Design Tips Index

Scenario League

Apolyton Civ2


     Populations for Cities by Blackclove

(December 98)        

 

Improve scenario accuracy by matching actual populations to Civ2 city sizes.


City Populations: Who Cares?

When designing historically accurate scenarios, it may help to know how large the population of a city is. It would be strange to find 12 million people in Rome during the  early republic. Of course, you may want to use artificially large cities for play balance  reasons, but if you know the population of a city in real life you can compute its  Civilization II size, and vice versa.

In game terms, the population of cities affects the periodic messages about how many citizens you have, the population of cities as shown on the city view screen, and so on.

 

Looking Up City Sizes and Measurement Problems

A brief note on setting city sizes for the research-inclined. There are at least two  commonly used measures of city population used in source statistics. The first is  metropolitan area population. This includes the city's population as well as that of all  surrounding areas, including suburbs and so on. The second is the population of the city itself. This number is usually much smaller as it includes only those who live within  the city as a political and geographic entity. You should try to figure out which statistic  you are being given. Some countries like Canada also inflate their official census  metropolitan area statistics by using a very liberal definition of "metropolitan area".

For scenarios set in the future, you cannot necessarily assume that a city will grow  larger. Detroit lost 200,000 people between 1980 and 1990, for example.

You should always try to look up populations whenever possible, as your intuitions may  be wrong. For example, most people reason that the population of Sweden must be  much larger than that of the Netherlands, because the country is physically larger.  However, it turns out that there are only about 8.5 milliion Swedes and 20 million  Dutch! It is also commonly believed that there are a lot of cities with over 1 million  people -- there aren't. A million is a lot. Pittsburgh, an American city important enough  to boast its own football, baseball and hockey teams, is only half a million people.

 

What's the Population of a Size 4 City?

The population is equal to 10,000 times the sum of this city size  and all city sizes up to it (shown in equation form below, where S is the size of the  city in Civ2 terms). So, to go from size 3 to size 4 you would add 40,000 (=4 x 10,000);  to go from 15 to 16 you would add 160,000 (=16 x 10,000).

I have tabled the values of city sizes up to size 24 below. It is easy enough to compute  higher city sizes; just continue to add the new city size times 10,000 people for each  size beyond 24.

 

Size Population Size Population
1 10,000 13 910,000
2 30,000 14 1,050,000
3 60,000 15 1,200,000
4 100,000 16 1,360,000
5 150,000 17 1,530,000
6 210,000 18 1,710,000
7 280,000 19 1,900,000
8 360,000 20 2,100,000
9 450,000 21 2,310,000
10 550,000 22 2,530,000
11 660,000 23 2,760,000
12 780,000 24 3,000,000


 

 

Have a Civ2 scenario development tip you want to submit? E-mail us!

Return to the Scenario League's main page.

Go to the Apolyton's Civilization II main page.