I've been playing Civ 3 since about 2001. For many years now, I've been in the habit of cheating a certain way, a habit I can't seem to kick, and I'm wondering whether anyone else does this. (I only play solitaire.)

The way I cheat is by pre-exploring my starting continent, deciding where I will put all my cities, and then restarting at 4,000BC. The reason I do this is because I like to place my cities in a pattern, at least for the most part, leaving only 1 or 2 squares overlapping. In other words, fairly far apart, but making sure there aren't any unused squares inbetween, if at all possible. It irritates the heck out of me if I get into a situation where I have too many overlapping squares, or more than one or two unused squares. I often restart on an entirely new map if I find I can't make a city layout that is acceptable to me.
I find myself unable to break this habit. I cannot remember the last game I played without cheating like this. I do it because it is the most enjoyable way for me to play.

Anyone else do this?

Oh, and needless to say, the city placements by my neighboring AI Tribes usually frustrate me, since their "pattern" never matches mine. I would guess that, on average, a neighboring Tribe with 10 cities might have one or two that I can fit into my "pattern", with the rest getting razed. Even then, I run into problems with mountains or coastlines, but I usually make do.

I just explore and plop down cities as I can. I used to be very conscientious about avoiding overlapping tiles, but I've started packing my cities closer together since I realized that none of them are likely to use all the tiles they get even with the overlap. Now, I just try to avoid overlapping more than 6-8 tiles per city, depending on how tightly they are packed.

Because of the corruption involved in a sprawling empire, I mostly don't bother resettling AI cities either. I do usually have conquered cities build workers down to Size 1, which gives me extra slaves and reduces foreign citizen count in my cities, but unless the city is really badly placed (or I can get a lot of improvement in tiles), the bother of resettling an AI city isn't usually worth the time.

I like to play Pangaea maps, so exploring the entire land mass and restarting is definitely not an option for me. :)
My current game is on the largest map size, I'm in the middle ages, and I still haven't found all the edges of the land mass or the last few AI civs.

Edit: All that said, you do you. If that's how you like to play, then I say go for it.

I thankfully haven't resorted to that yet, but I'm not against reloading if an unguarded Worker or Settler walks blindly into a newly-spawned Barbarian. Closer to your scenario, if I happen to roll a really good map, I'll play until things go badly or I screw up, and then I'll start over (using my acquired knowledge). My rationale? Uh, I'm sure others have done much worse.

My people always worship the great god Saveload. He is a merciful god, though he does sometimes demand work.