I have been taking the quadrant approach by splitting the city into four disconnected smaller cities. Each with its own mill, trading stations, warehouses, industry and agriculture. This approach helps because it allows me to make “quarter sized” test runs of my design. If there is food or distribution problems with the first quadrant city, then its back to the drawing board.
After 3 “quarter sized” tests I was able to iron out all problems. The quadrant city can support itself fully populated (about 30k) and still produce a surplus of fish, salt, and ceramics. I use a unique fishing block in my quadrant city that produces so much surplus that I am able to feed my people, hold the new years festivals, and please the gods with fish alone. Only spices, hemp, and tea are imported.
So far my quadrant test city has rock solid stability on VH with max pop, and uses only approx 800 sprites. With my design the food, distribution, and sprite problems have been worked out on a quarter scale. I did not realize there was a maximum number of walkers. That is a whole new problem that I will have to deal with. If I do hit the walker limit, it is probably because I have too many cart pushers standing around, and I think I can work that out. This weekend I will be ready to make my first attempt at the full sized version.
I will post some save games of my progress if anyone is interested.
Edit:
Do cart pushers and immagrants count as a walker? If they did it would seem that you would reach the walker limit way before you hit the sprite limit.
Thinking out loud:
My quarter city uses about 800 sprites.
Approx 360 of those sprites are commmon housing that dont produce walkers.
If the remaining sprites all produced one walker, thats
440 walkers per quadrent, and thats pushing the 500 per quadrant limit. Hmmm...
[This message has been edited by Kinesis (edited 08-06-2007 @ 02:22 PM).]