MEGACITY — Patch 2.9.1: The Census Bureau Regrets the Error.
Commanders,
Some of you left the office at five million citizens and returned the next morning to one hundred billion. The food was gone, the water was gone, the steel was gone, rumours abound of sentient cloning vats and the Census Bureau had some explaining to do. This patch is that explanation...
FIXED:
*The overnight population explosion is fixed. The cause: temporary growth edicts were quietly stacking their bonus onto your city's permanent growth rate every single tick, and never giving it back when they expired. Leave the game running long enough, then step away overnight, and the offline simulation compounded that runaway rate into numbers no housing block was ever zoned for. Growth edicts now boost growth only while they are active, exactly as the paperwork always claimed.
*Population growth is now held to sane limits across the board — edicts, technologies, policies, and events included. No single decree will ever again outbreed the laws of arithmetic.
*If your city was already affected, you do not need to start over. The next time you load that save, a Census Correction runs automatically: the phantom billions are struck from the register and your population is restored to what your housing can actually support. You will find a report in your inbox confirming the audit. The Bureau thanks the affected citizens for their cooperation, insofar as they existed.
CHANGED:
*The Law tab has been reorganized. Sector edicts are now grouped into five categories — Security, Economic, Social, Infrastructure, and Political — each under its own header with a count, instead of one hundred decrees in a single unsorted pile. Bureaucracy remains, but it is now alphabetized bureaucracy.
ADDED:
*The in-game manual has a new Population and Housing section covering how growth works, how housing caps it, what temporary edict boosts actually do, and what a Census Correction means if you ever see one.
NOTES:
*Existing saves are fully compatible. Healthy cities load unchanged; damaged ones are repaired on load as described above.