[Daradon]

I'm missing something here, the guy hasn't been able to finish the game by beating the other nations in war? I mean, when you got to the point were you are the dominant superpower there is no problem fixing up the whole world and buying everything for every city.

The way I usually played it was by developing a small nation of a few cities (6-10) of immense economic power. When eventually I got provoked into war (rarely searched it out, just defended my territories and cites from greedy neighbours) I went all out and just flooded the world with artillery. With my high economic output, my science was usually much higher than most others too. I'd be up against a nation (or nations) with 40 or 50 cities (always played on the largest maps) but they couldn't match my economic output. Once I finally got everything switched over and got a beachhead on their continent it was only a matter of time before I took everything over. Then as I felt more safe with my new holdings, I'd switch my main cities back to economics and science, and use the newly taken over cities to produce units. The benefit of this was I'd be raking in so much gold from my cities I could BUY units and upgrades with the rush builds for my newly taken over cites, and quicken the process.

Eventually it got to a point where there was just a wave of artillery sweeping across the globe methodically with an even larger army of engineers behind them cleaning up the mess and increasing the economic output of the cities.

Always stayed away from the nukes. I mean it's fun to do one or twice just to see what will happen, but if you're wanting to make the world a better place and have everything neat and tidy and clean, you delay the Manhattan project as long as you can, so you don't start the nuclear arms race. I would generally build all the science and wonder projects around that, and save that for the end when I didn't have anyone that would challenge me anymore.