Well here's a summary of how last night's attempt at a little more difficult game.

1. Using the same strategy as the last time around to start it off I became one of the top two largest contiguous countries.
   
2. Lived in peace and harmony many many years gradually absorbing the cities that in my expansion I had surounded. Build the UN headquarters and get myself elected world leader, game ends prematurely in my victory. I thought this sucked so I went back made sure that didn't happen.
   
3. Go many more years and accidently finish my space ship. Oops reload imediately prior and make sure cities don't automatically build SS parts.
   
4. Start a world war, I (playing as chinese) attack India, their ally, Russia, attacks me. Me being the biggest and badest won out when the other mutual defense treaties go into affect so the following occured: Japan attacks India, Americans attack Russia, India attacks Rome.
   
5. I get the resources I wanted on the map and declare peace with all the parties involved, but of course since they were my allies at the time I didn't think much of it. They stayed at war so then it became: Rome still at peace with me, Russia now at peace, India as well, and Japan and America at war with me.
   
6. After the generous use of modern armor (which I didn't even have around, but it takes between 1 and 3 turns to build in about 20 of my cities) my world domination looked like it would have been very possible, then I made the mistake of declaring peace with Japan and America.
   
7. I win the cultural victory. I get annoyed by winning when I don't want to and go to bed (somewhere around 1970AD I think).
   

I have a feeling that if I want the games to last more than 5 hours I'll need to seriously crank up the difficulty level. But I already know the computer cheats.