I was more of a SimCity 3000 guy.

I totally cheated my way through though, cheated past the natural disasters it generated every 4 game years. I'd just save the game just before the next random generated disaster, and let it play on.

If the disaster caused significant damage, I'd just reload the savegame, and it would generate a different disaster. Once it played out a disaster that basically didn't affect my city, I'd run with that, saving lots of game money...