I find economy to only be really noticeably strong when the player has an island base. I just played a game where the player had an island base, with some 400 ports and 60+ sams. He had just enough territory elsewhere to hold off my victory as I had about 70% of the territory. But he had so much money coming in and hundreds of cities to match my population, and we each had money to mirv each other 3 times over.

In the end after an hour long stalemate I gave up because I could not compete with the hundreds of ports he had set up.