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

Good info

 

This is my first post and sorry to revive this old thread but I recently managed to grow my one-city challenge city to size 95 and wanted to post the population numbers from sizes 41-95. The city was actually still churning out a new citizen every 13 or so turns by the time it reached size 95 and I wanted to get to size 100 but my social policies were maxed out except for Autocracy and Order and I had to choose. Suffice it to say that when I clicked one of the two remaining social policy branches, the population summarily collapsed and so here's the numbers I could gather from this one city from sizes 41-95

41-32,794,000
42-35,083,000
43-37,472,000
44-39,963,000
45-42,559,000
46-45,260,000
47-48,069,000 (population of Spain, South Korea)
48-50,988,000
49-54,019,000
50-57,163,000
51-60,422,000 (population of Italy)
52-63,798,000 (population of France, a little more than the population of the UK)
53-67,293,000
54-70,909,000
55-74,647,000
56-78,510,000 (population of Iran, Turkey)
57-82,499,000 (population of Germany)
58-86,616,000
59-90,862,000 (population of Vietnam)
60-95,240,000
61-99,752,000 (population of the Philippines)
62-104,399,000
63-109,182,000
64-114,104,000 (population of Mexico)
65-119,167,000
66-124,372,000 (population of Japan)
67-129,720,000
68-135,215,000
69-140,856,000 (population of Russian Federation)
70-146,647,000
71-152,589,000
72-158,683,000 (population of Bangladesh)
74-164,931,000 (population of Nigeria)
75-177,898,000
76-184,619,000 (population of Pakistan)
77-191,502,000
78-198,547,000 (population of Brazil)
79-205,757,000
80-213,132,000
81-220,677,000
82-228,390,000
83-236,575,000
84-244,332,000
85-252,564,000 (population of the United States in 1990)
86-260,973,000
87-269,559,000
88-278,324,000 (population of the United States in 1999)
89-287,271,000
90-296,400,000
91-305,714,000 (population of the United States in 2009)
92-315,214,000 (population of the United States in 2013)
93-324,901,000
94-334,778,000
95-344,846,000 (population of the United States and Canada combined)

As you can see by a size 95 city, the realism starts to go away. A size 95 has more people than the entire United States! It has more people than all of the former Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact states combined! It has a population nearing that of South America. If we just guesstimate a size 100 city therefore probably has a population between 397,000,000 and 401,000,000.

 

Next time if you're going for 100, use the allow policy saving option. It allows you not to pick a policy. Great numbers by the way!

 

With the cheating tool (ingame editor), I found the population numbers that correspond with the number of citizens of one city. From pop 1 to 182, the pop number follows the math formula with rounding errors less than 1000 (Error becomes significant for cities that have only a few citizens)

y = 1000*x^2.8

where y is population and x is the number of citizens in a single city.

Interestingly, the population for a city with 183 citizens displayed in the F9 screen is -2,132,931,396. Population in the game becomes negative when the total population of the empire exceeds the number 2^31.

Interesting examples (wikipedia): If real life countries play OCC:

China: 1,347,350,000 pop = 154 citizens
India: 1,210,193,422 pop = 148 citizens
US: 313,918,000 pop = 91 citizens

World: 7,026,495,081 pop = 278 citizens
Asia: 4,140,336,501 pop = 230 citizens
Africa: 994,527,534 pop = 138 citizens
Europe: 738,523,843 pop = 124 citizens
NA: 528,720,588 pop = 110 citizens
SA: 385,742,554 pop = 98 citizens
Oceania: 36,102,071 pop = 42 citizens
Antarctica: 4,490 pop = 1 citizen

 

Wrong!
Tokyo is the largest city in the world with 36,5 million inhabitants (agglomeration) which is +- size 43.

 

Thanks for posting, interesting stuff. I would have guessed that it was based directly on how many apples need to be added for each bucket.

 

Now, what would be really interesting, imo, would be to keep track of when your population grows, and use the growth over time formula, combined with these numbers, to see how close that comes to being accurate.

Px = Po(1+y)^x

 

INT ( "City Size" ^ 2.8 ) x 1000

A 100 pop city is 398,107,170,000 people.

 

Never thought I would learn math by playing Civ!

 

I've started to consider the cities more as Metro areas, meaning the core city and the outlying area. For example, LA has almost 4 million people, but the surrounding metro area has almost 13 million. So, when it says a city of 30 has a population of around 13 million, I look at the actual city having around 4-5 million. Anyways, my 2 cents.

 

But you will never see a large area with over 350 millions of people in...let's say...in a region 10 times larger than Tokyo. Maybea we will reach the ''Coruscant'' level someday and see a 100+ pop city

A trillion btw is: 1,000,000,000,000 i.e 1000x1 billion

We still have a lot of work to do

 

Is this still accurate in BNW?

 

Wow this is actually extremely useful, especially if youre going vertical

 

dizzying

 

Easiest way to do this would be to take the average population in the demographics screen and multiply it by the number of civs in the game. But of course this wont count citystates

 

This is the relevant code I found in the CvCity.cpp from the game source

Code:

long CvCity::getRealPopulation() const
{
	VALIDATE_OBJECT
	return (((long)(pow((double)getPopulation(), 2.8))) * 1000);
}

for those who don't know c++, "long" stands for "64bit integer", "pow" = "power", "double" = "64bit decimal point number"

So like what they said before the formula is:
pop^2.8 (rounded down) * 1000

2^31 is exactly the maximum upper boundary of a 64bit variable, When you exceed that point it loops back to -2^31

 

I think the demographics formula is just unrealistic. A size 90 city has 3 times more population than two size 45 cities. Maybe its to just show that it is harder to get a 90-pop city than two 45 pop cities. But they consume the same amount food!

 

Not exactly, but very, very close.
The upper boundary for a signed 64 bit long is actually 2 ^ 31 - 1.
(It's a quirk of twos compliment)

 

I recently got a size 53 cap with Egypt mixing tradition and liberty and going with 10 cities sending trade routes to Thebes for 1/6th of the game this was on deity and id tested this strategy the day before on immortal but this time i had 2 salt tiles near me i id like to see Aztecs in the same starting location

 

This old thread isn't about how to get cities to grow, or even what your record is.

It's instead about how much population on the demographic screen cities of various sizes are.