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Given a starting number of 35k, how much would the population grow in 500 yrs?
12th century tech with arcane and divine magics of up to 2nd lv spells. Water and food are pretty readily available. Weather is moderate year round (there is snow but never very heavy or stormy).
There are minor conflicts, and being a fantasy setting, an occasional monster event.
Can anyone give me some numbers on this or do you some more info?
Birth rate also plays a pretty significant part. If you have an infant mortality rate of only 20%, but you have a birth rate of one child per couple, you're going to see a pretty rapid depopulation.
So, there's not enough information to answer this question.
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A population grows at the speed of plot. If a woman is doing her level best to have lots of kids and has access to enough food and good health care, she could have at least more than ten children on average. At the other extreme, a population could die out pretty easily. Choose what you like and what fits you.
The easiest way to do this is to assume that your fantasy world track the real world fairly closely. In order to do this you assume magic is a 0 sum game. Yes magic makes life easier by making food and healing more readily available but there are also magical dangers that offset those advantages ie cure disease cures some people but dragons eat some people.
If this is the case your world would be analogous to 12th century Europe (for most games). This was a period of growing population in Europe with population peaking at about 100 million in the 13th century. that is up from 50 million after the collapse of the Roman Empire. The population then evened out before shrinking again due to the multiple disasters of the 14th century (plague, war, etc.)
Based on this it took 600 years for the population of Europe to double from the collapse of Rome to the peak of Medieval population in the 13th century. But in reality it was stable for much of that time and tended to grow in spurts.
Thus depending on the circumstances population could be growing quickly in times of peace and prosperity as people push back the wilderness or be basically stable in the absence of expansion or decreasing if the world is particularly chaotic.
I tend to think the particular dangers of a fantasy world would mean slow population growth as it is very hard to push back the wilderness and clear more land for food production.
I thought I included birth rate. Historically birthrates have been very high because deathrates are very high. It still is that way in developing (third world) countries. Population starts surging when conditions begin improving and birthrates have not adjusted to declining deathrates such as the case of places like India or China at one point. In non gritty roddenberry fantasy like Golarion and pathfinder I. Would just say birthrates and deathrates have stabilized from things like stabilize and clw and have the population go up maybe 1-5% a year.
Given a 35,000 starting population and 500 years:
1% growth rate would be 5 million
2% growth rate would be 700 million
3% growth rate would be 91.7 billion
4% growth rate would be 11.5 trillion
5% growth rate would be 1.4 quadrillion
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Something else to consider in population growth is the size of the region and immigration. Are people leaving the area? Are people coming to the area? Prosperous areas will see immigration from non-prosperous areas and areas suffering regional natural disasters. Populations don't just rise and fall; they shift. The effect is that more prosperous regions by default tend to become more cosmopolitan in population (broader selection of ethnic/racial groups).
So as most people have pointed out, as long as you have a reasonable sounding explanation the population will expand at the speed of plot.
Given a starting number of 35k, how much would the population grow in 500 yrs?
12th century tech with arcane and divine magics of up to 2nd lv spells. Water and food are pretty readily available. Weather is moderate year round (there is snow but never very heavy or stormy).There are minor conflicts, and being a fantasy setting, an occasional monster event.
Can anyone give me some numbers on this or do you some more info?
Your answers are all quite well explained in this video by a math guy.
> video <
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Given enough time, and no disasters, a population of super-predators will reach the maximum population allowed by energy.
If these people are using medieval farming techniques, then they are going to get one person per half acre to one person per 2.5 acres. Variance here is due to both uncertainty and land quality. Fishing will improve their numbers, of course, in a way that's hard to predict.
BigDTBone's 1% growth rate is a fine average, but the increase will be uneven. So we could have a population of 5 million, but that would require 2.5 to 12.5 million acres. That puts you somewhere between Connecticut (3,548,000 acres) and West Virginia (15,508,000 acres) of just farmland. No forests, mountains, or natural areas. It's much more reasonable to assume only a third of the land is suitable for farming, so we'd look at 7.5 million acres to 37.5 million acres. Vermont is 6,154,000 acres, and Wisconsin, 35,933,000 acres.
Magic's impact is going to vary wildly. 2nd level spells? Of what edition? How many people have the ability to learn magic? Does Cure Disease include heart disease? At the wide end, a 1st level alchemist in pf2 can make a day's meals for ten people every day. At the narrow end, I think magic would mostly make a difference in communication. Animal Messenger and such will relay information that would take a few days of travel. That means less waste.
African or European Swallow?