Well, I played a game tonight, where I experimented with an idea.
Maybe others have tried it before, or thought about it, I'm sure it's not a new idea.
I played the Dutch in a co-op game, four humans versus four tougher computers. We've got a new player to the game, so we toned down the AI. East Meets West was the map, a nice defendable map...
About half way through the game, my goal was to get 10000 of each resource. At 10000 resources above starting resources, the interest the Dutch get is +500. Add in five or so cities, some rare resources, and it should be easy to reach +600 economy cap. It works... I was able to kill off my citizens, gaining back about 30+ pop. cap to boost the size of my army.
Now I'm going to try to see how quickly I can reach this point, making use of the market, rares and ruins bonuses. I don't think this can be of huge use early in the game, if you can survive to GP age or Enlightenment, then you've got a chance at pulling this off.
