20 Culture groups! (but way less techs)

[Bowsling]

Actually, if you wanted to make an even bigger sacrifice, and your scenario is on a preplaced map, you could have up to 60 (31). How? Equal out all the differences between town, metropolis and city. Make it so that there are no buildings that enable cities to become metros, or towns to become cities. Then have some civs start with all their cities either as towns, metros, or cities. However, these three groups would also share many things, such as popheads. Also, they would be three levels of "advancedness" .

 

[wolf_brother]

That would only work as long as you made sure none of the "culture group" with lvl-1 cities aren't near rivers, ponds, or the coast.

 

[nick0515]

Plus if you built units requireing population, or citizens died from flood plains and jungle you would have problems. Not to mention the civs with bigger sized cities would have far more production, tax and science.

EDIt I just realised you said equal out all the differences betweenthe city sizes, tho I don't know how you would do that for production etc. I guess by making almost all terrian yeild nothing...

 

[Bowsling]

Maybe you could fiddle around with yields and food consumption so that cities wouldn't grow anyway? What I meant with equal them out was about unit support and defensive bonuses mostly. But yes, there would be massive production gaps.