I used this as a rough guide for an Emperor / Standard / Continents game, and got a spaceship at 236 turns. I didn't micro quite as much you as you describe, and I wasn't really clear which cities were going to produce the spaceship parts until very late in the game. I need to get a better handle on predicting this, the strongest cities were ones on a river (for Hydro Plant) with farmable hills. Food production was as important as hammer production, since I was limited in how many Maritime states I could bribe. In my game at least, I only really needed 3 - 3 for the boosters, and by the time I unlocked the remaining 3 parts, those were all done.
Since I was playing Emperor and not Deity, I went for settler spam as soon as my capitol hit size 2, as you suggested elsewhere. I got to 10 cities before turn 85, but 55 science came more like turn 100. I did get Chichen Itza as well as the Forbidden Palace, the Taj Mahal, and the Hagia Sophia. I find Chichen Itza hard to resist. In my game it added 16 turns of Golden Age: +7 to the Taj, +5 to the 2nd Happy age, and +4 to my one and only Great General fueled Age. Normally I burn more Great People, but I didn't have a lot to spare this game, 2 Generals and an uncounted number of Scientists.
I did fight several wars. In the first one, Germany and Arabia declared war simultaneously, and all I had were 5 warriors and a couple of archers. I guess I should have upgraded some of them to Swordsmen earlier as a deterrent. In any case, I had little difficulty fending them off, since they had mostly spears at the time.
