Yes!
At Immortal difficulty, that would be remarkable enough. But this is also the only game I can recall where I never fought a war with any of the AI. Napoleon had one war against Willem, then two more against both Roosevelt and Boudica, but these were basically stalemates. My immediate neighbors remained peaceful, although I was worried when both Julius and HC were at WHEOOHRN for considerable periods.
I concentrated on my science and eventually on the space race. Although I led the AP at times, and later the UN, I never had the votes for a diplomatic victory. When the AI were at war with each other, I was content with my diplomatic power to let those wars continue.
I was first to complete Apollo, in 1848. I completed the Internet in 1898 (which gained me some techs I didn't need for space, but more importantly prevented any of the AI from learning my techs) and the Space Elevator in 1902. As usual, I generally ignored the espionage game, but I stationed some spies defensively in my own cities. While the AI stole a couple techs, they never sabotages any of my space ship components, as has happened in other games. I was confident that this race would be mine.
I had only one SS Casing to complete, which I had one of my low production cities building. I had founded Mining, Inc., which helped some, but HC had gone wild spreading his Creative Constructions throughout my empire, which knocked down that city's production enough to delay my launch. I'd re-establish Mining, Inc., then he'd immediately send another of his CC executives! Annoying, but not enough to be significant, I thought.
And then, with 7 turns left before that SS Casing was completed, one of HC's cities reached legendary status, and I realized two other cities would reach legendary in just 12 turns!
(It has been a while since I had paid attention to culture, when everyone was still long away from that goal). Now what do I do? Launching the spaceship now would take 10 turns to reach Alpha Centauri, but with only an 80% chance of success. I hated taking that risk, when I was so close to completion and 100% success, but I saw no alternative and launched.
And then HC must have completed some other cultural improvement, because now I saw that Cuzco would become his third legendary city even faster. I dispatched all of my defensive spies to Cuzco, with the intention of provoking revolts in that city. Some failed, but two succeeded (each slowing down the cultural growth by one turn) and in the end my ship reached Alpha Centauri in 1942, when Cuzco was just one turn away from giving HC a cultural victory. Whew!
I realized I had one other option to save my endgame, which was going to war to take one of the legendary cities. While that could have worked fine strictly in terms of game mechanics (where I only needed to extend the game by a couple turned to achieve my space victory), it seemed riskier if one was to think more "realistically" of the long-term prospects for Father Ragnar's empire, particularly with strong neighbors that might have joined any war on HC's side. For fun, I tried replaying this endgame from 1938. I declared war in 1939, blitzkrieging Machu Picchu and razing it in 1940. Victory would come again in 1942, with a slightly lower score, probably reflecting the military strength I lost in the attack.
