History III: Beyond the Pale

After several thousand years of peaceful simulation, I noticed an interesting phenomenon.

Hexes are supposed to have a random chance to generate a new settlement. However, the location for these places is determined by the desirability of a place.

The desirability is partially determined by the local infrastructure.

This means, apparently, that when empires reach a critical mass, it's essentially impossible for any hex that's not adjacent to one of these empires to generate a settlement! So once the first few large coalitions are formed, no others ever do (at least, not geographically separated).

year 2160, human kingdom

That's one reason I end up with every dwarf in the world in a single megalithic empire. It also kinda looks like Scotland.

year 2160, dwarfen empire

This could be solved by maintaining a separate desirability index that does not take local infrastructure into account.

After 2160 years:

race	urban pop.
orc	52,567
halfling	1,315,550
human	2,282,919
dwarf	1,535,095
elf	524,542

And that's a total (including rural) population of 101,621,930. Not bad.