Actual population of cities in Civ5 (I grew a city from size 1 to 40 to test this)

For those interested:

One thing that always annoyed me in Civ 5 was that I could never see what the world's total population was during or after a game (along with a game replay etc). So I went and created a scenario with one city surrounded by rivers and wheat-farms to see what the demographics screen said was my actual population at each city population/size level (1, 2, 14 etc). This is the data I got:

The Data will be presented as:

City Size. Actual Population

I stopped after my city grew to size 40 because seriously who can grow a city that large?

TL;DR: here are the actual statistics (ala the demographics screen) for one city as it grows from size 1 to 40.


The latest patch helped a lot with having more realistic total world populations - although to actually figure that out you would have to scrolls across the map recording each city's size and then cross reference it with this information before finally adding all the figures together. My guess is a huge size world at 4 billion years with medium rainfall and a temperate climate would be the most accurate to today's world size, Pangaea with a low sea level might create large total populations as well.

My current game is a huge continents (3 billion years) on prince, 22 civs playing as Songhai and funnily enough Polynesia (who started on a lone island in what is probably the equivalent of the Pacific lol) have the largest city at size 30 and largest total population even though they only have 4 cities.

That a cool chart, I've always wondered what the actual population of my cities was and how close it mirrored real light. Most of my cities cap off mid-20's by mid-game, which makes sense compared todays modern world cities.

Thanks for putting in all that work!!

Actually those numbers look pretty good, nice to see something making a bit of sense.

I think hit size 42 on a space win in one game. I'll have to look it up this evening.

It was a Continents normal start using Gandhi. Think Large map with... 10ish AI's? Normal CS. I didn't really have great Maritime until near the end.

So it's not quite exponential, which I rather thought it would be.

If you graph it, you can see the curve looks to be heading exponentially but levels off around the 30s where the amount the intervals increase by slows down to 1-2 thousand. There are some exceptions (39-40 = 5,000) but on the whole it heads up in a much more linear line than the curve I expected.

could someone who enjoys that sort of thing chart it with size of food basket per size level?

See this post, SpearMan !

Nice chart! I'm glad they finally did away with the asinine population model of the old Civ games:
10,000
30,000(+20K)
60,000(+30K)
100,000(+40K)
... etc.

I hated how I could have a 10,000 pop city at 4000 B.C. (very unrealistic)
and could never really get anything close to a realistic size in the Modern era. This isn't yet up to realistic (India would have to have close to 100 cities at 30 pop to hit their actual current population, or about 40 cities at 40 pop) but it is a step in the right direction for sure. Balance issues prevent the game from accurately demonstrating the population boom that went along with the industrial revolution.

I'd like if the total population counted not only cities, but also had a function adding pop for each individual tile to illustrate suburbs and farmland. Perhaps, each tile worked in cities radius should give something like 1% pop in addition to what the cities pop. So a 40 pop city using all 36 of it's tiles would get 306,030 per tile, or an additional 11.1 million total.

Seems some pretty random intervals. Is it meant to be following any particular formula?

Useful information - thanks

Thanks for the info, nice to know.
National population in the demographcs screen still seems very low. Real nations tend to have a lot more smaller towns than large cities and some natons still have a large rural population. It would be better if improvements would count a bit towards total population. It would be even better if trading posts would be replaced with cottages and towns and those were mainly used to calculate total population.
City population looks halfway realistic though, if a bit high. I usually get a populatin over 50 in my capital when I'm playing Aztec.
The largest city in the real world is Chongqing in China with a population of about 31 million, so in Civ terms between 40 and 41. It isn't the capital though and does't have any wonders (except the Three Gorges Dam which is not in Civ5).
Looks a bit like modern day Mordor in this pic.

You table is flawed! Population grows even without the size growing EVERY TURN. It all depends on food ammount. So if you reach the size 2 with larger food overflow , you ll have more population then another size 2 city with less food.

I thought Tokyo was the world's largest city. It has a metro of almost 32-33 million people, which would make it a size 40 city, or higher.

I've never even heard about Chongqing, I thought that Bejing and Shanghai were China's largest cities. But I could be wrong...

Save_Ferris said:

I've never even heard about Chongqing, I thought that Bejing and Shanghai were China's largest cities. But I could be wrong...

Click to expand...

There is 30 million people in the Chunking municipality which is something between a county and a state in US terms. When we start talking about city population at this level it becomes hard to define exactly what constitutes an individual city vs an urban area etc. For instance about 4.5 million people live in Sydney, Australia but even though it is generally all known as Sydney, the city started as many different railway towns within that area which were very much different towns (with wild bush in between etc) - it's now all one large urban area and yet people clump them all together as Sydney even though there are different local governments/shires/counties etc. When talking about other multi-cities like New York-New Jersey at the very least in that example there is a state boundary separating the two.

Shanghai is still generally recognised as the world's largest city. But at that level a better question is where does one city end and another begin, if at all?

Ermak- said:

You table is flawed! Population grows even without the size growing EVERY TURN. It all depends on food ammount. So if you reach the size 2 with larger food overflow , you ll have more population then another size 2 city with less food.

Click to expand...

Lol okay then it might be flawed. I'd very much like to see a screen shot or data showing your own figures in a game / controlled worldbuilder test etc (not trying to be provocative, i'm actually interested in this).

Interesting.

It has always annoyed me that the numbers are so low. It was even a problem in civ4 also. Modern civilizations count their population in billions, not millions (for large countries, anyway). My world-spanning empire has 50 million citizens? Please. Adding a few '0's to the numbers on the demographics screen wouldn't hurt at all.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?...738267301079.168560.1408037300&type=3&theater

lol try to beat that while playing legit !!!!!!!!!!

Strategist83 said:

Modern civilizations count their population in billions, not millions (for large countries, anyway).

Click to expand...

Read: 2 civilizations.

Interesting and informative, now I know how many souls cry out in anguish when I nuke a city.