I settled out to 20 cities as planned and built the Great Library. I was 50/50 to get a GE as my second GP thanks to HG and I got it, which I used to rush MoM and then start a GA from music. I adopted bureaucracy then as well as emancipation and US too. From that point onwards, I stayed way ahead of the AI in tech for the rest of the game. I later got another GE which I saved to rush Taj and libbed rifling and switched into nationalism and went on a drafting spree. I decided to simultaneously attack both Hammurabi and Charlemagne. Charly had been in a war with France for awhile and had been losing cities. By the time I was ready to invade he'd capitulated, so Louis was next on my hit list. Invasions started around 1180 AD. Besides drafting, I also bought out a decent amount of cavalry to lead the southern invasion, which in hindsight was probably suboptimal.
Charlemagne fell pretty quickly both thanks to the cavalry and his lack of stacks due to his previous war. The campaign against the Babylonians was a little more drawn out since he had some 20+ cities to go through. Hammurabi had built the Statue of Zeus and before too long, between my war with him and all the battles taking out Louis's rather large medieval army, the war wariness got quite large. By the end I had over 800 WW with each of them! I conquered all of Babylonia's on continent land as well as got some islands in the peace treaty and decided to make peace with Louis after taking Paris and his southern lands. I had the option to vassal France but I decided not to.
One interesting note about these wars is I'd been avoiding researching astronomy and so had a large fleet of galleys shuttling troops around. And this was an instance where the ironclad, a unit that I often don't give much thought to, was quite good. The four ironclads that I sent to lead the Western fleet killed off some 40 Babylonian caravels plus a handful on Galleons without taking a single loss.
I gave the corp route a try and founded mining and sushi in 1340 AD and 1470 AD. And wow, once those get up and running its pretty ridiculous. For most of the game mining was around +25 hammers and sushi around +22 food per city. I spent a long time with wealth at 100% just expanding the corps and buying out buildings in the newly conquered lands. I'd never launched a spaceship before so decided to see what's involved. Definitely went a bit over the top on the economy building as by the time the spaceship landed in 1775 AD I'd researched future tech 17 times
. Though the Chinese did have a hand in that too as they sabotaged one of the parts the turn before I was going to launch.
Overall I ended the game with 63 cities with both corps spread to all of them. Winning as quickly as possible wasn't my objective this game, though if I'd switched over to police state at some point or accepted Louis as a vassal I probably could've won by domination or even UN vote a lot faster as I ended the game with 50% of the land.