Andrew Janssen wrote: > Jason Heaps wrote: > >>The Largest cities on Qaiyore* >> >>1) Mirabalpur >>2) Cormenaera >>3) Zelkor >>4) Anaduan >>5) Tal >>6) Thalsedon >>7) Jall >>8) Bega >>9) Damaris >>10) Fauve Monde >> >>* We don't actually have population for cities so this one is completely up to my impression, and guess from the population chart. > > There's a formula on the Medieval Demographics Made Easy page for > figuring the population of a country's largest city: P * M, where P is > the square root of the country's population, and M is 2d4+10 (minimum of > 12, maximum of 18, average of 15). The second-largest city is 20% to 80% > the size of the first city, and the third-largest and subsequent cities > are 10% to 40% of the size of preceding cities. The equation I use, and that's proven historically accurate is: Sm/Sn = (n/m)^k Where Sm and Sn are the size of the units ranked n & m and k is a measure of "concentration." (The lower the value of k the closer your population centers will be in size and thus the less "concentrated" your population.) k in the real world is about 1/2.25 and historically seems to vary between 1/3 and 2/3. I usually just set the value of the largest city, and then play with numbers to get smaller cities, but the values for the largest cities obtained from the Medieval Demographics page look pretty reasonable for Celandra. For Qaiyore we know that Port Kaeir has a population of 60,000, and it looks like Thalsedon and Mirabalpur are larger. Now, most cities are based on trade so the size of major cities is based on the population of their trade area, not just their nation. By excluding Torphan we get a MidSea trade population of 51.5 million. A k value of .86 gives us (not rounding): 155,000 Mirabalpur 85,398 Thalsedon 60,257 Port Kaeir 47,050 Cormenaera for the four "Great Cities" of the MidSea. (Historically, I'm sure Taltheran and Videss were on this list, while Port Kaeir wasn't and Cormenaera may not have been.) Mirabalpur is the greatest city on the MidSea and the only one to maintain a population greater than 100,000. That it's 82% larger than the second city of Thalcedon certainly makes the perception of "City of a Million" reasonable. The next step is 38,834, but different circumstances can change the value of k, and I'd change it to 2/3 at this point. That gives us the next six cities at: 38,834 34,431 31,101 28,477 26,347 24,577 and a total of 29 cities with populations greater than 12,000. I don't know which cities these are specifically. My choices for the last 6 of the top 10 would be Caladyn, Orasar, Anecir, Puramyr, Fauve Monde, and Tal. Beyond these top 29 cities the line would flatten out again. I'd call urban areas between 1,000 and 12,000 towns, but wouldn't quibble over other names. Gatherings of less than 1,000 are villages, typical population around 400. -- Jefferson http://www.pioctech.net/~jeff_wilson63/rpg/ ---------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, send mail to celandra-off@phoenyx.net.
