Upper Size Limit for a Single Base

knowhow2 · May 27, 2001, 22:00

Okay everyone. I know that this subject has been up before but I didn't recall what the exact number were. So I made myself a game and tried getting as high a population as possible. 126 was the the magic number, when the base hit that, the game went nuts and all citiziens disappeared! (although the base size number stayed the same). Does anyone have any comment about this?

Standard Size Map
Random Map
Abundant
Cult of planet
Cheated with farm/soil enricher/condesor/nutrient bonus squares around the base (and boreholes when rocky) plus MANY crawlers.
also cheated with the tech advancements to get the appropriete techs.

using nearby bases (5) to produce pop pods to pod boom.

hit 126 year 2176.

RedFred · May 28, 2001, 01:27

Wild. I can't figure out why you got such an oddball maximum population. Now 128 or any other power of 2 I could understand.

knowhow2 · May 28, 2001, 09:41

red,

why would 128 be better?

RedFred · May 28, 2001, 12:52

It has to do with the way things are programmed. Who knows? Maybe they are using binary numbers somehow. That would explain why your base's square's maximum resource displayable is 8. You notice that anything higher is displayed as 8+.

Googlie · May 28, 2001, 19:09

Hmmm - interesting.

I set up a scenario, Gaians, adjacent to Monsoon Jungle, and crawlered it plus about twenty kelped sea nut tiles (standard map).

Although nutrients were over 400 per, I maxxed out at a pop of 99 - the editor just wouldn't give any more to the base.

When time permits (ie when it's next raining in Vancouver) I'll play a few turns to see if the pop increases thru gameplay.

Googlie

knowhow2 · May 28, 2001, 20:45

BTW

I did my thing with SMAX and patches avaible.

vogon_jeltz · May 30, 2001, 20:05

With a pile of sky hydroponics pods, you can push the pop even higher. Example: with the city of size 126, you can launch 126 + 63 + 31 + 16 + 8 + 4 + 2 + 1 sky hydroponics pods, raising your population to 241! Since sky hydroponics pods can only bring bonuses in numbers equaling your base size or less, you can plan ahead and launch hundreds while your bases are still in infancy. Assuming that in future versions the bug will be fixed, you could have thousands of unmodified Planetary Council votes, allowing you to singlehandedly vote yourself into office. You can use the Nessus Mining Station to increase your mineral output, and another kind of pod (I forget the name) to increase your energy output. You can also use Geostationary Survey Pods to give you an omniscient view of the world.

vogon_jeltz · May 30, 2001, 20:16

My guess is that Firaxis used unsigned 4-bit integers to store base size. That would yield a max. pop of 127. As for 127, it probably triggers some "oops" piece of code in the program.

As for the "8+", there are only 8 sprites in sprites.pcx, and they had to be drawn that way.

Misotu · May 30, 2001, 22:15

Hard to imagine why you'd need a base bigger than 126 though ... this is one bug that really doesn't bother me!

Aredhran · May 31, 2001, 08:38

The unit limit is much more of a problem, right Googlie ?

Provost Harrison · May 31, 2001, 08:40

The largest size is 99 when played normally. Anything larger is totally and utterly superfluous...

knowhow2 · October 21, 2001, 02:32

I'm gonna try this thing again and see what the results would be. 126 was the last record.

knowhow2 · October 21, 2001, 05:30

Interesting, the new uppersize limit for bases are 128 but consider I play with PK this time it could be his +2 base limit that made it 128 instead of the 126 for cult. Maybe I should try this with Ascentic Virtue to see if I can stretch the limit even further (130).

knowhow2 · October 21, 2001, 05:31

here's the attachment with the 128-base last turn before everything goes nuts.

Googlie · October 22, 2001, 01:46

Hmmm - loaded it and hit turn complete - pop number counted down to 127, then 126 etc.

Reloaded, activated sceanrio editor, added 10 colony pods, deactivated editor, and set each of the ten to build (within the base, thereby adding to population) - same 1 x 1 countdown as I hit 'b' till it bottomed out at 118 after ten builds.

Reactivated scenario, and used the "increae population" key, with the same result - each pop I added actually subtracted pone from the total.

Now I know there was a problem with early versions when you reached 127, but Firaxis fixed that in smac 4.0/smax 2.0 - here is an extract from the readme.txt file:

Miscellaneous text fixes.
· Base population no longer 'rolls over' when it reaches 127.

I never built a base that reached - let alone exceeded - that number. What did the 'roll-over' bug do?

(and what did you mean by "going nuts"? - I just saw the pop drop by 1 per turn and my excess nutrient bar increase proportionately)

G.

knowhow2 · October 22, 2001, 06:20

I'm not sure exactly what the base showed but the base actually have another 20-30 or so MORE nutrient to go before exceeding the nut vs pop rules, so what I meant with going nuts (which btw was a semi-joke

, is that the game started to act a way it's not suppose to act, namely going backwards in the pop booming even though it should continue to grow.

kh2

mark13 · October 22, 2001, 06:59

Mis - haven't you come across my size 124 base in BM1 yet?

Paul · October 22, 2001, 13:17

Rolling over has something to do with the way computers calculate. An 8-bit signed integer can have values from -127 to +127. When you add 127+1 it will them become -127, so you would get a negative base size. This is called rolling over. This can also happen with signed integers (values 0-255) where 255+1=0. And of course with other types of variables as well, but these are probably the most common cases.

So in this example Firaxis was right: population doesn't roll over. Although I doubt that it was supposed to count down, because that doesn't sound like a real fix.

knowhow2 · May 14, 2002, 10:39

bumped^

Grail Quest · May 14, 2002, 21:51

OK, what am I missing?

My last SP game at Transcend, I had just about every Secret Project and bases with everything except the Punishment Sphere (I ended the game because turns were passing at 1 turn per 45 minutes, because I had so many bases...).

Population never got above 20 even though I had enough Nutrients to support the bases.

Sikander · May 15, 2002, 03:58

Quote:

Originally posted by Grail Quest
OK, what am I missing?

My last SP game at Transcend, I had just about every Secret Project and bases with everything except the Punishment Sphere (I ended the game because turns were passing at 1 turn per 45 minutes, because I had so many bases...).

Population never got above 20 even though I had enough Nutrients to support the bases.

It sounds like you didn't have any hab domes. That would explain it. Hab domes are the upgrade to hab complexes, and they come pretty well up the tech tree. They allow your bases to grow above the hab complex limit (usually 14 for most factions, +2 for LAl and +2 for one of the SPs). Another possibility is that you weren't pop booming either by having +6 growth or the Cloning Vats.

Kataphraktoi · May 16, 2002, 10:16

i cant ever get bases above 99.it just..stops getting bigger.even with nut output of 500+ in a one city game i was playing a few weeks ago(had a zillion crawlers,like 1500 minerals and 5000 EC per turn

)