Too Many Cities???

[Bonaparte]

What's up with the game limiting how many cities can be built - is there any way of getting rid of this limit?

[Spiffor]

No, it is hardcoded AFAIK.
However, you can abandon useless cities or raze enemy cities to be able to build again.

[Jaybe]

512 cities among all civs isn't enough?

With civ3, I've come to realize that a city is equivalent to a county/province/state.

[Worthingtons]

Aye, very annoying, I want to Build Cities and Towns, if i was building counties i'd build Yorkshire...

[Carver]

What's the point of having 512 cities? Culture points, maybe. But still... what do you name them all...

[vmxa1]

New city nn - where nn is a number that has not be used for that ciy before, very clever of them. 4 is the highest one I have seen so far and I hope to never get in any games that will exceed it.

[fittstim]

The main reason for the max number of cities (increased from 256 to 512 in one of the first patches) is to maintain a certain degree of speed associated with gameplay.

Having more cities means that the AI will build more cities which means that the AI will have more units which means that for each moving unit your computer must calculate the most efficient movement route.

People complain about how SLOOOOOWWWWW the game becomes during the later stages. This is in part due to the number of cities and units that must be managed. Increase the number of cities and a single turn can take a whole day to complete...

If you want to increase the number of cities you can build, simply reduce the ideal number of cities for the particular size map you like to play on. The down side is that corruption increases significantly after you reach this number. But if you add corruption/happiness effects to city improvements (kind of a cheat) you can set this number to e.g. 10 on a HUGE map with 16 civs. These civs will try and build 10 cities each and then you are left to build 360 or so cities.

But talk about corruption and unhappiness...

P.S. Personally I like to have original names for all of my cities so I went into the Editor and listed out 512 city names for the civ that I usually play.

[vmxa1]

Wow how long did it take to crank out that list? I admire your drive. What civ are they for?

[Billster2k3]

No kidding! And I thought I was doing a lot of work when I copied and pasted a list of the 50 most populated cities in the US from the Census Bureau's web site so that I could build 50 cities with no name repetition.

[Bonaparte]

OK, no idea how to respond to each one of you individually so I'll just make my comments here.
To Spiffor: Surely with all the civ fans out there someone has the capability of writing a little program that can deal with what is hardcoded - unfortunately that person isn't me.
To Jaybe: 512/24 = 21.3cities per civ. No, that's not enough!!!
To Carver: I just use the default city names and concentrate my efforts on the game strategies, but maybe I'll start working on lists for all the civs.
To fittstim: Even with darn near maximum cities my pc wasn't slow, but yeah you got the right idea. For now I just manipulated the rules (to long to say how here) so that at least I can build cities at the rate I want without giving myself a huge advantage. But I am still waiting for that someone to come along and write a program to get rid of the hardcoded limits.

[Chieftess]

And with 31 cities, you get about 16 cities per civ. Try playing on a giga-map... You'll notice a lot of empty spaces...

[Jon Shafer]

I pity the poor fools who play 31 civs on a giga map...