I really wonder how they are working on it though. I understand the fact that it's a free time occupation project. But is setting a max population check in the code that difficult ? And if it's just an error, which can happen, why not hotfixing asap ?
I mean at this point, a complete reroll is obligatory.
They did set some limits. GDP rolls over to negative at 9.223+ quintillion (64bit integer limit), Income rolls over to negative, but expenses all cap off at that number individually, debt caps off at negative limit. I guess they never "planned" for super pop growth, why they didnt just shut it off though days ago, who knows.
My story, for whoever cares at this point:
I had continued running a "balanced budget" most the game trying to test stuff out, about the end of 1993, my pop growth went from ~1.1% displayed value to 6.6%, then just continued growing from there, with death dropping within months to 0%. Looked to me like when dropping below poverty 1/3 some kind of (bugged)multiplier effect hit and ramped everything up. I had tweaked health budget, as done many times before, a small amount then I set it back where it was previously and next day those growth numbers just popped up to the new values and starting growing x20+ the previous rate. At those rates it meant doubling pop every 3 months, now getting close to double in 2months, about x1.88 per 2 month currently
Everything pretty much carried on as it had before the explosion, income continued to outgrow expenses with a decently funded budget in various fields (I never exploded kids before the update). Testing stuff. All for naught, really. Health budget, Environ bugets, overall spending will increase growth rates. Most the other stuff does nothing, NOTHING. Even research, its running at 1% per year, with 0.06% funding, and the same with 100% ----- Dev says you need to balance budget and get the right type of investment in your country to improve employment. I call total rubbish, I got my chart here plotting the unemployment drop from 1986 to 2000 with plenty of datapoints per year, and its linear trendline showing a nice and perfect decline. Not even a period where, slopes up a bit here, declines fast there... nope it declines linear - perfect. The day to day drop bounces around, and the average day drop per month can vary but the overal trend is linear, budgets have been up and down from 5% to 100% for years at a time... uh huh
So yea, already writting an essay about this nonsense. Er, continuing, so I tried foolishly to find the good balance on budgets, see if something does something, anywhere, find the magic solution etc. Pop continued to double up slowly, I was only ~150k when I started so it took years to get to the high numbers. When GDP start rolling negative, saw the guys on discord happen to them, happened to me a year later or so, I guessed well income will probably do the same at 9.2qt. It did. Basically gameover for any continuation of running a balanced budget of any sort, income will now keep hitting negative without constant adjustments to taxes, going faster, but expenses all capped off at the max limit. Not much to do now. Shut down all funding wait for update to stay out of debt or just screw it and go max. Doesn't seem much point dropping to zero progress ("progress" /facepalm), so I just shut off income and ramped all to max. Wondered if balance would roll over to postive when hitting the limit, nope, sits at max -9,223,372,036,854,775,808.00 debt. Two decades of balanced budget staying out of debt, and hit max debt in 2-3months of max funding at the end.. should I laugh or cry
TLDR:
An essay on how to waste a couple of hours a day, for 20 odd days, trying to find solutions in random noise.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0138704/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 - suddenly can't stop thinking of this film..