Max City Size

[percuno]

ok...

I just reinstalled CtP2 and am relearning the game, starting with the basic 1.11 patch until I am comfortable enough to use mods.

I have searched the entire CtP2 forum and can't find any info on this:

I can't grow a city larger than size 60, no matter what I do. I have built all of the wonders, all of the city improvements that have anything to do with growth, overrowding relief, and so on, placed my cities 6-8 tiles apart as often as possible and built the third tier land/sea food-supply tile improvements on every tile "owned" by a city, but still can't get cities to grow over 60.

In the score page, I have this:

Cities < 300,000 3x10 30
300,000 <= Cities < 1,000,000 63x25 1,575
1,000,000 <= Cities < 5,000,000 0x50 0
Cities > 5,000,000 0x100 0

and it is becoming quite frustrating.

Why is this? How can I fix it?

[percuno]

I should add that I have terraformed almost the entire map I control to grassland for maximum food production.

[EPW]

The max city size is 60 in the default game.

The score screen has a decimal point in the wrong place.

Download the playtest to fix this problem and many more:

http://www.apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?postid=3373252#post3373252

[percuno]

So basically this is something Activision screwed up from the beginning, and although "cities larger than 1m population" are listen in the Score page, they cannot actually exist in-game?

I really don't want to be installing a hacked version of the game, mods bother me enough, and I would rather change something small in a file that removes this artificial bottleneck so that I can continue playing my existing game.

[Maquiladora]

You can alter some of the max pop increasing buildings in the file buildings.txt or you can alter the base overcrowding level in citysize*.txt (one for each difficulty level), both files are in ...\ctp2_data\default\gamedata

The maximum population without buildings before growth stops completely is 18 (you can see this under BaseMaxPop in citysize*.txt), so when your city finally grows to 18 it wont grow anymore without buildings that increase the max size (RaiseMaxPopulation in buildings.txt), no matter how much food it has. All the buildings that add to this base 18 adds upto 60 in the default game. Aqua Filter (+14), Aqueduct (+14), Arcologies (+14). 18+14+14+14=60.

[percuno]

ok, I was hoping that there was just one way to completely remove the city size cap, so that a city would keep growing until it reached as much as its food supply would support, although I can see where this would cause other problems wih unhappiness and such, especially in a city with cornucopic vats/unlimited food supply - hey, now that gives me an idea, cities with no farming improvements whatsoever ;p)

This way will at least give me a higher cap without running the risk of all my cities going nuts.

[percuno]

Seem to have a problem, some cities are now receiving growth at 60, while others are receiving none but are at 61. Strangely enough, it's the ones with only 12 tile improvements (the ring 1 of 8 plus the middle of each arm of the +).

I also went in and changed the maximum number of cities allowed for each government, now to see if this is going to work for me or crash and burn.

[percuno]

OK

I increased all of the RaiseOvercrowdingLevel and RaiseMaxPopulation values by 50% in the buildings.txt file.

I increased all of the BaseOvercrowding by 50% and all of the BaseMaxPop by 2 points in all of the citysize#.txt files.

Now a bunch of my cities have made the immense and significant jump to.............61 max pop, and are again stuck at +0 growth with a completely black growth bar (not a red one).

Any ideas?

[Maquiladora]

Did you start a new game?

[percuno]

I figured that since I was only changing some parameters in the config files, not the actual source code or the format of the save file, it would make no difference. After all, I did get past 60 to 61. It will take some time before my new game has cities large enough that I will be able to see if they will grow beyond 61. I'd hate to get there and find out that I am still stuck at that limit.

[Fromafar]

It depends on which files you have changed. Some of the data is stored in the save file, and will not be reread from the configuration file when you resume an old game.

However, you may be lucky with this one. Once the population of your city is over the value of MaxWorkers in the last entry in ctp2_data\default\gamedata\citysize#.txt, the growth of the city will come to a full stop, regardless of any food surplus. Increasing this value should work.

[Peter Triggs]

Another thing that will zero out population growth is when the city's population equals it's overcrowding level. So, in summary, you should

1) Open up each citysizeN.txt (there's six of them) and change the population field in it's CITYSIZE_SIX record to, say, 100.

2) Then go to buildings.txt and change the building's RaiseOvercrowdingLevels so that their sum is equal to 100-18=82 (instead of 60-18=42, see Maq's post above).

Or you could allow some other buildings to RaiseOvercrowdingLevel. The point is that the base overcrowding from the citysize record plus the sum of the RaiseOvercrowdingLevels of all the appropriate buildings in the city should equal the value in the (max) population field in the CITYSIZE_SIX records.

It's a good thing you brought this up. Please post about how it works out because I think we could incorporate something like this into the source code project.

[percuno]

ok, changed all of my CITYSIZE_SIX Population and MaxWorkers values in all 6 files (0-5) to 120 (arbitrary number), and as noted above had already adjusted the BaseOvercrowding, RaiseOvercrowdingLevel, RaiseMaxPopulation and BaseMaxPop values. Hopefully this will allow my new game to expand better, although the old save game is long gone so I can't test it there.

I also changed all of my TooManyCitiesThreshold values in govern.txt, so I can actually have a chance of filling the largest map at least halfway, I just have this sense now that I am "cheating" by opening up all of the boundaries that formerly existed.

[Martin Gühmann]

Originally posted by percuno
[...]I just have this sense now that I am "cheating" by opening up all of the boundaries that formerly existed.

Actual this is called modding and not cheating. That's why CTP2 is so great, if you don't like something change it.

-Martin

[percuno]

It still "feels" that way though, because if I were to compare two single-player scores of two identically skilled players on two identical games, the "modded" one would by default be higher, because I have "changed the rules".

Aside from that, I am definitely having more fun now that I have expanded the basically arbitrary limits that the game had "stock".