Population Calculation

[William Keenan]

Does anyone know how the game calculates the population of a civilization?

[Paul]

As far as I know it adds up the populations of all your cities.

[Black Bart]

I think he means the pop diplayed in the main window in millions compared to the population on the scoring screen. I loaded a few game. The ratio seems to go up with the number of turns past.

in one game AD 860 I had 122 citizens and 3030000 population. About 1 citizen=24800 population.

in AD 760 I had 100 citizens and 2130000 population. About 1 citizen=21300 population

another game AD 1290 I had 179 citizens and 4920000. 1 citizen=27486 population.

not that it really matters. It's just the value that shows up on the demographic screen. Scoring is based solely on the number of citizens each city has and whether they are happy.

[Paul]

The game displays your city populations based on 10,000 for the first citizen, 20,000 for the second, 30,000 for the third an so on. I was talking about adding up all these populations.

[Crustacian]

pop for size:

1=10,000
2=30,000
3=60,000
4=100,000
5=150,000
6=210,000
7=280,000
8=360,000
9=450,000
10=550,000
11=660,000
12=780,000

------------------
The journey itself is the thing~Odysseus

[DaveV]

In general, pop = size * (size+1) * 5000

[William Keenan]

That's great guys, thanks.

I'm going to be puting this formula in a tip about demographics and I would like to know who derived the formula so that I can give him credit.

[DaveV]

William - the first place I saw this formula was in the Civ I FAQ, so it's been around a while. Unfortunately, there is no credit given in that document. The formula is a fairly well-known one for the sum of a sequence...

[Lazlo]

DaveV, that formula is still quite reasonable.
The cities grow in an arithmetic proportion.
For example, a size 3 city will have
10k + 20k +30k = 60k population.

This respond to the arithmetic sum formula,
which is
pop * (pop+1) * 10k / 2

= pop * (pop+1) * 5K

I don´t know if this growth proportion holds for very big cities. I have only checked for 12 or less population