City Setups

To test a model we need to see how it stands up to realworld situations, preferably unusual or extreme ones. Here are some settings I tried out.

	England 1340 AD	Japan 8th century AD	Europe AD&D Fantasy	'Ancient Egypt'	Ninth Pass Pern
HEX	25	25	25	25	25
POPCONST	235	485	235	235	51
LAND	100	265	100	200	830
CLIM	1	1.5	1	1.2	0.7
EXTRA	0	0	600	-80	0
YIELD	1	2.5	10	1	1
TL	3	2	7	2	7
URBAN	2	12	50	6.9	1
Land Use
ARABLE	40	15	30	5	15
PASTURE	30	0	20	5	15
WOODLAND	10	30	20	0	0
FISHING	5	10	5	1	5
IMPORT%				-35
City
COASTAL	1	1	1	1
POP	50000	50000	50000	20000	5000
CCOUNT	2	1	2	2
FARMLAND	30	500	50	800	150
VILGAP	1	0.7	5	1	2.46
MAXCITY	50000	50000	50000	20000	5000
Tech Level Table
TLPOP			0.005		1
margin			5		0.3

Japan 8th Century AD

Given highly mountainous terrain, how did Japan manage a population of 8 million? The secret is YIELD: two or even three crops of rice per year.
Note that FARMLAND needs to be high: the farmers were crowded into the coastal plains, as is still the case in modern times.

Europe AD&D Fantasy

An attempt to recreate England as imagined in the AD&D World Builder's Guidebook.
For this some major changes are required so we've switched to TL7 and increased farm production margin by a factor of 5! This enables a much higher proportion of non-peasants to be supported, 50% in our case.
Obviously with Priests blessing crops YIELD is going improve. Let's be silly and make it a tenfold increase.
We need villages 'scattered at five- to ten-mile intervals', but with their population similar to realworld. This can be achieved by another drastic change - reducing TLPOP to 0.005! The peasants don't really need ploughs or other technology. No wonder those buxom wenches are so keen to give our bold adventurers guided tours of the local haylofts - they've little else to do...
I've increased Woodland to allow for those vast forests that fantasy writers often seem to require.
Checking WILDERNESS we find a full 88% of monster infested land for adventurers to explore. Excellent!
RURAL_EDGE is low, so we can have a really big city. It might be difficult finding enough people to live in it though.

'Ancient Egypt'

Here we have a desert country with a small strip of fertile land along the banks of the Nile, simulated by setting ARABLE low and FARMLAND high. I've not used realworld figures here, since I've no idea what they should be...
In Roman times Egypt was exporting grain (it still exports food) which seems to run counter to common sense but in our model IMPORT -35% is actually no problem. WILDDENS is low, as it should be.

Pern

Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series seemed at first sight to be a simple exercise for the spreadsheet - until I found the author had a secret...

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