Estimating populations of cities

[techumseh]

How do people calculate the size of cities in scenarios? To be honest, I often guess at a value, based on impressions and what "feels right".

In my latest project (3rd Reich), I decided to be a little more precise, although not by much, as it's turning out. I have an old atlas (1953) with a list of city populations, so I started with that. I used 100,000 population for each point, up to 1 million. After that I used a declining scale where 2 million was a size 14 city, and city size grew by 2 for each additional million. London, by far the largest city in Europe in 1938 at 8.3 million, was therefore size 27. Except for some island and desert cities, I made all cities a minimum of 2 in size.

Since many cities declined substantially during the war, I did some checking using Wikipedia, which as population figures for 1939 for some cities. Many German, Soviet, Polish and Balkan cities did have a reduction, about 20% on average. So I increased their size accordingly.

In less industrial countries such as the Balkans and Turkey, there are few large cities, except for the capital, eg. Bucharest, Sofia, Belgrade, Istanbul. Most cities in these counties are under 100.000 in fact.

This raises the issue of rural populations. Should they be taken into account when fixing city sizes? For example, Turkey has a significant population (and army), but aside from Istanbul, almost all its cities would be one or two in size, without counting rural populations. If I get the city sizes correct, the total national population will be too low.

How do other others handle this?

[curtsibling]

Blackclove made an interesting paper on this subject:

http://sleague.apolyton.net/Guides/sldt_city_sizes.shtml

[McMonkey]

Probably telling you stuff you already know!

Many (possibly most) atlases display the city names according size AND importance.
Ie:
Major City = Large bold text
Large City = Normal bold text
Towns = Normal text
Other settlements = Small text
Urban areas = Orange blob!

There are probably many variations depending on the map maker but I find this the best/easiest way to gage city size when building a scenario. I expect the map makers take into account cities that are rural hubs or provincial capitals.

I tried making the Balkans War cites and total populations accurate but due to the number of size 1 cities that are easily destroyed I had to tweak things a bit. I think that the right feel is far more important than 100% accuracy which is extremely difficult to achieve within the CivII limits.

Wikipedia often lists historical populations in its city guides.

I am interested to hear how other designers handle this!

[kobayashi]

The most important consideration is your choice of aquaduct and sewer thresholds. This divides the cities into 3 tiers, matching the atlas text (or dot) size. Ignoring the puny smallest city (which tends to be razed in WWII) graphic, match the size to the three larger city graphics.

'nuff said

[our_man]

I try and keep it within normal Civ 2 parameters i.e. what the formula calculates is the population in numbers relative to points. However, I have been flexible in the past if I feel the system would give the city a low population point number that does not reflect it's economic/military importance. So I allow myself to manipulate at my discretion by 7-8 population points in some case to reflect importance. That's a lot, I know.

[techumseh]

I did some calculations regarding the difference in city sizes and national populations. I used Turkey as a rural based nation and France as an urbanized one.

According to my 1953 atlas, France had a population of 42 million, and Turkey 21 million or half as much. Using the formula described above, I created French cities totaling 102 points. Turkish cities total only 42 points, significantly less than the 51 points that would be half of the French total.

I attribute this to greater urbanization in France vs. Turkey, ie. more people live outside cities in Turkey than in France. The question is, should the Turkish cities be enlarged to reflect the total national population, or not?

[Dr Kellogg]

In my unfinished WW1 scenario I tried to reflect historical provinces and populations. I wanted cities to act as provinces and metropolitan areas (Though I was not sure whether I should use the names of the provinces or the names of the provincial capitals).

I systematically placed terrain tiles with additional shields as well as terrain tiles with less shields or no shields at all to classify cities/provinces into industrial and rural ones.
Additionally, I made regular infantry pretty cheap and artillery, vehicles and aircraft exorbitant expensive. Therefore, infantry could be easily build in most cities (except for a few ones in southern and eastern Europe) whereas the good stuff had to be build in industrial areas. So even larger cities in Anatolia or Russia couldn't mass-produce artillery or tanks.