SKM Development: Townsfolk. The Pops. The Fams. The Creeps.

One of my players commented on a previous post, pointing out a really useful post from another website.

Medieval Demographics Made Easy

Now, I gave this place a cursory once over and found out some pretty useful stuff.

The guy from this site Mr. Ross uses late-medieval France as his baseline and states that he'd aim for pops between 30 (for benighted hellholes) to 120 (for rich land full of milk and honey) per square mile, as reasonable population bases. Mr. Ross is going for kingdoms, not hexes, but he does give a helpful method for determining the square footage of a hex, which is to take the hex's size in miles, multiply it by 0.9306049 and square the results.

This means that essentially, our six mile hexes are 31 and some change in square miles. So let's eyeball and say its about 31 square miles. Now, this means if we use those demographics, we have a maximum hex population of about 748 families (remember a family is 5 people). This actually matches up with where ACKs puts a maximized civilized hex (750 max pop, outside of settlements), so at the danger of recreating the wheel, lets make that our maximum population if we don't have a settlement (settlements can get larger, but as I stated are still hungry beasts).

Now, where I'd get weirder here, is I'd argue if a hexes population drops below 30 families, which is about 5 people per square mile, the hex is in danger of becoming 'depopulated' and lapsing from control altogether since at that point the people are so spread out that its impossible to manage them.

So.. Max Hex Fam size is 750. Min is essentially 30. Quantities in between can be taken to found settlements (at a to-be-determined gp or resource cost), which let you break the cap buuuut..

Only families in the hex (not in a settlement in the hex) can be assigned to subsistence production.  

This now gives an additional reason for hex clearing and maintenance. The 750 is the HARD CAP for life living in the hex. Sentient monsters would be assigned to represent pop (that tribe of orcs is using/misuing land your people can't) and thus would limit your ability to spread to complete control in the hex.

This gives mechanical friction to say, having tribes of innocuous, but not allied creatures in your land (giants, lizardmen, etc).

But non-sentient undead, in most cases, wouldn't count except for say the really, really big ones.