What did we do with great spies? We settled 2 in the capitol and build SY with another.
Mao goes after roosevelt (he was annoyed with that guy, pleased with me). Nappy was pleased with me from early on and I worked on him, even going as far as false war vs gandhi. I worked nappy up to friendly to keep the only serious warmonger left in the game off me.
And...tanks
Wait, what?
Yeah. Tanks vs longbows. Idiot mao went culture (gandhi tried earlier but nap took his good culture cities). Gandhi wouldn't cap to nappy because of mansa musa! HAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHA. Broken vassal mechanics work out in my favor for a change. Eat that, AI. Anyway I got to tanks via a couple tech steals (only what I showed), emancipation cottages on a huge amount of the world's land, and judicious trades (having nap friendly for trades helped). With all that land I went from a sorry tech rate of like 200 bpt to well over 1000 bpt by around 1700 AD, and it kept climbing to actual respectable rates. With a tremendous production and tech lead, lights out:
Mao was willing to cap before I even took his capitol, but I wanted to end his culture script. More importantly, I only vassaled him rather than wiping him off the map completely because nappy dowed him too. He had mass media (the only civ even near it other than me who had radio) and built UN shortly after our war stopped. I knew before the war that taking the cities he had on my continent plus a little more somewhere would give me enough for UN with nap's support. Originally I was just going to finish off late domination with tanks on roosy and probably MA vs all else, but UN works too. With internet and a tech lead, even space would have worked.
But, I'll just take the cap and win.
This probably won't look like a typical TMIT final tech picture, but...
And just to spite I bought the tech off mao before:
Score was ~ 65k due to having so much land/pop (had 40% pop including 1/2 of mao's, similar in land).
Final civics were US/FS/Eman/Environmentalism/FR. In other words, straight up UN civics, but by choice! Environmentalism really helped with the health as I used coal plants + levees and some cottage cities came out OK. Good enough to build up a respectable force of tanks once I got there. There was always $$$ rush if I needed it. I didn't.
Almost the entire empire was done with automated workers, too.
If mao didn't build UN, I could have just gifted MM to someone other than nappy FTW too. Or just won space. Or killed everyone. This game went pretty well for me.