Max. Number of cities!

[The Pioneer]

Hallo everybody,

I find, like most of you, the fact that the AI builds lots and lots of cities (of which most are useless) foolish.
Thus, I was wondering if there is any way you can set the max. number of cities that a civ can build. The only thing I could find in the editor was to set the optimal number of cities. I might be missing something here but I searched in the FAQ and I still could not find anything!

[Willem]

No, there's no way to set a specific number. Not that it would be fair in any case, unless you also allowed yourself that same number. The only limit is the ultimate one of 512 cities in total, which is hardcoded, and not editable.

However, there are a number of ways you can do to slow it down some. I'm not going to go into any details, since I don't have the time, but just fool around with some things in the editor. One thing that's really easy to do is to make the Settler into a wheeled unit, so it has to have a road in order to get into a jungle, or over Mountains.

And with the next patch, you'll be able to restrict the production of cities on certain terrain, which will probably slow it down some as well. For instance you could set it for no cities allowed on Desert, which is what I'm planning.

[zulu9812]

that number of 512 - is that for all cities of one civ or all cities of all civs combined?

[Lucilla]

AFAIK, it's for all cities of all civs combined. Unfortunately, I can't remember where I read this, so I can't tell for sure.

[Lucilla]

Ok, I found it in the release notes from patch 1.16:

"The maximum number of cities permitted in a game is 512, increased from 256."

[kring]

In the last 2 patches, I have noticed a slow down in the rampant AI build, it is not trying to populate each and every 1 square tile like it used to.