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Pop - how many people

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I've not even thought of them in terms of being the same number across the strata. I've just assumed a Noble represents fewer people than a Freeman who in turn represents more than a slave and so on. As @Daft says, it's just a rough abstraction anyway. "People live in this province. How many? Lots."
 
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Magnar said:
I considered that but then you have pop promotion and demotion which indicates some sort of equivalence.
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Nah, same in Stellaris. When a pop demotes, that doesn't mean a block of say 2500 freemen became slaves - just that enough freemen became slaves or nobles or w/e to fill the new pop while impacting the group they left. It is an abstraction, ofc, but I never thought of it as 1:1.
 
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Doesn't help that we don't really have any clear picture of population numbers from the ancient world... so the game abstracting these values is perfectly fine. It's fun to invent a number that corroborates pops to a real world value, but it won't represent reality... and helpfully for the developers... there's little historical information that's reliable to abstract pop numbers from.
 
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Magnar said:
There are a few census examples from aroudn that period eg Athens in 317BC but not enough to account for the whole map.
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It's more a case that the overall reliability of those documents is questioned by historians. They're very ball-park-y and there was a clear agenda in "inflating" numbers by the Macedonians, in that a given city had a larger tributary requirement. We also don't know anything about how they collected and determined census data.

Even later relatively "good" census data from the Roman Empire is... very problematic. Hence why Rome is "a city of a million people" or also called a city of no more than 300,000 people at Rome's height. Really depends on how information you base that on.
 
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Arthrodira said:
Don't use Athens as your standard. Athens in particular has far too SMALL of a population in game, less than Sparta! (WTF?)

I believe historians use a ratio of something like 1:15 when estimating population sizes from army sizes (so 1k soldiers would indicate 14k civilians = 15k total).

You cannot assume 25% of the population are adult males in the ancient world. That's based on a modern family size of 2 children per parent, which is too low. Given population losses to war, disease, and famine in the ancient world, you would need a higher youth population simply to maintain a stable population and not face extinction. Also, wars create widows - you expect to have more women than men in a violent society (partially balanced by high mortality rates in childbirth, but less fathers means less children so...). Also, no country mobilizes every single adult man for war. The elderly are typically not going to be conscripted, nor are the middle aged (unless desperate). You also need to keep in mind that in all societies, ancient and modern, most adult men are still going to be working as civilians most of the time. Sure, many of them would have fought at some point in the classical world, but they are not all fighting at the same time.

So using 1:15 (which could be wrong, I'm not 100% sure on the exact ratio, but it's in that range), if you raise 500 militia per pop, then that pop represents ~7.5k people. So if Alexandria should have 300k people, then it should start with 40 pops, which is actually pretty close to how they have it! Though it does indicates they are not using the same ratio as 1:15.
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I think a civilisation not mobilising everyone available is represented by the levy size multiplier, so a pop likely does represent 500 men of fighting age, plus their families.
 
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Feowen said:
It's more a case that the overall reliability of those documents is questioned by historians. They're very ball-park-y and there was a clear agenda in "inflating" numbers by the Macedonians, in that a given city had a larger tributary requirement. We also don't know anything about how they collected and determined census data.

Even later relatively "good" census data from the Roman Empire is... very problematic. Hence why Rome is "a city of a million people" or also called a city of no more than 300,000 people at Rome's height. Really depends on how information you base that on.
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we can only work with the information we get given + a bit of salt. Something at the end of the day is better than nothing to start a population model.
 
Jarolleon said:
I think a civilisation not mobilising everyone available is represented by the levy size multiplier, so a pop likely does represent 500 men of fighting age, plus their families.
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If we estimate ~five children per family, that puts us at about 3500 per pop, which seems a bit high again. Especially for Noble and Slave pops.
 
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