We discovered by accident some features of the game that when put together allowed for an interesting way to win the game and build bigger cities than is normally possible. We discovered that if you settle a city in a far off uninhabited location – Australia was the best – and if you starved the population to the point that it dropped down to one, you could disband the city and have it revert back to a settler unit, except that now it wouldn’t be tied to any other city for its upkeep. (If you do that too close to another of your cities the settlers will be tied to it for upkeep.)

We also discovered that if you drop enough nukes it will start a global warming process and eventually turn all the land terrain features except for mountains into jungle. Now, of course, this royally screwed every remaining civilization on the map, depriving them of most of their crop land, wrecking their productivity and slowly starving them. We also discovered that we could use our upkeep-free settlers (we quickly learned to make a bunch of them before nuking the planet) to “terraform” all that jungle into prime crop land. Before long our cities were back up and running better than ever, while our enemies were being largely taken care of for us by mother nature. Then we proceeded to conquer and terraform the world at our leisure, and develop insanely high population cities.

Damn, I’m a loser.