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PostPosted: March 3rd, 2016, 7:30 pm 
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Duke

Joined: May 30th, 2015, 6:01 pm
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Location: Michigan, USA
Hey all,

As I was writing some lore, I realized that we have not had an official discussion about the scale of Hermertia in a loooong time. By scale, I am referring to the physical size of the Empire’s territory and the Empire’s population (which in many ways are closely entwined). In order to strengthen the cohesiveness of our lore, I think we should settle these parameters.

There has been minimal discussion of this throughout my time on the server, but there are some points that I remember. While we do not need to necessarily stick with these figures (as they have never been officially lore-ified), I think they are worth mentioning. Here are the points that I remember:

- New Hermertia is approximately the size of Western Europe (approximately 1600km in width and 1300 km in height)
- “Super cities” like Gnossis and Bogtown in the Old World had estimated populations of 10,000 (likely the equivalent of the Imperial City or Concordia)

Other than those two points, there really has not been any discussion of Hermertia’s scale.

So there are two parameters that we need to discuss: population and land area. I’ll post a quick summary of the necessary details to start discussion on each topic, then we can discuss as a community from there.

Land Area
In terms of in-game land area, New Hermertia is 85km by 65km. While this is quite large for a Minecraft world, it is not so formidable in real world terms. As such, it is probably a good idea to scale up the size of the Empire lore-wise in order for things to make more sense. We just need to decide which magnitude of scaling we think is best. As an example, the Western European scaling would mean increasing the size of our world in lore by a factor of 20. This would mean that settlements that are 1000 blocks away in game would be 20km away in lore.

Population

Since there is no in-game population to base our lore population of off, this is a bit of a trickier parameter to set. The total population of the Empire is going to be closely tied to the city population that we decided on, so perhaps it is best to look at city populations first. Below are some examples of city sizes (and the corresponding approximation of total empire population given that size). When I say cities, I mean large cities in our world like Gnossis, Concordia, and their equivalents. As the city sizes grow in the list below, it is assumed that some of the population of the empire would live in villages not created in-game. Should we want to make it so that only in-game settlements exist in lore and effect lore population, then the large city sizes would have lower corresponding empire sizes. Clarifications aside, here are the estimates:

City size: 5000 (size of large Neolithic settlements) => total empire population = 50,000
City size: 10,000 (size of large Bronze Age settlements) => total empire population = 100,000
City size: 50,000 (size of Bronze Age cities like Ur and Athens) => total empire population = 1 million
City size: 100,000 (size of Early Middle Ages cities like Constantinople and Alexandria) => total empire population: 2-5 million
City size: 500,000 (size of large cities in the 1600s) => total empire size 30 million

These are just some estimates to get the discussion started, and are certainly subject to adjustment.

My Stance
I believe the best fit for Hermertia is scaling the world by a factor 15 (lore size 1200km x 900km) and having large city populations around 100,000. That level of scaling would make the Empire the size in this image:

Image

I think this pairing makes the most sense. Scaling up by a factor of 15 gives the territory a nice sense of size without being overly large. While a total population of 2-5 million might not seem like a lot of people for such a large chunk of territory, much of the Empire is unclaimed and unsettled wilderness, so I do not believe it would create too much of a mismatch.

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PostPosted: March 3rd, 2016, 9:44 pm 
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King

Joined: May 30th, 2015, 10:17 am
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I'm out but I agree with this. Great post. Hadnt ever occurred to me to consider this.

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PostPosted: March 4th, 2016, 3:08 am 
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King

Joined: May 30th, 2015, 7:09 pm
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sounds good to me.

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PostPosted: March 4th, 2016, 4:04 am 
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Duke

Joined: June 1st, 2015, 12:47 am
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A word of caution: this was done as a thought experiment and considering the results I would not recommend using this method to determine the sized of the Empire.

I got to thinking about this and did some calculations that produced interesting results:

Given:

The running speed (sprint w/o jumping) in Minecraft (vm) = 5.612 m/s

A minecraft day (tm) = 20 min = 1200 s

The average human running speed (vr) approx. = 11 m/h = 4.91744 m/s

An Earth day (tr) = 24 h = 86400 s

and

Δx = v * t

It can be determined that (given constant velocity and level ground):

a player can travel 6734.4 m in one Minecraft day (6734.4 = Δxm).

a human being can travel 424866.846 m in one Earth day (424866.846 = Δxr).

If Δxr / Δxm = the scale of the real world to the Minecraft world,

then that scale is 63.0890378:1.

In essence, by comparing the length of Minecraft and Earth days as well as the sustained running speed of a player and a human being, it can be determined that the Minecraft world is shrunk down by a factor of ~63. This means that if we were to use the above calculations to determine the size of the Empire, then we would multiply all distances by that number. This would result in a size of ~5355 km east-west and ~4095 km north-south. This is about 1/5th by 1/6th of the Earth's circumference (about the width and height of North Africa).

This is, of course, much larger than our target size, which is why I don't recommend using the results of these calculations.

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PostPosted: March 4th, 2016, 4:06 am 
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Duke

Joined: June 1st, 2015, 12:47 am
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Also, I like Arkelai's proposal.

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PostPosted: March 7th, 2016, 7:00 pm 
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Duke

Joined: May 30th, 2015, 6:01 pm
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I'll leave the discussion open for a few more days in case anyone has an proposition. If there are no new proposals or dissenting opinions, shall we formalize my proposal for Hermertia's scale?

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PostPosted: March 7th, 2016, 10:02 pm 
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Count

Joined: June 23rd, 2015, 8:57 pm
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I love it, it makes sense and it's well thought out and presented. Once it's formalized, we clean up the post to make it informative as opposed to a suggestion, then link to it from the FAQs/elsewhere?

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PostPosted: March 7th, 2016, 11:13 pm 
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Duke

Joined: May 30th, 2015, 6:01 pm
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Sounds good to me. I was thinking of renaming this post to "Scale of Hermertia Discussion" and then making a new informational post that we can sticky in this subforum. That way we can keep the original post archived.

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