That's true, although those are RTS games, whereas in turn based games like Colonization you only have to worry about moving one unit at a time
As an aside, I remember trying to play Transport Tycoon on my old 486SX-25 back in the day. This machine was the absolute minimum system according to the box. It seemed to run fine at the start but once you got up to around 20 trains or so things started to slow down. I eventually hit the vehicle limit (80 for each type of vehicle IIRC, plus some other limit for train wagons) at which point a game year would take 3 hours to pass. On a new game with an empty map, game years were over in about 10-15 minutes. Screen updates were amazingly slow too, the monorail trains would move a pixel every few seconds, when they are supposed to be the fastest train in the game and zoom across the screen
Anyway, Colonization. I read somewhere that the unit limit is 255 for all players combined (including indians). I'd say it was just done this way so they only needed a single byte to ID each unit, for sake of simplicity when programming the game.
As an aside, I remember trying to play Transport Tycoon on my old 486SX-25 back in the day. This machine was the absolute minimum system according to the box. It seemed to run fine at the start but once you got up to around 20 trains or so things started to slow down. I eventually hit the vehicle limit (80 for each type of vehicle IIRC, plus some other limit for train wagons) at which point a game year would take 3 hours to pass. On a new game with an empty map, game years were over in about 10-15 minutes. Screen updates were amazingly slow too, the monorail trains would move a pixel every few seconds, when they are supposed to be the fastest train in the game and zoom across the screen
Anyway, Colonization. I read somewhere that the unit limit is 255 for all players combined (including indians). I'd say it was just done this way so they only needed a single byte to ID each unit, for sake of simplicity when programming the game.