without a single session being held, but that seems beyond my abilities, so for my game it was after the second regular session.
In my game I went 4-city tradition, immediately into Temple of Artemis. Oh wait, it's not there
! Instead I should have gone for Great Library, that would probably have given me some more tempo, an earlier entry in Astronomy and Printing Press, and therefore shaving off some turns of the final victory. However, given the game pace I was a little reluctant to commit to a 16-turn build in the capital when I had not seen seen half of the civs yet. In the end, after all my libraries had been built and GL was still there, I started building it in an expand, but was then beaten to it with 2 turns remaining.
My interactions with the other civs was very Alexander-like: I stole settlers and workers, pillaged tiles, took all of their gold in peace treaties, only to declare war again later. Initially, this was quite profitable. I think early game Montezuma gave me 500 gold and 10gpt for peace, but after a while the AI coffers began to run dry. I was not sure how many of the AI cities I actually wanted to take, and settled for Tenochtitlan only, mainly because the other capitals were far away or unappealing. Also, until around renaissance, happiness was a bit short.
I went Freedom, as I usually do, but perhaps Order would have been better here, since there were no spaceship parts to buy. T320 Globalization with Oxford, followed by ending turn 29 times