Well it's done. Space ship victory in 1886 with nothing but dips/spies and transport vessels. No settlers other than the original 2, who did nothing but move around and use the build command. No military units. No vans.
The worst part was something I hadn't even thought of originally: Pollution. as I was growing, I came to the realization that if I produced more than a certain number of sheilds I'd have a chance to produce skulls that I COULD NEVER CLEAN UP. My original thought was to overcome an initial sheild defecit by building KRC to get up to 30s per turn so I could crank out a spy per turn. Then once the city got to be strong enough I was going to subvert a bunch of cities from weaker opponents to put me over the top for science. But as I was looking around at some of the threads on KRC I noticed comments about pollution and that's when I realized I couldn't go that high. So at that point I just decided to stick with the OCC approach. The bigger AIs grew enough that I always had someone to beg from. I had to almost completely shut down production after discovering Auto and Mass Production until I got the Mass Transit built. Then I could comfortably sustain 20s with no skulls at the end.
After some work in excel, I came to the conclusion that if I could get up to 20s production, I needed 42 dips and just under 12K in gold to build the standard 15-3-3-1-1-1 space ship. When I hit Space Flight, I had over 13k gold, and something like 45 dips in the city with several others scattered about the globe in case anyone started rapid-building SS parts or tried to build Manhattan.
I ended up with two routes in the city as the sioux eventually sent a couple vans my way. My techs for much of the late game were around 4-5 turns each. I think my max output was around 500 beakers with research lab and before flight. Because I was not researching very fast, I did get a fair number of techs from the AIs along the way.
There was very little to build in this other than 1 spy every 2 turns. I built a supermarket just to get one more food out of the city square. I only built the stock exchange near the end, but it probably didn't pay for itself since I was at 100% science most of the time. The offshore platform was built the turn before SF was discovered to give me the 20s production for parts as I didn't need more than the city's 15 base shields the rest of the time. With no roads other than the city square, I only built Superhighways once I got a second trade route from the sioux.
