I feared I would not have enough culture to fill all of rationalism, then get to order T3. I went for biology and built seven archeologists, which gave me four landmarks and three great works. also got the musician's guild in the cap so I had all guilds online.
I built christo in my petra city and broadway in my cap. I timed broadway perfectly to spawn a musician after getting my second natural musician. missed christo by a single turn which really pssd me off, but I decided not to reload.
after +3 culture per world wonder was approved I went for worlds fair. on my way to hubble I won the fair quite easily and at this point I realized I had more than enough culture for all of rationalism plus all of order.
I preemptively built all defense buildings up to arsenals in my two eastern cities, plus nuke shelters. built some fighters and some blocker units, but not enough. I focussed on banks/hospitals/stock exchanges too much and only upgraded my army instead of building more. hiawatha inevitably dow'ed me at around T190.
his army was consisting almost exclusively of info-era units. lots of planes, lots of marines, anti air guns and machine guns. I wasn't ready. my bombers and fighters had no offensive use at all and were pretty much a waste of hammers, since hiawatha had pretty much unlimited intercepts. should have built blocker units instead.
My happiness was widly going up and down, at some points +40, at some -20. I built Zoos in all cities and got Neuschwanstein, but still had happiness problems.
I had to stop building anything relevant to the spaceship in every city but Copan and focussed on not getting rolled over. I lost almost all of my units, even fortified great war infantry with the 20% bonus from defenders of faith just melted away. hiawatha got to atomic theory, I stole it. he bought an atomic bomb and dropped it on me the next turn.
I did the same thing, only I build three atomic bombs, befriended austria, traded gpt for gold and bought another three nukes. even after getting just about 100 units blown away by bombs, planes, rocket artillery and fortified infantry hiawatha still wanted six of my cities for peace...
I built hubble, only built the spaceship factory in one other city and produced three spaceship parts manually (the three boosters). I proposed spacehsip factory and invested exactly 860 production for the research boost and the scientist. after buying three scientists for faith with peak science I bulbed through the entire tree. It was barely enough. I saved up three engineers (got the last one only two turns before I won the game) and finished the last three parts.
I blew off into space on turn 237 (the move of my last part ended in my capital, would've been 236). that is my fastest science victory to date. Only 4 of 8 players survived, only 2 of 16 city states did. What a game.