How can I get huge cities in ctp2?

[Chemical Ollie]

I have only played ctp2 once but got bored on the interface. I prefer civ3 instead, now that it is finally released. Anyway, I had no problem to win in ctp2 and dominated the game throughout history (I think difficulty level was slightly harder then medium). One thing frustrated me though: When my cities reached size 60, they stopped growing. No matter what I did, their growth was 0. I had all possible improvements, had completed the full research tree, had plenty of food and happiness and tried all kinds of high-tech governments. In the score board, there was an indication that you could get huge scores for cities bigger than 500 but mine stopped growing at 60. How could they get bigger? If I find out, I might try the game again when I eventually grow bored of CIV3.

[Oerdin]

Play against other humans and you might find the game more challenging. On another note why would you even want to have cities bigger then 60? At that point having a pop of 61 is kind of like Bill Gates making another billion. Yeah it can be done but why bother?

[Martin Gühmann]

You try CTP2 with mod like Cradle, than you wiil know that it is not easy to win and that growing thing will be less improtant. Of course it can be done to make the cities grow bigger, but that's not freally the aim in this game try to win in Cradle, and then you can reconsider it.

-Martin

[Yolky]

I thought the cap was 60 unless a mod was done. not shure if that is what you were looking for.

Davor

[The Raptor]

Part of the problem is that the scoring allows for cities up to 200+. It just lends you to want to do that.

[Oerdin]

I'm not sure if any city can even produce enough resources to support a 200 pop city. To bad there isn't food sharing between cities...

[SCG]

In one of my first games (chieftan, republic) not having read the civilopedia concepts yet), i got a city up to 205 (after i got the game started i just started ending turns for a long time). In my curent game (chieftan, democracy) I have 2 cities over 70 atm, although also have 2 stuck at 32 and 45. In trying to figure out why I discovered that if you have a granary and the city is celebrating, even with huge food deficits, my cities all had increasing food storage because the granary was giving half the food needed to grow each round (is that a bug?) In one of the Cities (size 45), it had exactly 0 food surplus, so when i teraformed, it got a food surplus to grow again and is back to the 1 per round again. I'm still looking into why the other (size 32) isn't growing - it has a rather significant food deficit and stopped celebrating at one point. As a side note - the net food increases if the city is celebrating. Of course, some of those mechanics may change once i step back up in level. I'll have to play around with celebrating cities in space and in the sea...

As for having cities over 60, well i come from Civ II OCC where specialists are very significant. having an extra 100 laborers with all those production increasing units can bring in late wonder in no time or help teraform a large stretch of land in a hurry. I haven't tried my Civ I and II strategy of subverting cities to join my side yet (wording in the civilopedia seems to indicate that it may form a new nation instead of joining my side - may have to look into televangelists), but having an extra 100 merchants or extra 100 laborers (capitalization) can help bring in the gold to do so in a hurry.

*edit* I think i posted in the wrong forum on this one - just saw this was CTP2... o well, reason for having 60+ is still good

[Oerdin]

Yes, I think I was a little hasty in my previous post. I guess there are a few good reasons for wanting massive sized cities. The question then becomes how long does it take to build them and are the added benifits out weighted by the effort, tedium, and time that must be invested?