Population Resets to Zero

[MaxWilson]

Thanks for checking that out, Loren. The gems is also good to know about, although it's hard to conceive of hitting that limit in one of my games (doubt I've ever banked even 1000 gems).

-Max

[Loren]

It occurs to me that I ought to mention one other thing I learned in that test: Three Red Seconds can be cast on an enemy province.

The game goes very fast if you have a sufficiently powerful siege force in every enemy province. I couldn't simply take the provinces because that would have reduced his dominion and risked an unwanted dominion kill.

[Mordici]

I'am sorry but I didn't imagine my population resetting at around 500k three times. The situation stated by myself in the OP can and did happen to me on three occasions.

[Endoperez]

How sure are you about that 500 000 value? There is an overflow bug, but if it doesn't always happen at same point there's something weird going on. I doubt the pop cap would be terrain dependent, but I can't think of anything else ATM.

[sector24]

There's a really tiny chance that the variable used to keep track of the population is two unsigned chars. "Unsigned" meaning it goes from 0-512 instead of -256 to 256, then the value multiply by some constant to get the actual value displayed in the game. If that was the case then the population would overflow to 0 at 512, but a char is not the optimal data type to store this kind of value so it's not likely.

[Loren]

sector24 said:
There's a really tiny chance that the variable used to keep track of the population is two unsigned chars. "Unsigned" meaning it goes from 0-512 instead of -256 to 256, then the value multiply by some constant to get the actual value displayed in the game. If that was the case then the population would overflow to 0 at 512, but a char is not the optimal data type to store this kind of value so it's not likely.

What?!?!?!

An unsigned byte goes from 0 to 255. A signed byte goes from -127 to 127.

An unsigned word goes from 0 to 65535. A signed word goes from -32767 to 32767.

This latter is what I think they used and they are adding an extra zero for display purposes.

[sector24]

Right, but what mordici is saying is that his population is rolling over at 500k. The closest variable being 2 unsigned chars (512 x 1000), even though that would be inefficient. Hence its unlikeliness.