How far into the future can Civ4 go?

[MattiK]

I've read interesting articles about Civ2 and Eternal War played on it. That got my attention all right. I'd like to try that on Civ4. Maybe not as far as Mr. Moore played it, but maybe somewhere around 3025-3040 AD. Before I begin, I'd like to know game's limitations and what parameters I need to set. Do I need to set turn limit, and how high can it go? Are there mods that would be useful for this endeavor, like new tech to research and new military units to wage the war?

[edit]
Also if someone has already done it, I'd like to know about it.

 

[ChaosSlayer]

try C2C mod - its the freaken LARGEST mod in terms of eras, units and timeframe.

 

[Nightinggale]

In terms of hard limits for game lengths, my guess would be turn counter overflow. That will happen around 2.1 billion turns (32 bit signed int) and you will run into soft limits before that. Most likely the issue is that the game stores something each turn for the history display at the end of the game. Being a 32 bit game, it will crash once it use 4 GB of memory, though there are indications of it crashing earlier than that. In theory you can keep playing until you run out of memory, which would take quite a while. I think that's it for the technical limitations.

I'm not sure what you need to set in order to make the game play forever, but I think it's doable from XML. Maybe all you need to do is to make a custom game and uncheck victory conditions related to turns/time.

As for mods for this purpose, C2C is what comes to mind for me as well.