A Civilization 7 player stacked so many bonuses they broke the game and it started demanding negative food

pcgamer.com:

With Civilization 7's new ability to mix-and-match leaders and civs, and all the bonuses available from civics, wonders, and new features like leader attributes, there is a goofy amount of optimizing you can do. While playing a preview build of the game—which isn't out for a couple more weeks yet—YouTuber Drongo decided to see how far they could push it. It's safe to say that they pushed it to its limit, because the game stopped working.

You can watch Drongo's video above. It's sponsored by 2K for a new channel called One More Turn, so consider the praise for Civ 7 with that context in mind, but the mechanics of the game-breaking optimization are the interesting thing to me. It was clear to me from my own experiences previewing Civ 7 that you can go wild with bonus stacking if you want to, but I'm not really the theorycrafting type—I just want to build cool wonders so I can admire them, not because I have some big plan in mind.

Drongo is the other kind of player. I'll leave the full details of this game-breaking build to the video, but the gist is that playing as Confucius with the Khmer civ, Drongo focused all his energy on stacking food and growth bonuses. Just a few of them:

By turn 76, Drongo had stacked around 18 bonuses and was producing 263.5 food per turn. For comparison, at turn 87 in a recent game, I was producing a pathetic 59 food per turn. Granted, I had been playing in exactly the opposite manner: focusing all my energy on pointlessly building a really long Great Wall, purely for aesthetic reasons. (I think that makes my leadership style more historically accurate.)

Sadly, Drongo did not get to create the world's first urban sprawl before the invention of mathematics, because Civilization 7 simply couldn't handle that much food and that many people. At turn 98, he noticed that his capital had stopped growing. Upon further inspection, he discovered that Civ 7 was asking for -1112 food to produce a new citizen. It's not clear why the game invented the