Upper Size Limit for a Single Base

[knowhow2]

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]

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]

red,

why would 128 be better?

[RedFred]

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]

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]

BTW

I did my thing with SMAX and patches avaible.

[vogon_jeltz]

Oops, one important element missing...

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]

126...

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]

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

[Aredhran]

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

[Provost Harrison]

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

[knowhow2]

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

[knowhow2]

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]

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

[Googlie]

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.