alternative strategies to outback tycoon?

[king of nowhere]

I know one way to win outback tycoon relatively easy at high level:
- at beginning, beeline getting new settlers; make no districts or buildings save for a few trade routes. make workers, but don't improve much ground. absolutely do not chop forests.
- get conservation. start making naturalists. use the builders you made previously to plant forests for the bonus appeal. chop rainforests that give appeal penalty and plant forest.
- with all those parks your gold is growing. you can start buying naturalists and workers.
- as soon as you get world war, make only AIF projects in every city. keep buying naturalists and workers.

Using that strategy, I got up to 1300 gold per turn, and I'm sure others got even more.

But it's really LAME!

I mean, the disclaimer says something like "explore a mysterious continent, and turn this wilderness into a great country". that's what civ is about, great. Except it is the total opposite of what I'm doing there.
Here I find a wilderness, I say "This may look like wilderness, but it is actually PROTECTED wilderness!". Then I chop all the ugly-looking trees and replace them with more photogenic trees, and I build nothing but armies that I will send to fight literally on the other side of the world.
I don't need any tech in the tech tree, and civics progress is also irrelevant. I also don't need to do much exploring, save for finding gold - necessary to get 2 settlers - and possibly a wonder. After that, I could disband my explorer. there is no incentive whatsoever to really explore. The one game where I tried to explore and build a REAL civilization, I couldn't win on settler.

So I wonder, is there some other strategy that will give a comparable gold-per-turn while being more satisfying to play?

 

[christophius1]

I just finished it on Prince with 600 GPT, but that score was sufficient to have won on King. My strategy was a mix of building harbors, commercial hubs and the associated improvements, but then once the world wars hit, I used farmers to basically deforest all of Western Australia to hurry along AIF production. This scenario basically forces AIF production out the wazoo. Without it, I don't think it's mathematically possible to hit the gold thresholds within the allotted turn limit.

 

[I_pity_the_fool]

I thought the usual strategy was to settle areas with lots of forest, grow normally for a while, focusing on gold and then when you've done the AIF civic to start chopping forests and building AIF projects. There's no need for wilderness parks at all.