VICTORY! Cultural Victory in 1916 AD!
Looking at the game results page now, I sure got fortunate. Other results reported were culture losses in 1872 and 1907 and a spaceship defeat in 1900 AD. My result would have lost to those, although I could have speeded mine up in response to early threat detection, by throwing defense to the wind and using the slider right after Mass Media or even Biology. I don't know if my game was an outlier in AI-AI wars (there were a lot, but none involving runaway Pacal) or just in the luck of them not trying cultural victory. Or maybe it was the gameplay, where my hogging early wonders (especially Sistine) left the AIs not trying.
I sure don't win a lot of games where the score graph looks like this:
and definitely very few when the power graph looks like this!
Thanks to Sullla for the game. I enjoyed it as a variant inflicted strictly by the map, like Focal Point. That might be an area to investigate more for some RBCiv events - rather than wacky variant goals (though we like those too), some more "play the hand you're dealt" games with straight rules but an unusual map. I'll check with my muse.