Hey all,
As I was writing some lore, I realized that we have not had an official discussion about the scale of Hermertia in a loooong time. By scale, I am referring to the physical size of the Empire’s territory and the Empire’s population (which in many ways are closely entwined). In order to strengthen the cohesiveness of our lore, I think we should settle these parameters.
There has been minimal discussion of this throughout my time on the server, but there are some points that I remember. While we do not need to necessarily stick with these figures (as they have never been officially lore-ified), I think they are worth mentioning. Here are the points that I remember:
- New Hermertia is approximately the size of Western Europe (approximately 1600km in width and 1300 km in height)
- “Super cities” like Gnossis and Bogtown in the Old World had estimated populations of 10,000 (likely the equivalent of the Imperial City or Concordia)
Other than those two points, there really has not been any discussion of Hermertia’s scale.
So there are two parameters that we need to discuss: population and land area. I’ll post a quick summary of the necessary details to start discussion on each topic, then we can discuss as a community from there.
Land AreaIn terms of in-game land area, New Hermertia is 85km by 65km. While this is quite large for a Minecraft world, it is not so formidable in real world terms. As such, it is probably a good idea to scale up the size of the Empire lore-wise in order for things to make more sense. We just need to decide which magnitude of scaling we think is best. As an example, the Western European scaling would mean increasing the size of our world in lore by a factor of 20. This would mean that settlements that are 1000 blocks away in game would be 20km away in lore.
PopulationSince there is no in-game population to base our lore population of off, this is a bit of a trickier parameter to set. The total population of the Empire is going to be closely tied to the city population that we decided on, so perhaps it is best to look at city populations first. Below are some examples of city sizes (and the corresponding approximation of total empire population given that size). When I say cities, I mean large cities in our world like Gnossis, Concordia, and their equivalents. As the city sizes grow in the list below, it is assumed that some of the population of the empire would live in villages not created in-game. Should we want to make it so that only in-game settlements exist in lore and effect lore population, then the large city sizes would have lower corresponding empire sizes. Clarifications aside, here are the estimates:
City size: 5000 (size of large Neolithic settlements) => total empire population = 50,000
City size: 10,000 (size of large Bronze Age settlements) => total empire population = 100,000
City size: 50,000 (size of Bronze Age cities like Ur and Athens) => total empire population = 1 million
City size: 100,000 (size of Early Middle Ages cities like Constantinople and Alexandria) => total empire population: 2-5 million
City size: 500,000 (size of large cities in the 1600s) => total empire size 30 million
These are just some estimates to get the discussion started, and are certainly subject to adjustment.
My StanceI believe the best fit for Hermertia is scaling the world by a factor 15 (lore size 1200km x 900km) and having large city populations around 100,000. That level of scaling would make the Empire the size in this image:
I think this pairing makes the most sense. Scaling up by a factor of 15 gives the territory a nice sense of size without being overly large. While a total population of 2-5 million might not seem like a lot of people for such a large chunk of territory, much of the Empire is unclaimed and unsettled wilderness, so I do not believe it would create too much of a mismatch.
