Completed Ytarria Hex map with terrain added

[apoc527]

Originally Posted by darebear

To test this approach I looked at Megalos and Caithness. Megalos contains 1 Metropolis, 8 large cities, 11 cities and 48 towns. Rough math for all those areas worked out 18.2 million souls living in the empire. I did not remove water hexes or account for hexes which would automatically count as borderlands due to their terrain type from the equation. I also did not reduce population where zones overlap across a border into other realms (typically the zones for cities in foreign realms overlap so it all comes out in the wash at a macro level). These reductions would have reduced the Meglan population numbers by several million easily and would bring the population figures well within the canon 16 million. Any remainders would be considered to be living in the wilderness in isolated settlements. The zones also match canon description, with eastern and western Megalos being largely civilized while northern and central Megalos are more sparsely populated. However, rather than reducing the population size for these unusable hexes I would likely make the assumption that the population in those areas are instead concentrated on coasts and other hexes in the zone.

Caithness consists of 2 cities and 15 towns. That works out to 800,000 for the cities and 2,100,000 for the towns. Canon population is 3 million. The country contains areas of tight civilization surrounded by borderlands and wilds.

Cardiel is interesting in that large portions of the interior are wilderness, with civilization concentrated along the major rivers and coasts. This allows many options for traditional adventures in the interior regions. The population for the zones is roughly 5.5 million, with the population of Tredroy split between the three adjacent nations.

Of course all of this is very generalized and done at a macro level. It is by no means meant to be a completely accurate depiction of population levels.

A new map is posted with "Zones of Civilization" to indicate how this all works in practice, with the inner band around an urban center being Civilized and the outer band being Borderlands. Using this methodology should provide a much better image of the levels of civilization throughout Ytarria.

It is not perfect, but it does provide a basis to determine where the "wilderness" areas could be found. To be sure, there will still be uninhabited areas even in civilized zones and bandits are always a problem in well travelled lands.

The opportunities for adventure still abound even in the heart of Megalos.

Yes yes yes. 1000 times yes.

A few observations here:

1. This makes it sound like the numbers on Banestorm p84 may be...reasonable? I swear that we've had discussions (upthread even) that these are way too low. BUT using this technique (which is very similar to the more modern ACKS II system, though I don't know about the numbers), I think it shows that perhaps things aren't as off as is commonly believed?

2. Would it be possible (at some point) to shade the hexes in some way to show them as Civilized, Borderlands, or Wilderness? The circles you created are workable, but they make things a little hard to see.

3. More please!