A friend/coworker of mine and his wife hosted a weekly boardgame night that I attended. Most of the other guests were kinda flaky, and this one particular day, I was the only one who showed up. So it was just me, my friend, and his wife.
Someone suggested Dixit, which I had never played before, but it sounded fun and I was down to play. So we broke it out, shuffled, and started the game.
Now, if you don't know how Dixit works, it's basically a deck of cards with pictures on them. One of a toy abacus. Another of a child pointing a toy sword at a dragon. Another of a winding staircase with a snail at the bottom. Etc.
In one version of the game similar to Apples to Apples or Scategories, everyone gets a hand of cards which they keep hidden. The dealer announces a clue and everyone (including the dealer) contributes a card from their hands face-down to the center of the table and the dealer shuffles them together and reveals them all at once without revealing whose card is whose. Then players vote which one they think matches the clue. You get points as a player if others vote for your card or if you vote for the one the dealer picked. As a dealer, you get points if close to 50% of the players vote for yours.
I was the dealer this round. One of the cards in my hand was of a ship's anchor. That's when it came to me.
See, the friend/coworker and I both worked in web software development. His wife didn't. And I came up with the perfect play. I gave the clue "hyperlink." Hyperlinks on web pages are created using the HTML <a> tag. The "a" stands for "anchor." And any web developer would know that.
When the vote came in, I got one vote for my card from my friend and his wife failed to select the correct card and so didn't get any points. It was a slam dunk move. But I felt a little bad for excluding my friend's wife from an inside-knowledge thing.
The next round, my friend was the dealer and he picked a rule/card that was an inside-knowledge thing between the two of them. (A line from a poem they both knew well, the next line of which related to the picture of the card.) So I was glad of that.
Well, there's your problem. Civ 5 had a thing where research took more science points to complete the more cities you had. The ideal number of cities to own was five. If you had even a single city over that, even if science output was maxed out in all cities, it would take longer to research anything than for a player with only five cities.
I'm pretty sure I ended it with 25 cities and roughly 500 to 600 science per turn output. Just because there's an established way to play doesn't mean that you can't find alternative paths with the proper civ.
I think you're missing my point because I knocked out a science civ with pure gold and warfare and then switched my focus to science and outscienced a science civ.
Most people go tall or wide. I go wide and tall. It takes a very long time but once I get production ramped up I am literally unstoppable. It's just a matter of time. Cities can easily accommodate a population of 20 with internal happiness at that age.
While you're obviously not wrong to play the way you like playing, you won because none of your opponents were playing effectively with the strategy Vindictive describes. You can comfortably get a science victory centuries before 1900 without even playing a civ that has science buffs. Someone playing tall science well doesn't need to ever let the game get anywhere near 1900.