Hi,
did some computer simulations..
If you do population expansion as I was told the Book of Manor does, then you'll gain a 100 peasants every 4.5 years (up till around 1500 peasants when it start to decrease). After about 100 years everyone will have 2000 peasants (assuming none are of course killed of and no bad harvests).
That's a population doubling in 22.5 years, which given the golden age of Arthur actually sounds ok to me :)

fg,
Thijs

did some computer simulations..
If you do population expansion as I was told the Book of Manor does, then you'll gain a 100 peasants every 4.5 years



Of course, the computer never lies, but four and a half years sounds awful short, according to my experience and pre-calculations.

-g

While the computer never lies, me the human programmer makes more then enough mistakes...

If you have 500 men, then you first need to succeed a roll against population/100 and then you need to fail it (similar experience check). Correct?
So 500/100 is 5, so succeed 1-5 (25%) then fail 6-20 (75%) so, .75*.25=~19% chance per year you go from 500 to 600..
So on average ~5 years per manor, but because some lucky people will have increased several times during those 5 years the 'average over many manors' is slightly lower...

fg,
Thijs

While the computer never lies, me the human programmer makes more then enough mistakes...



I've made a few myself.
Confession here: I didn't use computer anything to calculate the number in KAP, just lots and lots of graphs, hand-done calculations, spidery-web things showing connections whee a point here will bump down the line, etc.
So, maybe some of my calculations are wrong.
Though, over time, most of them seem pretty consistent within the system, which is what I want.



If you have 500 men, then you first need to succeed a roll against population/100 and then you need to fail it (similar experience check). Correct?


Yes
HOWEVER, one must first have had five successive years of harvest that is Meager or better.
One Bad or Very Bad harvest and the count starts all over again.
However, with the Pax Arthur, this hardly occurs until the Wasteland.



If you have 500 men, then you first need to succeed a roll against population/100 and then you need to fail it (similar experience check). Correct?
So 500/100 is 5, so succeed 1-5 (25%) then fail 6-20 (75%) so, .75*.25=~19% chance per year you go from 500 to 600..
So on average ~5 years per manor, but because some lucky people will have increased several times during those 5 years the 'average over many manors' is slightly lower...


Let's just call it 5. So, you can expect your village of 500 to grow to 600 (and L1 in income) in 5 years.

Then the chance is about 21%, so again, get another 100 in another 5 years.
Then about 22%, so again, about 5 years.

Or, 25 years for your population to double. roughly.
Just about what you said.
Nice.

I see now it was this line...


After about 100 years everyone will have 2000 peasants

...that threw me. I thought, "no one gets a thousand peasants!"

Now I see, ¡doh! it should have been, "Although the campaign only gets about half that time,"
and the Wastelands ruin growth for half of that as well.



fg,


May I ask "What does fg mean?"
Thanks

You're forgetting something very important.
Before you can make that roll, you need 5 years of at least Meagre harvests.
If the population fails to increase, you can keep rolling each year after that, as long as you don't get a worse than meagre harvest. The first time you get a Bad or worse harvest, the clock resets, and you need another 5 consecutive Meagre-plus harvests before you can start rolling again.
This makes the population increase much, much slower than your calculations suggest.

Edit: I see I was beaten to the punch :)

What effect does the Pax Arthur have? I was going from memory in my last post, but the only thing I remember arthur's reign affecting wa sthe manorial benefit table. The individual manor harvest rolls themselves can still be pretty dire, can't they?

Even if a substantial increase in chance of good harvests occurs, it's still probably limited to, roughly, 30 years (520-ish to the Wasteland) - and with 30 rolls, still a pretty good chance of getting at least 1 poor harvest. You only need 1 to really slow down the advancement of population.

Also, I think once population has increased, the count is reset. So, roughly 1/5th chance of +100 peasants every year, after a buildup period of 5 years, means +100 peasants per 10 years, assuming no bad harvests. I think that's slow enough! If you have a LOT of good harvests, you're better off buying the population increase.

HOWEVER, one must first have had five successive years of harvest that is Meager or better.
One Bad or Very Bad harvest and the count starts all over again.
However, with the Pax Arthur, this hardly occurs until the Wasteland.


I assumed those years were present at the start of the campaing (531). Also most of my players make they have high stewardship, high concern commoners and negative hate (landlord) and will very unlikely fail their stewardship, hence always have at least meager results. Even the wasteland will unlikely cause the Misfortune to critical, so they could pull this off for long time.. I am not aware the clocks resets after successful expansion, then indeed the average increases by another five years.





After about 100 years everyone will have 2000 peasants

...that threw me. I thought, "no one gets a thousand peasants!"

Now I see, ¡doh! it should have been, "Although the campaign only gets about half that time,"
and the Wastelands ruin growth for half of that as well.

I made calculations for 200 years :)




May I ask "What does fg mean?"



fg = friendly greetings

What effect does the Pax Arthur have? I was going from memory in my last post, but the only thing I remember arthur's reign affecting wa sthe manorial benefit table. The individual manor harvest rolls themselves can still be pretty dire, can't they?

Pax Arthur decreases the Misfortune/Bad Weather according GPC.

fg,
Thijs

Don't forget the money the knight of the manor has to put up in order to build the new hamlet for the new 100 peasants. That can reduce the population growth significantly.

Those numbers are very high...IF you care about reality..(I'm not saying you should...)

England's population increased from around 1 million in 1086 to around 6 million in 1328 (according to Wikipedia). That time period was on of high population growth. Plugging those data into a standard exponential growth curve with no limiting resources (where Nt=Noert....I'm an ecologist), you get r = 0.007 or 0.7% per annum population growth rate. If you use this realistic r, then in 5 years you would increase from 500 to 518 person. It would take 93 years to double from 500 to 1000 peasants.

To go from 500 to 600 peasants in 5 years would requre a 3.6% annual increase.

To double from 500 to 1000 peasants in 25 years would require a 2.7% annual increase.

World population growth rate reached its max in the 1960s at around 2.2%.

Just a thought...

Does the population growth always represent natural growth? If it includes in migration (which seems justified if the harvests are good and the environment is safe, and free of raiders and brigands) then 100 people moving in seems justified over a period of 5 years.

Since serfs can't move legally, then it seems reasonable that the new denizens are freemen, including craftsmen and yeoman farmers. A yeoman probably generates more income for the lord than a typical peasant family, so the growth could be said to not include 100 actual residents, but merely enough residents to have the economic impact of 100 peasants (which is only 20 families).

If, for the sake of argument, we say each yeoman family has the impact of 2 peasant families, then we only need 10 yeoman to move into the village over the space of 5 years. The families will follow the head of household, and so we can reasonably say that annually 2 new yeoman (and their families of 5) each moved into the village. These might not even be real migrants, but the younger sons of a current yeoman who are able to purchase land due to the continued prosperity, or peasants that have moved up socially and economically due to the continued prosperity.

It brings to mind an idealic village of sturdy yeoman, the old roast beef of England, and all of that.

Also, I was under the impression that New England's population growth was something over 5% annually during the 17th century, but I'm not a colonialist so those figures may be off. Still maybe 2-3% in an especially prosperous locality isn't so far off after all.

Don't forget the money the knight of the manor has to put up in order to build the new hamlet for the new 100 peasants. That can reduce the population growth significantly.

You dont need hamlet for 'normal' growth, only expanding fields..

fg,
Thijs

Those numbers are very high...IF you care about reality..(I'm not saying you should...)

England's population increased from around 1 million in 1086 to around 6 million in 1328 (according to Wikipedia).


But in Arthur Pendragon all time is sorta increases by a factor 10 for technology, so why not also for population expansion? :)
Afterall in Pax Arthur I guess that health-care is much better and thus higher birth and survival rates increasing population exponentially..

fg,
Thijs

Does the population growth always represent natural growth? If it includes in migration (which seems justified if the harvests are good and the environment is safe, and free of raiders and brigands) then 100 people moving in seems justified over a period of 5 years.


No that calculation doesn't include immigration....but it doesn't really matter. It's not Harnworld......I was just fooling around. And as some one else noted...it Arthur's reign.....not reality...

NT

Also, I was under the impression that New England's population growth was something over 5% annually during the 17th century, but I'm not a colonialist so those figures may be off. Still maybe 2-3% in an especially prosperous locality isn't so far off after all.



Probably mostly immigration....Again, I don't think it really matters for the game.

Does the population growth always represent natural growth? If it includes in migration (which seems justified if the harvests are good and the environment is safe, and free of raiders and brigands) then 100 people moving in seems justified over a period of 5 years.


So it might seem. It really depends on which Arthurian view you want to take.
Historial reality: migration? Not a chance
Ideal Arthurian: migration? Of course!

My own is a crunch of (surprise!) history and Arthurian Idealism.



Since serfs can't move legally, then it seems reasonable that the new denizens are freemen...


I will interject that in my KAP, there are nowhere near this many yoemen anywhere except Occitania.



Also, I was under the impression that New England's population growth...


Please, let us end this off subject from the thread.

-g

Also, I was under the impression that New England's population growth...

Please, let us end this off subject from the thread.

-g


I was trying to suggest that a 5% population growth can be 'historically realistic.' Sorry if that wasn't clear.

I'm a little confused. What basis are you using for population expansion, migrants / refugees or birth-rates?

It struck me that having 100 peasants might be well as good, but they might all be under 5 years old.

Refugees may another matter, but there should be sufficient excess food available to feed them all from harvests as mentioned.

Without more land, or an agricultural revolution, the limiting factor may well be how many peasants the land can support.

I'm a little confused. What basis are you using for population expansion, migrants / refugees or birth-rates?



The numbers I gave were "natural" population growth--so just birth-rate. Most others would be a combination. I think the Pendragon ones are undefined and perfectly good for the system. As for some of the 100 being children..they'd be working the fields at a pretty early age anyway, so I'm not sure it really matters. Just think of it as an increase of 100 'effectives'.

NT

I'm a little confused. What basis are you using for population expansion, migrants / refugees or birth-rates?

It struck me that having 100 peasants might be well as good, but they might all be under 5 years old.



I'm working under the presumption that they're not all born during the previous 5 years. The ''new peasants'' are the ones that survived the past 5 years of prosperity but would not have made it during harsher times. It includes, for example, children who've grown up into adults who wouldn't have survived diseases like the measles if they had been malnourished due to poor harvests, or those elderly people who are able to live a few years longer because of the improved nutrition and safety available to them on the manor.