Population Density

[nedfumpkin]

Anybody know if there is anything that deals with population density? I'm looking at a map from 1847, and it gives me the pop. for the different towns, but what would 734 mean in RT3, how many stars? Any thoughts?

[JayEff]

Ned I will give you two examples from my mapmaking about how I approached this.

1. I am working on an Eastern Europe map where I am representing all cities with 200k pop or higher. A 200k city gets 10% density, and the rest goes up proportionally. Moscow would work out to more than 400%, so I set it to 400% and painted a high density region around it. Then with the other regions I assigned densities that would give me parity between raw material industries and finished material industries. So the map is balanced, and all the cities are proportional. At a later stage I will adjust the overall map density and growth rate to suit my scenario.

2. On the Athabasca map there is a huge disparity in city sizes. I used present day populations. Well Edmonton is at 985k, and I wanted to include towns down to 1k population. So I did a log transformation. Edmonton ended up at 352%, 1k towns were at 3%. Fort McMurray, the second largest city, came out at 30%. The formula I used was density = 3+log(k_pop)^3*15. Any formula of this type that gets them all less than 400% density should be fine.

So 1k pop = 3 + log(1)^3*15 = 3
985k pop = 3 + log(985)^3*15 = 352

Even with this log transformation, Edmonton's size is dwarfs the rest of the map, but at least I can get the little towns into the picture. The story is about Edmonton, but it is about Smith, McLennan, Lac La Biche and Spirit River too.

[JayEff]

When I was researching for Canada Bound, I became aware that Lower Canada and Montreal grew more slowly than the other colonies. If you have a city whose growth you want to arrest, while the rest of the map grows, set its density to zero or really low, then place some upgraded houses and industries, or buildings that will not upgrade. And voilà! you have a stagnant city.

[nedfumpkin]

Thanks, I guess I'll go with whatever scale makes the most sense. Since I already know the needs of the houses, I guess I can determine it to be equal to x residents. My highest number will be less than three thousand at inital start-up.