What is the maximum population that a city can have?

[20886432]

I am playing the Crossfire expansion as Gaia's Stepdaughters and am curious how high (assuming you have all the population expansion buildings) can the population get?

 

[Buster's Uncle]

W/ satellites, 227 is possible before it rolls over to a negative pop (!?!) and crashes the game within a few turns.

 

[20886432]

Is it possible to stop the game from rolling over? Because that sounds ******ed.

 

[Buster's Uncle]

Don't let your pop exceed 227, is all I've found in the last 24 years...

 

[Buster's Uncle]

Oh - it's 127, btw.

 

[Jarek Noschese]

Oh - it's 127, btw.

This is actually interesting to hear, because I've always wondered how many points one can get from just their population alone. Talents are worth two points a pop and Workers and Specialists are worth one point each, whereas Drones are worth nothing. Sadly, a Talent needs to actually work the land to count. Only 21 squares can exist within a city's radius, so its impossible to get >21 Talents/1-city. Therefore, you can never get >42 points from Talents in a single city. The other 106 must be Specialists/single-VP-markers. Therefore, no city can be worth >148 points from just its population alone. Scant reports exist of players who tried to build as many cities as possible to counter this. Sadly, there's a catch. The maximum possible number of cities on a single map is approximately 200. Therefore, no player can EVER get more than ~29,600 points from just their population alone. 825 points are possible from Secret Projects, and each one is a flat +25 to the score, so there are (obviously) 33 Secret Projects in total. 825 + 29,600 = 30,425. With all 76 primary technologies, that's another 76 points to a score, so now it's 30,501. However, it would EASILY take ALL 400-500 turns to reach this point, so we can only get 1,202 points from the Science Victory. This is added to 30,501 for a grand total of 31,703 points. This seems to be the highest possible score attainable from just the population, techs and projects alone. It would ALSO require eradicating five factions and leaving the sixth faction with only a single city to keep them out of your way. So unless we find out how far Transcendent Thought can go before looping around/crashing the game, the highest possible score in this game may very well be substantially >100,000 VPs.

 

[MysticWind]

I wonder how many people in real life each pop is equivalent to, 5,000 people?

 

[Bibor]

As far as I remember, 127 is the number, as 128 goes into negative.