Mine was a long time ago before there were other humans...
...and the world was plagued with sniveling,greedy, quarelling AI's.
There was a little yellow city which was reasonably priced and nicely situated from what I could tell. Somehow the Yellow capital had fallen and all their cities were very reasonably priced
But by coincidence there was many many ships and a several other units near that city which were thrown in on the deal which was like 40 gold!!! If I remember rightly in the uppr teens was the number of ships. Remember how they used to come up on your coast cities in droves and whomp away futile-ly? And once one of their carriers was empty it seemed to never get refilled and wandered around aimlesly til it threw anchor near you and just sat there.
Well this time here was all these destroyers, cruisers and seems like even a battleship next to this newly bribed city, which must have been on their way to comit suicide on my city nearby, and bingo! they are now mine.
But what a huge resource deficit!! it was all I could do to find ways for them to go into the cities they could to be disbanded or re-homed to new cities that could support them to try and save some resourses or units. Some sadly had to be disbanded at sea, I mean how many resources does it take to make even a cathedral!?!..of course we hoped the crews were saved.
Now that I think about it in those games if an AI city admired your Civ it would all at once join you!

Arthur's forces are next to the French city of Camelot. On the first turn at 3950 BC:

First the French built JS Bach’s, then the Barbs suddenly landed and captured Camelot because the French Warriors rashly came out to block my path, a Barb Horseman was within contact distance of my Spy and the Barb Leader was exposed and within the ambit of my (bribed) Horseman! I had enough gold in the coffers to bribe Camelot the next turn.

As a picture is worth a thousand words here is the smallest pic I can manage - my Horseman is about to capture the Barb Leader:

• Ai city
  
• 4 special
  
• river
  
• lighthouse
  
• 1000 bc
  

Nice 3000 year birthday present.

It was a very different war after that.

In my current game, a horde of barbarians appeared on a small, fertile, 4-special penninsula on a continent dominated by those Guiness-guzzling Celts. In the past, whenever I saw a horde on someone else's continent I thought, "How nice! they are bothering someone else!" But I've just been reading over some threads here on bribing barbarians (thankyew thankyew) and I realized what opportunities I've been missing.

So this time I sent a couple of transports with spies, engineers and a few combat units. Bribed the barbs very cheap (unfortunately only 4 were left when I got there), used a bribed piece to kill the one protecting the leader (e tu Brute!), took the leader's ransom as reimbursement, and built a city w airport on the spot with the engineers. Now my 16 year spaceship just launched (late; I'm not real good at Diety yet) and the spies are on their way to visit the Celts who are scrambling to build a faster ship! It's going to be an interesting 11 years.