28-05-2001 07:00									#1
	Upper Size Limit for a Single Base Increase the size of your Attachments

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.

	28-05-2001 10:27									#2
	Increase the size of your Attachments

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.

	28-05-2001 18:41									#3
	Support Apolyton

red,

why would 128 be better?

	28-05-2001 21:52									#4
	Support Apolyton, buy Galactic Civilizations

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+.

	29-05-2001 04:09									#5
	Support Apolyton, buy GURPS/ Alpha Centauri

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

	29-05-2001 05:45									#6
	Increase Your PM Length

BTW

I did my thing with SMAX and patches avaible.

	31-05-2001 05:05									#7
	Oops, one important element missing... Lose 30 kilos (of popups)

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.

	31-05-2001 05:16									#8
	126... Enter the AD-FREE zone

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.

	31-05-2001 07:15									#9
	Full PM-box? Change here!

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

	31-05-2001 17:38									#10
	Remove this text

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

	31-05-2001 17:40									#11
	Support Apolyton, buy Civilization 2

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

	21-10-2001 11:32									#12
	Support Apolyton, buy Galactic Civilizations: Deluxe Edition

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

	21-10-2001 14:30									#13
	Support Apolyton, buy Civilization III: Complete

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).

	21-10-2001 14:31									#14
	Lose 30 kilos (of popups)

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

Attachment: pk-basesize-128.zip
This has been downloaded 19 time(s).

	22-10-2001 10:46									#15
	Support Apolyton, buy GURPS/ Alpha Centauri

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.

	22-10-2001 15:20									#16
	Support Apolyton, buy GURPS/ Alpha Centauri

I'm not sure exactly what the base showed but the base actually have another 20-30 or so MORE nutrient to go before exceeding the nut vs pop rules, so what I meant with going nuts (which btw was a semi-joke , is that the game started to act a way it's not suppose to act, namely going backwards in the pop booming even though it should continue to grow.

kh2

	22-10-2001 15:59									#17
	Support Apolyton, buy Civilization III: Complete

Mis - haven't you come across my size 124 base in BM1 yet?

	22-10-2001 22:17									#18
	Put an end to popups!

Rolling over has something to do with the way computers calculate. An 8-bit signed integer can have values from -127 to +127. When you add 127+1 it will them become -127, so you would get a negative base size. This is called rolling over. This can also happen with signed integers (values 0-255) where 255+1=0. And of course with other types of variables as well, but these are probably the most common cases.

So in this example Firaxis was right: population doesn't roll over. Although I doubt that it was supposed to count down, because that doesn't sound like a real fix.

	14-05-2002 19:39									#19
	Increase Your PM Length

bumped^

	15-05-2002 06:51									#20
	Not more than 20 Enter the AD-FREE zone

OK, what am I missing?

My last SP game at Transcend, I had just about every Secret Project and bases with everything except the Punishment Sphere (I ended the game because turns were passing at 1 turn per 45 minutes, because I had so many bases...).

Population never got above 20 even though I had enough Nutrients to support the bases.

	15-05-2002 12:58									#21
	Re: Not more than 20 Help yourself to an AD-FREE life

quote: Originally posted by Grail Quest OK, what am I missing? My last SP game at Transcend, I had just about every Secret Project and bases with everything except the Punishment Sphere (I ended the game because turns were passing at 1 turn per 45 minutes, because I had so many bases...). Population never got above 20 even though I had enough Nutrients to support the bases.

It sounds like you didn't have any hab domes. That would explain it. Hab domes are the upgrade to hab complexes, and they come pretty well up the tech tree. They allow your bases to grow above the hab complex limit (usually 14 for most factions, +2 for LAl and +2 for one of the SPs). Another possibility is that you weren't pop booming either by having +6 growth or the Cloning Vats.

	16-05-2002 19:16									#22
	Increase Your PM Length

i cant ever get bases above 99.it just..stops getting bigger.even with nut output of 500+ in a one city game i was playing a few weeks ago(had a zillion crawlers,like 1500 minerals and 5000 EC per turn )