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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kigmatzomat" data-source="post: 1707065" data-attributes="member: 9254">I think people are looking at commoner existence from a city-first standpoint.  Reality is, cities survive on the excesses of the farmers so unless you know how much the farmers overproduce, you don't know how big your cities can be.  So let's say that every individual in a family qualifies as a farmer, to eliminate the population age issue.  Then lets say that each farmer can produce enough food for 3 people for a surplus of 2 people.  That immediately means that 33% of the populace has to be farmers.  (FYI, I'm lumping meat producers in with grain and vegetable farming)However that's staple food production only.  We also have to worry about cloth, lumber, hemp, and various cash crops (like grains for alchohols).  Using the same 3:1 ratio we are now at a 66% agricultural.  Assume that 4% of the population are non-producing rural types (nobility, administration, milling, hauling, smiths, priests, animal trainers, servants, etc) we are 70% rural. The size of a city is based on the travel radius.  A farmer won't travel more than 2 days in an ox-drawn wagon.  More than that and the odds of storms or accidents get too risky.  That limits you to a production radius of 16 miles (rough terrain, typical road) to 32 miles (flat terrain, romanesque highways) for total area of 500,000-2,000,000 acres.  Half of that will be non-arable due to soil type, rough terrain, too much/not enough water, location, etc which brings us to 250k-1 million arable acres.For simplicity, half of the arable land will be staples and half will be cash crops, luxuries, or otherwise non-food producing land.  We're now at 125k-500k food producing acres.  In general, a medieval farmer could work 1 acre.  Remember, I'm counting children as farmers so I really mean a family of 8 works an 8-ish acre plot.  At maximum utilization you could have 125-500k farmers, 137-550k rural non-staple producers*, and 112-450k urban dwellers. With magic you can boost production by around 33%.  It isn't entirely 33% because plant growth doesn't impact meat production, a labor-restricted task, but I'll assume other spell-based improvements in production (weather control) make up the slack.  We can now max out a city at 150-600k people.  This super-city assumes there are no smaller cities within its production area.  Each one reduces the urban dwellers by an appropriate amount.  It also assumes no significant waterways or other non-agricultural resource.  You can have a big city if its on top of a gold mine and everyone can afford to have food hauled in.  If you disagree with an assumption, change it and go through the process again.  Thank you, and good night.</blockquote>

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