Higher pop in marathon speed?

Just came across this thread. http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=11611733&postcount=11

Is it true that you can get to 90+ pop in a city in marathon mode? How does it work? I assume each citizen consumes 2 food so it means a minimum of 180 food, which is crazy. Is there something that I don't know of?

Elfdemon said:

Just came across this thread. I assume each citizen consumes 2 food so it means a minimum of 180 food, which is crazy. Is there something that I don't know of?

Click to expand...

Civil Society in the Freedom tree: Specialists consume only half the normal amount of Food.

And, well, with 92 citizens, that's a lot of specialists.

They must have played well out past the normal game ending point, and not had anybody bothering them much. Also, to get that kind of citizenry, you'd have to have your city set on max food focus the whole way, and pretty much no production. If you had any production tiles to speak of instead of all food, you'd never be able to get that high. So basically what you've got there is a city that can't build a damn thing except people. Amazing, still.

I've no idea if you can get 90 pop. The best I managed to do was 51 pop... I was playing the Aztecs and I had 8 river tiles near my capital.