Shortly before the end of the war, caravels from both Hatshepsut and Roosevelt had found me. I traded with both of them, for example with Hatty:
Roosevelt was similarly ahead of me, but (as it is often the case) he had neglected Civil Service and Paper, so there were some trading possibilities as well.
Then, the 1500AD scoring mark arrived. Let's see where I stand now! First, my empire.
Unfortunately, the captured French cities had suffered from starvation somewhat because of cultural border problems, but overall I can safely say that it wouldn't have been possible for me to home-grow my own cities to such sizes in the same amount of time. Additionally, Louis would no longer pose any threat to me, so this war had been definately worth it! Here's the list of my cities, sorted by size:
Thanks to Bureaucracy, Cuzco was by far my strongest city, and thanks to its age, it was my largest too. That would change soon, though... Anyway, here's a graph showing my crop yield.
Normally, my GNP graph looks similar to this, but not my crop yield graph. 
But then in a normal game, I would have discovered Liberalism already by now, while in this game I'm still researching
Education and still lack Philosophy... 
Anyway, here are my population
statistics.
My population in 1500AD is 32.304.000 - how good this number really is remains to be seen. But again, I'm happy with my results.
What followed was a radical change in my playstyle. From now on, population no longer was important! Instead, research power was. Finally, I adopted Slavery and whipped several universities and other expensive infrastructure. Lots of farms were replaced by cottages. By now, I had generated another great prophet who had constructed the Christian shrine in Chartres, but now I concentrated on another type of great people. I don't think I will have any chance of scoring points for being the fastest to reach the modern age, but there is still one competition left I intend to compete in! Here you can see what I'm talking about:
I wouldn't have founded the city of Huamanga in that spot in a normal game, as its location was quite hammer-poor and missed several resources by one tile. I had only founded it there because it had only one hill and two plains tiles, and the rest were grassland tiles I could irrigate now. Lots of potential for growth, even if it had only one food resource! I planned to let Huamanga be my biggest city at the end of the game, and for exactly that reason it was building the Globe Theatre.
I also avoided building any improvements there that would give me health problems like forges or factories. That resulted in poor production, but with happiness no longer a problem thanks to the Globe Theatre, health and food were the only limiting factors for growth. For that reason, I now concentrated on generating great merchants and merged them into the city, the first in 1595AD. All the nice towns you can see in the shot were replaced by farms eventually, too.
In 1520AD, I discover Philosophy and finally start to research Liberalism. However, I got beaten to it by Hatshepsut by two turns - again, I had to pay the toll for my population-heavy playstyle. That was no real problem though, as my only goals were to survive until 2050AD, and to grow Huamanga as large as I could. Now that the only civ on my continent, France, was no longer a threat, I did not fear Hatty or Roosevelt, even if they were slightly ahead in tech.
Nonetheless, I still tried to reach the modern age as fast as I could. Who knows, maybe I could snag an additional point or three there...? Unlikely, but it can't hurt trying! After researching Astronomy, I traded for some techs.
Yes, I still lacked Engineering. Didn't have much need for that until now... Then, I made some detours that I felt were necessary. First, to Economics to improve my future research speed. Then, to Nationalism for the Taj Mahal, and to Democracy for the Statue of Liberty. I wanted the statue solely for being able to hire an additional merchant, to generate more great merchants for Huamanga! Then, I beelined to Radio, a modern age tech. While doing this, I generated a great scientist to construct an academy in my science city, Vilcabamba.
Vilcabamba was not the ideal science and Oxford University city - Huamanga would have been better. But since all towns there would be replaced by farms eventually, Vilcabamba was my second best city site for that.
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