Well I won my game fairly convincingly

Space Race victory in 1902AD, this tutorial must have done some good as I don't win many on Monarch the skill level I usually play on!
Was worried about Shaka going on in the game as he took out Mansa and then was going at Willem. He didn't seem too tempted to kill off Willem, think he quite liked him, but Pericles with the AP kept putting on votes for wars against him and pretty much everyone was agreeing to them! Finally he took Willem as a vassal and quickly went on to vassalise Monty very quickly. All game long Stalin couldn't make his mind up if he wanted to be Shaka's vassal or not, but whatever case they were good friends.
Not sure why, but despite being conquered Willem and Monty both seemed to like Shaka quite well (they also both hated me). So come the UN votes, Shaka had votes from Willem, Monty and Stalin... considering he held 44% of the world pop by himself, that was a big slice of the votes. Was about 50 from winning the diplomatic victory each time the vote came up, and in the end I decided to bribe Shaka to war against Stalin so he'd lose Stalin's vote (this was about the time I launched my ship, no worry of a domination win or anything of such for Shaka, and giving a tech up was no worry to start it off).
I had to work quite hard to keep my military up to a reasonable amount. Once factories came along though I was able to build them with Coal Planets and Levies, and along with the towns giving hammers from US most of my cities were good enough to spam units for the border cities. In the 15 turns it took my ship to travel I built about 30 Modern Armours, so I could probably go on after my victory for easy domination.
Weaknesses - I never got a proper GP Farm down. Producing the specialists was a pain and so I never got Sids Sushi or Mining Inc built. In the end I took the Oil company and spammed it worldwide as everyone had oil anyway, that got some cash in. And Create Constructions I made with a late engineer but was too late to bother spreading. Along similar lines, I ended up with Wall Street in my capitol only running 2 Merchants. Needed a city more apt with the food etc to make it work better. My military was generally very poor and had I not had such a nice peninsula with just 2 cities to have to defend, I'm sure I would have been attacked if not dogpiled. Got lucky that Willem was my only neighbour and was hurting from Shaka (I believe Shaka was killing Mansa early but Willem took him as a vassal. Shaka continued to kill Musa and then was at war with Willem so carried on).