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Message: <blockquote data-quote="David Argall" data-source="post: 770450" data-attributes="member: 4481">food supply"the problem right now is that the city was here before the rural population could take root. Think of Mor's End as a boom town in the frontier. A large town pops up overnight and no one is prepared to support it. That's why we're not seeing a typical rural population. I think, eventually, the populations will normalize. Perhaps in another 150 years it will be a lot closer to true medieval demographics."   Cart before the horse here.  Cities need food, lots of food, which means they don't exist far from lots of rural folk who produce that food.  The balance of a boom town is normally achieved within 1.5 years, not centuries.     Our choices thus are    a rural population around 100,000   [the standard]   A very productive agriculture system  [pushing things a mite]   heavy imports of food. [Food is a bulk item, and routinely spoils.  Add in the inefficiencies of ancient transportation and the city is not likely to get the majority of its needs this way.  Still, we may be able to push a good bit of the rural population off the map this way.]</blockquote>