Population limits

[formerly known as hf]

Is Cantr really all that primitive?

We're never going to see the sort of heavy industrialisation and huge metropolis in Cantr that we see in the real world, simply because there aren't enough players.
In such a situation, I would say it's fair to assume that Cantrians are becoming much more heavy in the resources that they use than they ever were, hence it makes some sense to introduce resource limits (as well as making it more interesting)

[Lumin]

Resources have only become finite during the last half century. Before that time, the only limitation on resources was development and manpower.

Development and manpower are still the main limitations. As you said, the gathering change is a very recent one, so why were populations still so small all the years before it came into effect? 80 people was considered about as big as a town got before, too, and even now any place that size should be able to build as many harvesters as they need, if they only had enough people awake to get organized and do it.

[formerly known as hf]

But Cantr isn't the real world - it is a simulation

Considering that we can never expect a simulation like Cantr to reach a population of millions in a city, the simulation has to be guaged around the idea that what is a large city for Cantr, is a bustling metropolis in the real world.

And, anyways, the resource thing was introduced mainly as a tool to shake things up and foster co-operation...

[Sho]

It may help to think of Cantr as analoguous to those strategy games (Civilization, AoE, Risk) where one "population unit" corresponds to hundreds or thousands of people. Obviously this is a horrible analogy, but the idea - that Cantr is, so to speak, "not to scale," is not new; it also shows up in resource weights. A Cantr city of 80 could be like a RL city of close to a million.

[wichita]

Dear God I can't imagine a city with a population of more than 100. I barely survived the Festival in Drojf, if it was like that all the time I would have to scream and quit the game. I think you could actually here the chatter in Krif. The server overloaded and started throwing posts to the next location.

Though Pter's honeymoon during the Festivities was a nice break.

[tiddy ogg]

OK an interesting discussion so far. I like the city districts idea, but I still feel the population level is too low to support the idea of currencies/newspapers. The recently introduced radios on the other hand, with their built in range limits, seem a very good idea ... not for general chat, which can always be done and heard by standing in the street, but for important defence/law enforcement announcements... like th4e early days of the telephone/radio in the real world.