DeletedUser
Just wondering as I start out.
The highest possible population currently is hard to say exactly, but I could estimate it. First of all, understand that as you play the game, the spae you have to build stuff in your city grows. Eventually it can grow from the initial 16 4x4 city squares you have to as many as 92 city squares (possibly more, but the amont of city squares you can gain for medals currently is unclear). With the next technological age for the game (Modern Era) there will probably be additional city squares available). However, going by 92, that is 92 x 4x4 = 1472 city spaces.
Also, the amount of population per square grows depending on the type of buildings you build, which depend upon the technological age you are in. The highest technological age currently is the progressive era, and the highest population per square buildings in the game are of that era, and called high rises. They require 9 squares (3x3), and they also need to have a connection to your city hall via a 2-lane highway, but they provide 1087 population each.
In addition, there is two great buildings (The Capitol and Tower of Babel) that can provide population. The tower of Babel is not as efficient as high rises in terms of population per square, even at level 10, but the Capital is better. So we will include The Capitol in our hypothetical city.
Note that in order to maximize population we need to ignore any other buildings and ignore happiness considerations, neither of which you would ever do in actual play, but this is a thought experiment. City hall takes up 42 space, so that leaves us with 1430. Since all the high rises will require two lane roads our whole city will use them, including for the Capitol building. That means we will build such a road along it's shortest side (it is 7x5, so we build it along the 5 side) and assume there will be high-rises on the side of the road opposite it. This means effectively the Capitol, and each other building then city hall, will take up one lane of a 2-lane road along their shortest side, so we will lengthen the longest dimension by 1 for space calculation purposes. That means the Capitol effectively takes up 8 x 5 = 40 spaces, leaving us with 1390 spaces.
Each High rise takes up 3x3, lengthened into 4x3 or 12 including the connecting road, spaces. This gives us 1390 / 12 = 115 (rounded down) high rises in our city. However, keep in mind that you can never get things quite this efficient because the road layout has to all connect up to city hall and thing will never quite fit this perfectly. Let's just knock off a theoretical 10% of those high-rises to account for that, leaving us with 103 high rises.
Each high rise provides 1,087 population, so 103 of them gives us 111,961 population. A level 10 Capital building gives us an additional 10530 population, so the total would come to about 122,491 as a maximum population in your city, given current restrictions on city space and residential buildings.
That's it. If it helps any you can imagine that each 1 population actually represents 100 people.
Chances are good that that number will slightly more then double when we get the next age, which they are working on now.
Totally guessing here, but, well, there is an awful lot of territory still available on the world map. I could easily see them having a modern age from maybe the 30's to the 50's, and then a computer age from the 60's to the 90's, and then an information/internet age from the 2000's to current day.
I too believe the Modern Era will revolve around the 30's and the 50's. Not sure how they plan on doing future eras, but so far I believe the rumors are that will be no "future" eras. If they do anything "future", it will probably be something close to our current days, I think what they want to avoid is a sci-fi world. So, nothing too far ahead.
But then again, anything could happen in months, they might just change their minds.
Actually a mod has confirmed to me that the modern era won't be the last.
Yes, I too am a mod and know Modern Era won't be the last, that's not my point. By "future" I meant something past our present day, futuristic elements, robots and other shmat. The Modern Era that's coming will not include present day, it will be around the 30's and the 50's. So there will be more ages after it, I was talking about futuristic ages.
And don't assume that the developers would go just for a high peak of an era (90's for information era), they're not following any book or list here, they're adapting the eras/ages for the purpose of the game.