30,000 Gold

[Marlos]

Originally posted by starlifter
I once had just over 70,000 gold, so I should have known better than just a 2-byte unsigned Int. The actual answer is a 4-byte signed integer, or 2,147,483,647.

Wow, that's some serious cheese!

Hey, starlifter, could you send me a PM explaining what you mean by a "2-byte unsigned integer" versus a "4-byte signed integer"? I would appreciate an explanation for my own edification. You need not explain it in the thread, up to you, but it isn't really germane to the topic.

 

[starlifter]

I'll explain it here, since it has to do with the common question about gold. Simple, really. The number is stored in 4 bytes. The number can be negative. This means the number can be 2^31-1 (2^32-1 if it were unsigned, meaning no negative values). If it used only 2 bytes, it would be 2^16-1 for unsigned, and 2^15-1 for signed.

I think "they" originally intended to store the money in as a 2 bytes signed integer, which would be a limit of 32,767. They then added a bounds check of 30,000 to fit that approx. number, since 30,000 "looks" better to humans, than 32,767. But... as playtesting went on, they discovered that lo an behold... some people can exceed 30,000 (which is a lot) in 1 turn, and they gave it 4 bytes of storage in place of 2, thus increasing the number far beyond what people could achieve in a game. But for whatever reason, they left the bounds check of 30,000 in. And you can edit that number in the civ2.exe file, thus "raising" the limit of gold in Civ2.

 

[gwuth]

So how do you edit the civ2.exe file, Wordpad?
or do you need a "special program"

 

[The Overlord]

It's really not difficult to reach 30.000 gold but it annoys me all the time when my extra income disappear. All your nice hard work for nothing And regarding the costly things like wonders there should be a bigger reserve of money.

 

[Priha]

I don't see a point in piling up gold just for.. the gold. I just keep income larger than costs. It doesn't matter if it's +100 or +1 as long as it's + something. As long as there's something to research I use all remaining resources in science.. still keeping income just a bit larger than costs. After Fusion Power (I prefer not to waste my funds in researching Future Techs) I tranfer resources from science to luxury, as kind of a reward for the people who has worked as hell for almost six thousand years without decent pay.. Then I just admire my attitute window showing 60 cities full of happy people. By then I usually have 25000 gold piled up and I haven't really even noticed it..

 

[starlifter]

Piling up lots of gold is not efficient, unless you have a specific thing in mind. You gold will be truncated at 30,000 after every turn. But then it can pile up again in one turn, and you can deliver Freight, take bribes, capture cities, etc. and send it as high as you want.... but then it will be truncated again if you don't spend it.

If you ever play a long game with 254 cities, you cannot spend all the gold near then end, esp. if you get all the Future Techs and have nothing else to do with your TSL.


About editing the civ2.exe.... you need a hex editor, or a disassembler. You will ruin the file if you do it with Wordpad. There is a patch to do it for you in the Downloads section. Make a backup first, and then patch the backup. You want to keep a link to the original version, and use it to play games with others so you are all using the same .exe.

 

[Old n Slow]

IIRC, my version 2.40 of civ II had an upper limit of gold at 32,000. So I guess that the .02 worth of "improvement" was to cost an opportunity to store another 2,000 gold.