That would be the very Rome of the game I just finished. If only there were some civ that could develop cities faster, perhaps by taking advantage of a strong capital. I've tried this in a few partial games and the problem is delaying expansion to more cities, they don't have enough time to develop enough to build and staff universities when you reach Education.
Ideally you do this all on just one city before expanding. There exists a particular plan to fix any civilization's early science speed up through the midgame: build the Great Library, shoot Philosophy, and build the National College early. I was still stewing on that, there has to be a better way to do this. It went super-wide with Liberty and developed well early using Rome's bonus, but just fell behind the pace at all the science milestones and couldn't get to the endgame beaker explosion soon enough to make that up.
So my previous Rome game didn't really work out.
