So far so good. And good, that tells me that villain Cyrus is a good 50 population ahead of my next potential opponent.
BTW, note that "you have shared your technological discoveries with us." This isn't the same thing as "fair and forthright" and it's much less commonly seen. Turns out that you get this for trading a monopoly tech that you have but nobody else does. It counts even if the recipient is just about to finish researching it themselves. With this trick, I got an extra +2 diplo with each of my supporters as well.
First things first, though. I need some extra time to finish growing all the cities. And I want the AI populations as high as we can get, too. So the first UN resolution proposed was Environmentalism.
Curiously, everybody liked the idea. (I don't think I've ever seen any AIs actually vote no on a civics resolution?)
Peter and Hammurabi got bored waiting for me to milk the population score, and declared war together on Cyrus. Access denied. I can't allow anybody to pass Cyrus in population and ruin my carefully rigged election. (And why in the everlovin world did P and H vote to stop a war they declared one turn ago and are winning?!)
Well, I overdid it a wee bit in pumping my population - that's over the 60% limit for electing a diplomatic victor. Nothing that a couple gifted cities can't fix. And you can see that there's still some growth headroom in many cities, but I don't feel like milking this any further. One last overview:
And there we go.
Diplomatic Victory in 1834 AD. 1319 points.
I'm confident that score is unbeatable in practical terms. Anything higher will just reflect more tolerance for milking (build denser, pump cities with Cereal Mills then give them away) rather than any additional strategy. That's 88% of the world population voting for me. (With four remaining rivals, it's impossible to get more than 90%. 60% can be held by the winner, with 10% each by four rivals and one of them has to be the election opponent.)
Replay, where I finished the land-grab in the direction of my opponents, reaching about par in city count and land area. But then I had that whole backyard with that much land again.
Fun game, if not exactly up there on the challenge meter. Anything that gets me thinking and guessing on micromanagement is a different scenario indeed.