Too many cities!

[George Garrett]

Have others had this appear on their screens?This happy wanderer sailing all over the civ large world map,in the year 2004 settling an islet here, a land mass there, plonking a minimum of two engineers, two soldiers, roughly every 5 squares,then erecting a city, was brought to a nasty halt when I was told that I could'nt build any more...I had no idea that there was any limitation to the number of cities, that could be built on any map.
I counted less than 300 cities built on this particular map, 177 of them being mine.There
was a lot of undeveloped terrain...what a waste.
I consider this limitation a serious handicap
to the school of strategists to which I belong - "Build it, and Deity will come"...I guess I will have to sit out my remaining civ years til "retirement" either playing the "stock market", or destroying the Persians, neither of which I'm good at...I think I'll have a word with the designer of Civ 3, ask him for limitless cities...who do I complain to, about the lack of cities in Civ2?.

[The Mad Monk]

The maximum number of cities is 255 (one less than 256--a very popular number in computer science, right up there with 128, 32, and 8). There has to be a limit set somewhere, or you will probably find yourself GPFing toward the end; the numbers chosen are undoubtedly tied to to the closest convenient bit or byte. 511 cities was probably more than most computers could handle.

Not to mention most players...

edit: spell check!
[This message has been edited by The Mad Monk (edited April 04, 2000).]

[George Garrett]

Thank you for that, Monk...I still think it's an unfair limitation on a certain way of playing this great game.

Sorry, Monk, pardon my ignorance but didn't catch the meaning of :-
GPF
511 Cities
Edit: spellcheck
Please enlighten

[crowatbitemedotcom]

GG - 511 is one less than 512, another very popular computer number (2^9). Can't help you with GPF, sorry.

[The Mad Monk]

GPF: (1) General Protection Fault, a common sight in windows 3.X, which basically made the computer toss its cookies. (2) An interesting online comic strip, not quite up there with Sluggy Freelance and User Friendly.

[George Garrett]

Thank you, gentlemen - all part of a young Civ player's education, I guess. By the way, a word of warning to other novices - that"too many cities!" warning can crash your game it's just appeared on my screen freezing it..I wasn't even up, let alone trying to build a city...it happened while the ai were skidding around...in future, I'll try to allocate the recommended 5 squares to each city...that way, even after 2000 years I shouldn't run into that dreaded "tmc!" sign again. probably a better quality city too, tho I amazed myself on how I grew single square townships...perhaps that's only at Chieftain level? Anyway,I'm going to try Diety next, and see if I can apply some lessons learned...probably come a right cropper.