September 5, 2018

Demographics II: Racial Diversity

Real races, that is.

I've been mulling over the applicability of the trade system to non-trade things, specifically race and some classes. Class distribution will be harder to implement but racial distribution turned out to be super simple.

Back to Demoland: Let's assign 1 "reference" of humans to all cities. Then replace that with 1 reference of dwarfs in Norys and Gerlin, and with 1 of elves near Ffith. First I run the resource code to determine availability, like everything else. This gives me the following numbers for Andox:

{'human': 11.149800849953373, 'dwarf': 0.6676576289379996, 'elf': 0.2330468227424749}

Alright. Now what? Simply normalize: divide each of those numbers by the total, which is around 12. Round it out (I don't need floating point accuracy), and we have a percentage for each race:

{'human': 0.925, 'dwarf': 0.055, 'elf': 0.019}

Very cool! There are still some conceptual issues to work out:

  1. Do enclaves form at all? This supposes that the demographics pretty much totally smooth out. And in this case, I've only got a few sources of non-humans in a sea of humanity. Maybe that makes a difference. But it does give me some slight differences already.
  2. What about immigration? These policies vary throughout history, from totally open to totally closed. Implementing the system as is might result in very cosmopolitan trade cities, but you might want cases where outsiders are allowed to trade but not necessarily to live.
  3. To that point, though this might indicate the race of any given person the party might encounter, not necessarily the static distribution of the total population.
A lot to consider. But the simple version works, and that feels good.

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