Is it actually possible to get a huge city??

[Zadig]

Read the above!!!

[notger]

Yes.

[notger]

Seriously, I do not like lots of exclamation marks and an army style way of talking to me. Nevertheless, here is the answer you were looking for:

Getting a huge city is possibly though it is difficult, takes a long time, will be hampered by the plague and so on. You need every happiness/health building and a leader that has maximum chivalry (crusaders, e.g.). St. Johns order also helps. Eastern factions (including Byzzies) have advantages due to more health-boosting buildings. Factions that have neither St. Johns order nor special health boosting buildings (iberian factions) are at a disadvantage. And you need the correct place. Inverness will never grow to a huge city, but London might.

Personally, since the fancy new troop types (musketeers and the like) are tied to the type of barracks and I wanted to play with 'modern' armies, too, I simply modded the growth conditions such that a metropole was reached at 30.000. That works fine for me.

To mod it, change the appropriate values in a file called desc_settlement_mechanics.db (or something very similar).

If you do not want to mod yourself, you find the file in the SicilianCombat submod, downloadable from this forum.

I hope, there will be a system that obliterates the need for the highest settlement level due to troop types available to them, sometime. Until then, help yourself or try your best.