On Fri, 23 Jul 2004, Ken Koester wrote: > This seems much too conservative. Agrarian France had 26M+; Britain, > 5.6M+. Europe as a whole could not have been less than 60M, and the > Empire is *at least* as large as Europe, to judge from travelling times > (before teleportation, that is). China must have had at least 100M. . . > . ah, I just pulled out my Braudel. In 1650, he cites a population for > europe (including European Russia) of 100M; for Asia, of 250-330M; for > Africa, of 100M. Your figures would lead to an extremely depopulated > Empire, by human--er, Easterner (-: --standards. Not impossible, if the > birthrate is extremely low. But to be that low, I'd say that all our > expectations of what an Empire is, or does, or functions would be wildly > off; the scale simply wouldn't translate to any experiences you care to > name. I've long wondered how the agrarian Dragaerans (say that 3x fast) managed to cope with the overcast. Perhaps they've been experiencing diminishing crop yields for many cycles now... Also maintaining good topsoil for 200k years is probably difficult.