I'll give it a try, but I want to see if I can't clean up the
presentation first. There are a few places in the spreadsheets,
especially in the first one, where I need to make some of the numbers
variable; when I created it, I did so for a specific purpose, so it
needs some editing to make it of general use.

The way the first spreadsheet works, you have to calculate the area in
square miles of your society, then figure out how many of those
sq.miles fall into certain categories: clear, wooded, river, hills,
rough, mountains, and swamp. Then, using preset proportions, the
spreadsheet calculates how many acres of farm-, pasture-, wood-, and
wasteland you have. The parts that need work are translating those
figures into potential food production, and then working from the
kiloCalories produced to farmers needed, workers in industry, and size
of army supportable. Quite complex.

The second spreadsheet sort of goes in reverse. For a given population
and level of farming technology/field fertility, it gives you a
quick-and-dirty ballpark figure as to the amount of food needed, amount
of farmers needed, and acres of farmable land required. That one will
require less work.

I'll look over the Wiki stuff and see about getting them on-line. My
only reservation is file format. I'm using Lotus 1-2-3 from 1997. I can
try saving in Excel format, but I'm not sure how well it'll work. And,
because I'm using an older version of 1-2-3, I can't import modern
Excel formatted files. Still, I *think* that the latest versions of
Microsoft Office *should* be backwards-compatible, but YMMV.

Andrew
--- Ibrahim Dughlas  wrote:
> Andrew,
>  
> Can you upload the spreadsheets to the Qaiyore website at phoenyx? 
> If you don't know how, take a look at the Wiki stuff. its pretty
> simple.
>  
> sounds good though.
>  
> Ibrahim Underwood
> 
> Andrew Janssen  wrote:
> 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.
>  The New Yahoo! Search
> - Now with image
>
search!----------------------------------------------------------------
> To unsubscribe, send mail to celandra-off@phoenyx.net.


__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard
http://antispam.yahoo.com/whatsnewfree
----------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, send mail to celandra-off@phoenyx.net.