^^I didn’t want to hijack that thread with this, the info below is also my starting point for a ‘shot-caller Gallard’ vision of Nibenay.
Ok, so I hadn’t seen the Population of Athas PDF prior to 8/28 but have been sitting down with maps and a bunch of crop, forestry and mining stats for the past couple of weeks after being inspired by this thread. Admittedly, I hadn’t thought of growth and was only looking at calculating capacity.
Basic Assumptions
- 1kg of Nibenese Rice is sufficient daily food for a man-sized avian/biped/lizard or Kreen; Half-Giants need 4x more; Halflings need 4x less
- Every workable (as defined by Gallard; see below) hectare in the ~182k hectares of ‘rural Nibenay’ is worked by a total of 82 252 serfs since Gallard is a control freak who values efficiency and organization.
- Gallard is ‘longview greedy’. He’s no hyper destructive moron, he knows sustainability has to be maintained because immortality will suck royally if ash is all that’s left to rule. Access to Psionic Enchantments and True Dweomers leads me to believe that it isn’t hard for Gallard to enforce sustainability within ‘rural Nibenay’.
- Corruption is kept to a minimum since Nibenay is most assuredly a surveillance state.
I feel comfortable calling 800k-1,000,000 the ‘Nibenese Capacity’ and decided that (at my table) Nibenay has a population of 888,252.
6 500 Hectares of Farmland Taxed @ 60% is 19 500 000 kg of Nibenese Rice to seasonal Land Tax obligations from the rural Nibenese Crescent Forest
91 000 Hectares of Farmland Taxed @ 60% is 136 500 000 kg of Nibenese Rice to seasonal Land Tax obligations from the rural Nibenese Scrub Plains
45 500 Hectares of Farmland Taxed @ 60% is 136 500 000 kg of Nibenese Rice to seasonal Land Tax obligations from the rural Nibenese Verdant Belts
This is 292 500 000 kg of Nibenese Rice per season, following assumption #1, this carries a man-sized population of 2 340 000 through a 125 day season.
This also leaves a total of 57 200 Hectares to be farmed as the ‘landowners’ like and only be taxed at 40% but only if transfer of ownership occurs.
If 5% of the seasonal gross goes directly to feeding all the serfs who work all of the apportioned Lands that leaves 95% to be collected by the Templarate in Land Tax obligations giving them 279 314 500 kg each season. They will use 56 484 500 kg of this to feed the Templarate and slaves of Gallard through the season. This leaves 222 830 000 kg to stock the Templarate Bank Granaries (easily enough to support a population of 1 782 640). Or it would be if 10% wasn’t lost to hoarding (an extra 22 283 000 kg kept by the Templarate and their cronies) and 10% of what’s left of that was lost to pests and spoilage leaving 180 492 300 kg to actually make it to market each season. Enough to feed a population of 1 443 938 man-sized bipeds through the season. Which is why I say that 800,000-1,000,000 is a safe capacity that leaves buffer room for High Sun crop reductions or other less natural famines.
This doesn’t even touch on the Agafari logging camps or the Copper/Laterite mines, trust me when I say there’re Nibenese billionaires (and I beat that PHBR6 mining table with a nerf bat).