A game can only have 255 (or 256) cities total.Thats a hard coded limit.
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the #255 or 256 appeared way too many times to determine which was for cities and which was for other limits.
When the game was programmed, they also stored certain data as 8-bit numbers called Integers. These Unsigned Short Integers return a value of 0-255. Because of this basic assumption, many "short cuts" were taken in coding Civ II where the value was actaully used inside the program. Hence, it is not a matter of redimensioning a matrix & changing a couple constants, or something like that.
With access to the source code, and permission from the copyright holders, a patch could be written. But it is unlikely the source code will be released. If it is, lemme know
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PS, the max cities you can ever have is 255, if an AI (that has
never founded a city) has a settler wandering. When you have 255, that AI civ can never found it's first city. If one AI has a "pet city" remaining, you can have 255-1=254 cities, max. You can never have 256 cities because 0 is a the 256th number already (there are 8 bits in a byte, and 2^8=256).
BTW, the reason a city is limited to a size of 127 is because they used a Signed Short Integer to retain the city's size. This allows only 2^7=128 possibilities, including 0: 129-1=127. So a "signed short" has values from -127 to 127. I've never understood why Reynolds chose to do it this way, unless there was an undeveloped plan for giving a special meaning to a city whose size was stored in the program as a negative number.