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Hi everyone!
Recently, the question came up as to what the population of some of the nations in Golarion were. While I know that the devs officially do not want to say (to give the GM some leniency within their respective worlds), I also know that this keeps coming up as a thread once every few years. So I decided to take an evening with the wiki pages and tabulate all the countries in Avistan. The result is the attached google doc. You'll have to save a local copy if you want to edit it.
A lot of the smaller settlements don't have figures and those figures really wouldn't matter in the grand scheme of things. In cases like this, I've assigned the following totals:
Hamlet: 50 pop
Village: 100 pop
Town: 500-1000 pop.
City: I haven't added anything to these. I'm hoping to get actual figures.
Furthermore, on the first page, I've added a column called "countryside population" which acts as a modifier to the city totals. This is to represent the number of people living on farms, etc... Its listed as a percentage of the city population. So, if you think twice as many people live outside of these named settlements, then you should add 200% to that column.
The spreadsheet is about 95% finished - enough to get a good sense of the relationship between different nations. If anyone has population / settlement figures to add to the spreadsheet, feel free to comment below. Please cite your work, though. I'll try to keep it up to date as much as possible. Lastly, I've also cross-posted this onto my blog.
(addendum: for my next trick I'm planing on working out the area of each country down to the square mile.)
Additional addendum:
On page 1, I've added modifiers based on the level of "civilization" in the country. They are:
Inner Sea coast 15%
Farmlands 20%
Semi-settled 33%
Wilds 50%
Inhospitable 90%
These figures represent the percentage of the population living in the named settlements. Inner Sea Coast are the large nations along the Inner Sea (Taldor, Andoran and Cheliax). Farmlands are the countries that have a lot of arable land and small settlements dotted throughout. Semi-settled are like farmlands but also have large untouched wildernesses. Wilds are mostly untouched wildernesses and inhospitable are places you don't want to be (i.e. the Worldwound).
So, in someplace like Taldor only 15% of the people live in the named cities. The rest are in the innumerable towns, suburbs etc... whereas in Hermea 95% of the people live in that one town under the eye of the gold dragon.
Is this accurate? That is entirely for the GM to decide. That's why I've released a tool rather than an answer. Don't like it? Think there's all too many Taldanes in the world? Feel free to change the categories or the values. All I've done is come up with a (hopefully) useful way to crunch numbers for you :)
Those are some cool tools!
Well, that's what the country modifier is for. You tell the spreadsheet what percentage of the population are in named settlements and it figures out the total population for you. Paizo adds a metropolis later and you can change your percentage.