New finding on population density.

http://persquaremile.com/2011/08/17/hunter-gatherer-populations-show-humans-are-hardwired-for-density/
A study of 339 present-day hunter-gatherer groups demonstrated that after “every doubling of population, the home ranges of [those] groups increased by only 70 percent”:
Every additional person requires less land than the previous one. That’s an important statement. Not only does it say we’re hardwired for density, it also says a group becomes 15 percent more efficient at extracting resources from the land every time their population doubles. Each successive doubling in turn frees up 15 percent more resources to be directed towards something other than hunting and gathering. In other words, complex societies didn’t just evolve as a way to cope with high-density—they evolved in part because of high density.
Drow city-state of erelith-cinlu anyone…

Interestingly enough, in v20, I gave up on mechanically “hard capping” the size of cities. The rules for generating cities, towns, and villages in a realm offer suggested settlement sizes for different realms, but mechanically the new rules let you create a city-state without a huge domain if desired.

Bargle wrote:“Every additional person requires less land than the previous one. That’s an important statement. Not only does it say we’re hardwired for density, it also says a group becomes 15 percent more efficient at extracting resources from the land every time their population doubles. Each successive doubling in turn frees up 15 percent more resources to be directed towards something other than hunting and gathering. In other words, complex societies didn’t just evolve as a way to cope with high-density—they evolved in part because of high density.”
Dan: Eh, not quite. We’re not “hard wired for density” we’re hard wired for intimacy, and hunter gather societies can be more complex (by far in some cases) than agricultural societies and “high density” is misleading in Hunter gatherer terms. Except where abundant fishing resources exist (think salmon runs) you can only have so many people hunting/trapping a territory before the food runs out (carrying capacity). A last point to quibble on is “the free up resources” idea. It’s a simple and well established fact that there is no more leisure time filled way of life than that of the hunter gatherer. You only need spend an hour or two a day getting food. Its us agriculturalists who bust our backs for gruel and barely have time left for sleep.

Leisure time is great! I told my wife we were going to become hunter-gatherers so I could have more time writing ACKS and it didn’t go over very well. :-\