unlimited number of civs.

[rysingsun]

my brother and i set up a multiplayer game in his civ gold something or other and we chose a huge map so we could get 15 civs. but it only let us have 8

well now! what's up with that? and we got to talking and said to each other "why cant there be 255 civs if we so choose? sure some of them will never build a city and sure the board will be packed with cities while the best civs have only 2 before the first wars. yeah yeah the game will have to give the cities dull names like "city054_003" and such. (civ54 gets a 'real' name like "romans" if it reaches lets say four cities). yes the color scheme will be problematic. the game will have to reuse colors and probably change colors at times to reduce the problems of multiple nations with the same color being next to each other. yeah the programmers will have to get on the ball with efficient algorithms for figuring out trade routes with all these countries.

ok ok the trade window will be .. umm .. interesting ... but wait! any civ with 4 or less cities gets the color "white" like barbarians and you cant do diplomacy with them nor does reputation apply to them. sort of like halfway between barbarians and "real" civs.

soooooo... you programmers say it's too problematic? well fine .. at least let me have 15 civs in multiplayer games. no no ... 25 civs! yeah 25 is good! no! i want 255 civs! figure it out. it could be fun

 

[Teabeard]

Ouch! 255 civs running simultaneously? I doubt the fastest supercomputers in the world could handle that... not to mention that it would take forever for Firaxis to make that many custom civs (unless you want them to be generic, UU less, leaderless, civs).

I think a good compromise would be to include minor unplayable nations which are limited in what they can do yet still make the game interesting because you can conduct simple diplomacy and trade with them. But even minor nations should not equal 255.

 

[rysingsun]

the reason we were musing on this idea was that we thought it would be cool if we were forced by overcrowding to be warlike from almost the beginning of the game; yet have the late game be more or less like a "normal" game.

the more i think of it the more problems i see; however there is a compromise. what about all the civs that currently exist CAN if the player is willing to tolerate the performance issues be played all at the same time even in multiplayer. a 30-40 civ game wouldnt be unthinkable on a medium sized map in this case and it might not even require more than a patch to implement it.

 

[rhialto]

The speed of every civ type game I have seen decreases in direct proportion to the square of teh number of civs current in the game, all other things being equal.

A game with 256 civs in it will take about, oh, 250 times longer per turn to process than one with 16 civs. Thats why massive numbers of civs is a bad idea.

 

[Zild]

But... I would like to be able to cram in six or even eight civs on just a tiny map. I know the programming can handle it, and so can my PC.

Wait, don't tell me... C3C let's you do this? B******s!

 

[warpstorm]

Vanilla Civ let you do this (it even lets you put 31 on a tiny map (if you've built/downloaded 31 that is - C3C comes with them)) in single play. For MP (PTW and C3C), the limit was lowered to 8 total as performance tanked about there no matter how ggod of a computer and network you had.

 

[Zild]

Are you saying it's possible with PTW to play with 8 civs on a Tiny map? That doesn't seem to be a standard option - anything special you need to do?

Or did they take it out after Vanilla?

 

[Jon Shafer]

Use the editor.

 

[Theoden]

a 30-40 civ game wouldnt be unthinkable on a medium sized map in this case and it might not even require more than a patch to implement it.

It wouldn't be unthinkable and it is possible even on a tiny map. 31 civs on a tiny map make for a very intense start with only the luckiest getting more than one city in expansion phase.

All you have to do (provided you have conquests) is go to the editor and set the number of playable civs to 31.