My shot at a sub 200 victory using this exploit:
Turn 184 Deity Science Victory with Babylon, standard, pangea. Room for improvement, some bad decisioins. Used tradition, might have gotten one more initial scientist if liberty for the finisher, but I don't like playing liberty...
No Scholars in residence, because: you cannot self research it (you burn 10 exponential techs, not worth it, and you cannot really wait anyway until turn 140 ish to start your bulb out (too late IMO to finish up for a sub 200 victory). Generally, burning the guaranteed exponential growth techs is a very bad idea, because, well, it's exponential growth
If you have the sailing, bronze working and masonry lines + gunpowder unresearched when you reach architecture (13 techs) you will have a multiplier of 1.2625^13 = 20.7 . Now, the real fun starts if you have just a couple of more techs researched by the AI (let's say 15) but not you: 1.2625^15 is a multiplier of 33! If you were "dumb" enough to research fishing because you wanted another trade route, that 20.7 would drop to 16.4... Very bad idea indeed.
When you are standing at the architecture threshold you need about 200.000 Science (very rough estimate) to finish the spaceship techs.
At least as Babylon, it is possible to generate 3 great scientists + the free one from writing (saved, not settled) by the time you finish architecture. The unique thing about babylon is that the first free scientist really is free (does not advance the cost of scientist no. 2) and of course the great +50% scientist GPP. Getting 2 unis up at education, the capital having both garden and the national epic, will result in 3 scientists generated just in time (1st capital, 2nd in 2nd city, 3rd in capital again).
Not sure you could do this as easily with Maya, would require a lot of timing because the Maya GP DOES increase the cost of the next one as far as i recall, and they generate new ones a lot slower than babylon in the early game.
The window is narrow, because your universities, rationalism policy etc. are pushing you towards architecture, but you want to hold off as long as possible to generate the max amount of scientists for a max size bulb. At the same time, you want your universities up in all 4 cities + 8 scientists working and opening rationalism + secularism done by the time you start researching architecture (to maximize the value of your bulb-out when you do it 8 turns later...).
Of course, you really do have to bulb when you reach architecture, otherwise you start burning the multiplier techs (nothing else left to research....)
When I bulbed, I had aproximately 250 science/turn(? don't remember exactly) which for me resulted in 1500 from each scientist, so an initial overflow of 4*1500 = 6000 beakers. Thus, my expected beaker max overflow at the end of the exponential growth was 6000 x 20 = 120 000. I ended up somewhere around 110 000 ish, so it worked out pretty well (discrepancy due to high beaker cost of the latest techs and perhaps not all AI having researched them).
I reached the the apollo program tech and advanced balistics (the SS bosters tech) with the initial overflow before i ran out of steam (meant I could hardbuild 4 spaceship parts before needing the remaining 2 techs, which gave my cap something to do while waiting for the last bulb-out)
Got the Sattelites (for Hubble) from my rationalism finisher, bought a great engineer to finish it in 1 turn (yay tradition) finished just one round of 3 RA's around turn 170 ish, bulbed another 7 Great Scientists (2 of them from Hubble, 1 from Procelain tower - missed leaning tower unfortunately) scientists for around 5500 bulbs each to finish out the 2 last 2 needed techs when i was at around 800 Science/turn (not settling any GS in capital makes it hard to reach 1000/turn...) used Oxford on particle physics and that was pretty much it (the scientist bulbs got me to nanotechnology shy of 3 turns or something).
I had to use space procurements to buy 2 parts, probably because i held off for a number to turns to build apollo (bad idea, thought i had plenty of time, turns out I did not
)
Having a lot of science AI's in the game would help a lot I think, In my game I had a few warmonger (Shaka, Genghis) and a few dud AIs (India, Venice), with 2 decent tech-AIs (Haille, Hiawatha) and Washington, who did little at all.... obviously, more tech-oriented AIs (Sejong) would have helped a lot, as my initial bulb would be helped by more exponential growth (remember, just 1 or 2 techs gives huge exponential returns at that stage)
I'll try another few games to optimize and see if my results are consistent, or if I just got lucky