The key "Aha!" moment was when I was trying to get it to play the SNES ROM and it was struggling with screenshots/inputs. Then I came across the open-source of the original SimCity engine (Micropolis) and pulled that repo down and Claude starting building an internal API to interface with it.
But to read someone else's strategy from just a document, and then implement it, that is new. The old civ did not do that, each AI just had pre-programmed rules.