SOTD15: Epic Railroad

Yeah I get that glitch a lot(in my normal SP games without scenarios/mod w/e), and that is just the highest number accepted in java(python too maybe? not familiar with the language)
2^31 - 1, anything higher gives overflow errors

I get this all the time too, usually when I have more than one worker doing improvements and one worker finishes it, the other ones show weird, random-looking numbers.

This happens a lot with me. If you go to teh Civ 4 funny screenshots you will see bunch of pictures like this one.

I think it happens because it's still stuck on displaying information for a workers action but another unit is selected. How long would it take an archer to build a railroad? Apparently a few trillion years.

THis also happens when it thinks you want to build a non-route outside your cultural borders.

Actually, if you look at the box, that prompts for a quarry, not a railroad.

well ... this is often happening to me, when i mouse over fortify-unit-until-fully-healed button ... once even negative (!) number

Oops it was a quarry my bad. But a pretty epic quarry. And the 2^31 explanation sounds right, so it probably IS 2147483647 turns every time. But why use 2^31? Civilization holds new mysteries every day. And this may be a stupid question, but I have lotsa Civ3 screenshots, so are they useless or can they be submitted?

Civ 4 must save/store its numerics as a 32-bit integer. 32 bits allows 4,294,967,296 values. This could be set to correspond to 1 through 4,294,967,296, or 0 through 4,294,967,295, but typically when using 32 bit integers in computers, you use the range −2,147,483,648 through 2,147,483,647, to allow for the possibility of negative values. With this convention, 2,147,483,647 is the largest integer value that can be saved.

For whatever reason, Civ 4 sometimes calculates turns required as maxed out, probably from some sort of work-around to divide by zero errors. In calculating turns to complete a work task, it takes the base amount of time for the task and divides by the working unit's work speed modifier. When the unit selected, in this case an archer, has no modifier, it tries to divide by zero, can't, and so defaults to the highest value it can take.

The real bug is that the game displays worker action times for non-worker units, as it sometimes does. Since you still don't have the option of assigning the archer to the task, its just a quirk of the GUI.

funny...either that is truely an epic, large quarry, or the workers are doing a really crappy job and building it slowly