Idea about farming, trading and development systems

[Tellos Athenaios]

Yeah, when you program using as little memory as possible

which you really need to do to improve performance, and in case you're using C/C++ also because you have to manually prevent memory leaks, thus more memory requirements increases the complexity of this task

you will start thinking in terms of "how to make the most of n bytes".

So if certain bits are used for what is known as a "bitmask" (encoding a bunch of -usually true/false- properties about something using bits) and the rest is a unqiue identifier... 31 which is (2^5) -1, makes a lot of sense. One byte (which is by convention usually 8 bits), of which the 3 most/least significant bits can be used to encode culture, for instance (there being exactly 7 cultures or (2^3) -1). Simple, huh?

EDIT: This is not to say one byte signifying a faction also signifies its culture in RTW. I have no "proof" for such a claim as I do not have reverse engineered the save file for instance. Who knows what other memory requirements make 31 a useful hardcoded limit to prevent a complete re-write of the memory management code (which is likely in part a residu of RTW itself, seeing both games use the same basic engine) ?