So we were playing pegasus today and we were forced into making an interesting play. It was a four player game. The very first card that came up was a choice of gaining a population at the expense of fuel or I believe losing a morale. We got the extra pop. Then as the game went on, we(the humans) are getting pounded by cylon ships, civilian ships are getting destroyed left and right. So we, decide to start "gaining" pop by playing a preventative policy for population, then executive ordering the other human to activate communications to push a civilian ship unprotected into the raiders and hope they activate. That way the civilian ship was destroyed and out of the game, there was one less pop lost and that ship couldn't be destroyed down on new caprica. Once we got to new caprica it was just a matter of getting Galactica back into orbit and having the admiral tell it to jump immediately away, we were alright with morale because we fought hard for morale checks and played Major Victories any chance we got, we were fine with food and fuel, and population couldn't be reduced to zero because there is only 12 max on all the civilian ships added together. Even after both of us humans died on new caprica we were still sitting at about 2 morale... even with every civilian ship being destroyed we still had 3 extra population... due to the two preventative policies and the extra pop from the crisis card.
In short, we learned that you need to get a couple of extra pop one way or another, which really is very possible to do with the "preventative policy-sacrifice civilian ship" method, and since there are not a TON of crisis cards that hit pop, then, as long as you managed to keep your other resources at at least 2 when galactica returns, you need only to wave to it as it passes by, haha.
I'm not saying that this will work everytime or that it is anything close to resembling a flawless plan... we've had plenty of games end before new caprica even started, but I thought it was interesting that I have now seen this strategy work in a few different games, and worth mentioning.