I think all of us who play in Qaiyore could use a reminder that civilization is for all intents and purposes *impossible* without agriculture. Using some figures I pulled out of the Quest RPG's World Book(a world design manual), I've put together a few spreadsheets. One calculates farm and pasture acreages from the terrains in a society's borders, and isn't really relevant to Celandra. The other spreadsheet, after you enter values for calorie consumption(I used a 2,000 Calorie/day diet), nutritional value(30,000 Calories/bushel), farm fertility, farmer productivity(5 farmers per 40 acres), and national population, will calculate how much grain would be required to feed that population, how much farm acreage will be needed, how many farmers will be needed, and what percent of the total population will be farmers. [Caveat: I make a *lot* of simplifying assumptions in what comes next.] Interestingly, the key figure is farm fertility. For a given value of fertility, the percent of the population who *must* be farmers is constant. For instance, if the average harvest in a society is 12 bushels/acre, a *minimum* of 25.35% of that society's population *must* be farmers, or the society will have to import food in quantity. I've run the numbers for Cedonia, which has a population of about 3 million, with very fertile soil(18 bushels/acre). At least 507,000 of those three million need to be farmers, or 16.9% of the population, and a minimum of 6,337 sq. miles, or .5% of Cedonia's total land area needs to be given over to farms. Realistically, of course, there would be more farms and farmers than that, because of the need to allow for poor harvests and building a surplus for storage or export, and because the farmers wouldn't just grow wheat, there would be animal herds as well, and that eats up much more land. The numbers for Mir are also interesting. Mir has about 2 million people packed into an island with an area 6% that of Cedonia (~75,000 sq. miles v. ~1.18 million sq. miles), but it has a comparable soil fertility(18 bushels/acre). Mir needs a minimum of 338,000 farmers working 4,225 sq. miles of farmland to feed its population. Again, a minimum 16.9% of the people must farm, but Mir needs a minimum of 5.6% of its total land area to be under cultivation, and more than that if it wants an agricultural surplus. Of course, in Mir's case, much of its people's calories come from fish, but they still need farmers; it takes nearly 1.5 million fishermen to catch enough fish to feed 2 million people. Note that those figures for the amount of farmland needed are taken as a percentage of *total* area. The amount of *arable* land available will be rather less than that. Note also that I'm assuming everyone's eatinf 2,000 calories per day. The ruling classes and the military are going to want more food, and so that requires more land, food, and farmers. Now, one last thing before I let y'all recover from the math I've been throwing at you. Based on the scale attached to the Qaiyore map, I've calculated the land areas of Mir and Cedonia, as you can see above. I then figured average population density for the two countries. Mir has an average of 26 people per sq. mile; Cedonia has an average of 2.5 people per sq. mile. Now, obviously, people don't spread themselves out evenly like that, but the numbers suggest that Cedonia is desperately underpopulated relative to its land area, with nearly all the people concentrated into the Imperial River baisin and the Gulf of Gomel coast. Because of this, I think when the Cedonian Civil War ends, Cedonia's primary orientation of Conquest may need to change to Equilibrium, giving the country a chance to recover from the Sinari War and the Civil War. Cedonia won't have the resources for foreign adventures for some time. Andrew __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard http://antispam.yahoo.com/whatsnewfree ---------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, send mail to celandra-off@phoenyx.net.
