Maximum number of cities?

[duke o' york]

If you had 255 cities, and then took the last AI city, but there were still civs left to enter the game, would they be stuck with a settler unable to build a city, or would you just win by conquest?

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in vino veritas

 

[starlifter]

posted June 29, 2001 06:12 AM
If you had 255 cities, and then took the last AI city, but there were still civs left to enter the game, would they be stuck with a settler unable to build a city, or would you just win by conquest?

You must mean 254 cities, then take another one. There can only be 255 cities, total. When 255 cities exist, it is not possible for an AI or human to build a 256th. The human will get a message saying "The maximum number of cities has been reached".

In your scenario, the settler would be unable to found a new city once a grand total of 255 cities exist. Presumably, an AI that got "stuck" and failed to ever found its first city (for whatever reason) would need to be hunted down and destroyed to win by conquest. Once an AI founds one city, and that city is later destroyed (again, assuming it is the last surviving of the AI's city(s)), the AI is eliminated from the game, including NONE units.

 

[allan]

Does anyone know if there's a max number of UNITS you can build? I remember CivI had one (never figured out what it was, but remember that in the latter stages of the game my advisor would tell me I couldn't build anymore, even those first defensive units in new cities, and it got frustrating....). Does CivII likewise (it would have to be a pretty BIG number, though)?

 

[starlifter]

I'm not sure, but the way programmers usually store integers and data, my bet would be 32767 or maybe 16383. I've had well approximately 3,000 units in a game before, so the number must be greater than that. I never played Civ I... of curiosity, what was the limit in tha game?

 

[Smash]

The unit limit in MGE is 2048 for all civs.
1948 for 1 civ.

Julius Brenzaida(no limits patch) spent a month trying to crack this.No luck.

 

[starlifter]

by Smash:

The unit limit in MGE is 2048 for all civs. 1948 for 1 civ.

I wonder if that limit includes engineers and freight. After some of my unit counts roll over (in long games), I lose track. Right now I'm approaching 500 engineers in my GOTM 4 that is crawling along, but freight is lagging at less than 100.

If 2048 is the limit, and the number seems like a "round" number in hexadecimal terms, I guess I've overestimated my hordes of engineers and freight at times in the past. I do wish Civ could accurately count units past the 256 limit!

 

[moksliukas]

All the number of cities and units limitations come from the way the actual program is written. I guess they stuck with unsigned short int for cities (assuming they did code Civ2 in C). However, it is not as easy to change as you might think, because the whole "engine" of the game might need changing. It is not only the case of using long int instead of short int, the coders might need to change into a more dynamic data structure that would have dynamicly allocated memory and therefore, have unlimited number of cities, units, etc. (well, not exactly unlimited, the number would be limited because of your memory, so, if you have 8 MB RAM, you would be able to have less cities than with 64MB. However, this is irrelevant, cause even with 8MB the number of cities that you could have in this way would be in the vicinity of tens of thousands).
Sorry, these are just technical details about programming.

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My doctor says that I have a malformed public-duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fibre and that I am therefore excused from saving universes

 

[HIEROPHANT]

That would be neat to have a thousand or so cities.

 

[starlifter]

posted July 10, 2001 02:19 AM
That would be neat to have a thousand or so cities.

It is funny. Reading your short statement made me suddenly realize something. I'm glad the 255 city limit exists... otherwise, some people would actually play with that many cities. I can tell you from experience with 254 cities, you don't want to do that.

Actually, I'd like to see a 255 limit per Civ, so a "real" battle can occur on a large scale. But I'm now against ever allowing Civ II to exceed 255 cities, unless there is a limit by civilization, for whatever my opinion is worth to Firaxis (and my opinion = 0 gold).

 

[Az]

I've never tryed to or came close to the 250 limit. In fact I thnk the game would be pretty boring.

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