Ugh, really terrible game for me. I'll post the standard summary when I get home and have time to upload the save.
Basic result: ~T292. Two key mistakes. 1) Playing 100% peaceful. 2) Thinking I could skip research labs and bulb scientists 8 turns after stocking public schools.
#2 is a result of playing almost exclusively domination lately... I got confused between chateau and airports, thinking I just needed Flight for both, so I used Oxford on Public Schools and bulbed my way through Radio and Flight by burning all my GS. I only planted one GS, as a result.
I also didn't fill Rationalism until after Aesthetics. Another lesson I'd forgotten. Silly rabbit, Culture VC is Science VC.
#1... well I should know better but I forgot that you can't play peaceful next to Poland without greatly impacting your turn of victory. Peaceful CV is IMHO inferior to carefully targeted aggression in terms of finish times anyway, but with Poland, doubly so. I tried to play peaceful and immediately regretted it. To those who think that *not being aggressive* (IE not forward-settling) is how you avoid conflict, sorry, I think you're wrong. You need to grab the most productive city spots for good mid-game growth, and it's worth building units to defend those spots. There are virtually no long-term diplo hits for defending yourself effectively.
IMHO, there are two ways to avoid conflict with Poland.
1) Beat him down early.
2) Bribe him repeatedly the entire game.
If you think #2 is cheaper and slows down your VC less than #1, especially for cultural VC, well I think you're wrong.
IMHO it would have been better to plan to fight him from the start, even deviating from my tech path and build order to do so.
After reading the other results, I think Tabarnak's 5-city solution was the ideal approach. Instead of bribing Poland all game, one should invest in units up front, build 3 cities, wait for him to put up like 5-6 cities, which won't take long, and then respond to his aggression when it inevitably comes by getting two of his expos either via peace deals or outright capture. Minor diplo hits at most, but likely zero.
Tabarnak!
Anyway, here is the result of my misguided attempt to remain peaceful when surrounded by aggressive forward-settlers. Russia was up on my doorstep by t65. Poland by t32. Poland was very grateful that I decided to open Tradition, and delay building a settler until t40, so he forward-settled on me with his first and second satellites, leaving me terrible city spots, and he still wanted my land. I spent the entire game and *most of my gpt* bribing him not to attack me. These bribed wars backfired, as he quickly took out Indonesia (entirely), shoshone (two cities), one randomly placed brazilian expo, most of Ethiopia, and was soon a runaway in every sense but culture.
My consistently low gpt put pressure on my build queue and ability to trade lux for lux, which in turn hurt my growth a lot. With Petra, I should have been size 30 by t150. Instead, I spent the whole game making hard choices between production, growth and specialists.
Also, randomly, despite Ethiopia being down to one city, I still had to put out 40k tourism total to overcome him. He managed to ally almost every cultural CS and with my bribe-induced financial woes, I couldn't do anything to stop it. I eventually managed to get Shaka, Shoshone and Poland to attack Ethiopia at once to try to slow him down... no dice. All their combined attacks couldn't break Addis Ababa. I convinced Poland to capture a bunch of his CS allies... but it was too late. I even blocked World's Fair, but it didn't help. Or rather... it could have been much worse!!!
At least I didn't have to waste my own hammers on WF, so I got every CV wonder that I wanted... which ended up being more than I needed. Without conquest, you can't spawn enough artists to fill uffizi, sistine chapel, louvre and hermitage... another reason you need to capture. (I did eventually get enough art to fill them via culture flip... I flipped two polish cities and one Shoshone city and got 3 artworks... but it was post musician bulb...)
Going for hermitage was another mental error. I chose that religious belief instead of +15% growth, another mistake. This isn't even close to my own Immortal CV record, but it's been so long since I've tried, I kind of forgot how to do it.
I also went for victory too early, which cost me a lot of turns. I built the musician's guild on t230, which was incredibly optimistic given my influence level. After faith-purchasing, and completing Broadway (which I'd kept at one turn) I ended up short: 90% influence on t250 after bulbing 6 GMs. Took me another 40 freaking turns to overcome him after that, and I ended up spawning another GM naturally as a result.
I did manage to dig up every artifact I could find, so I had a ton of raw tourism, but not nearly enough theming bonuses. I should have gone for Globe Theatre instead of Hermitage I think...
So poorly played.
And on top of that, this could easily be t220 victory via eliminating Brazil and Ethiopia or heck, even by bullying Poland early. Ah well, it was a good reminder. I'm once again fully convinced that all these threads where people say "you wouldn't have that problem if you'd played peaceful and not aggressively put out cities"... well... they're just finishing 40 turns later than they could have because of that philosophy. Especially with Poland as a neighbor. Just my opinion.
He went from Guarded to Friendly in one turn and the text was still bright red. I'm not that foolish!
