[aetherson]

I didn't buy the game either, but I've been following the news on it. What I've been seeing is that it's difficult to get population north of 200,000, though I would imagine not impossible as the accumulated skill of the player-base increases.

So, yeah, a couple of orders of magnitude... except, somewhat upthread from here someone makes the claim that a population of 100,000 sims actually corresponds to about 10,000 modeled sims, and then 90,000 "phantom population" on top of that. If true, this suggests only one order of magnitude more population than your Tropico examples, and the achievement is considerably less impressive.