Science victory T231. To start with the ending, I misplayed the final ~20 turns. Earlier, I did note that getting the space ship parts to the capital would be tricky (I had not built any roads), but when it came down to it, I finished Apollo way too late, and I did not have enough gold to buy airports everywhere. On turn 226, I researched my final tech, and had the money to buy all the parts, but that was also the turn I completed Apollo, so the parts still had to float to the capital.
Back to the beginning, after tradition I opened Exploration. My go-to filler tree is usually Patronage, and this game I missed the Forbidden Palace, and being to buy city states cheaply, so happiness was short and I used more hammer cargoes than I usually do. The point of Exploration was the extra movement (I had decided on some naval warfare), and the hammer policy for coastal cities. I nevertheless did not rush into galleas. I first went Acoustics, then into Metal Casting, and only then into Compass. Around the turn 130-140 mark I set aside some time to build a fleet of 7 galleas (with two to follow later), and that proved sufficient to conquer the AI. My targets were Washington (Temple of Artemis, Colossus), and Rio de Janeiro (Great Lighthouse, Great Wall, Machu Picchu, Mausoleum, Terracotta). After a short delay, also Palenque (all of the faith wonders, of course) and I wiped the remaining Mayan cities off the map. Even on Prince Pacal managed a decent prophet and missionary spam (he had already converted one of my cities that I had
just converted to my own religion), and did not want to bother defending my cities religiously.
I might have resumed hostilities against the other civs for plundering and lucrative peace deals (although Prince AI did not really have enough money for good deals), but I was too lazy for it. Also, despite my warmongering, I could still trade luxuries with Alexander, so perhaps peace was for the best.
I did not have the best transition into Plastics as you might hope for a science victory. Ideally, you would instantly buy research labs in all cities. However, the capital was still building Big Ben, and Samoa was still working on Statue of Liberty (needed for Mercantilism), so I could not start buying labs until about 5 turns after getting the tech, so I ended up buying some and building the rest (anyway I needed to save some money for space ship parts). The slow labs did not hurt my game too much, though, since my 8 cities were already making decent science even without the labs. The final mistake was 'greeding' Apollo and Hubble in the capital: I started building Apollo, then, after my final natural scientist spawn, I engineered Hubble (I spawned one engineer and no merchants, which is pretty decent), then continued building Apollo. I should instead have faith-purchased an engineer (I just fell short of the 2500 scientist before turn 226 anyway), and engineered Apollo as well (you can engineer that, right?).