My last game, I was ahead in score and land (I just finished wiping out Shaka), but was a few techs behind my overseas partners.
However, once Biology hit, I started raking in the profits:
First off, my farms got boosted.
Second, I had 3 really good cottage cities, so I could finally afford to switch out of vassalage and into free speech.
Third, I finally got my GP farm set up (I didn't have a good food farm beforehand, so I waited until I got the National Park for my GP farm).
4th, I got sushi and mining, and spread them to all my cities.
I was tracking it - with Wall Street in my HQ city, I was either breaking even or losing maybe 1-2 coins per turn. Throw on a double shrine city (thank you Asoka, although it would have been nice to get the shrine money before 1800 or so) as that wall street city, and it alone was at 700 coins per turn - nearly half my income was from that one city!
That's with +11 hammers and +9 or so food per turn each from the corporations. Basically, I just had 2-3 cities spam executives like crazy, and had both of them in all my cities (even my little filler cities, I had my executives there before the settlers. Nothing better than having a city of size 1 get +10 food and +12 hammers building that courthouse).
By the end of the game (space race win), I was up to 3000 beakers per turn, and practically all my cities were running 4-5 engineers. That's the key - I was probably 20 base hammers ahead in all my cities thanks to corporations. And it doesn't cost me anything (being in Free Market helped, I'm sure). Throw on forge/factory/power, and that's 40 hammers a turn in my top 10-15 cities. I had cities at the end with 40 or 50 base hammers (over 100 a turn even when building research) that were just building research, since I had enough other cities building my spaceship components. Even though Joao and Frederick both built apollo before me, neither of them had any components on their ship until I launched. I really should have tried to not build anything, then the turn after I finished the last techs, build one component per city. I'm sure I could have still finished ahead of anyone else.
