How many people are there in Cyrodiil?

[Gad]

How large is the population of Cyrodiil in 4E 433 (population includes: all NPCs, all bandits and basically anything that isn't animal or beast except argonians and khajiits if they're beast at all)?

I say around 25 000 people. 30 000 at most.

[Shn_carson1]

i would say in between 20-25 thousand but there are an unlimited number of bandits in the game.

[Gad]

There's no correct answer (^just one of the reasons why^), I'm just curios of your estimations.

[Mazer]

According to the wiki, there are 948 people who have particular names. But, as you wrote, lots of human beings are unlimited there: all kinds of bandits, guards, apprentices from various guilds... So for the sake of logic, I thought it could be 5 to 10 thousand.

[AtlasCentrali]

20,000 and 30,000. It seems to be the most logical during the 3rd era, However during the time of Skyrim (4e201) I'd 10,000 and 20,000 since I think the citizens of Cyrodiil moved to the neighboring provinces because of the Great War.

[AKB]

Depends on how you scale it, as we don't have a consistent size for the provinces.

[Fiore1300]

There are easily 500,000 people living in Cyrodiil City alone, let alone the entire province, if we're talking about lore here. The capital of the Empire is said to be the largest city in Tamriel.

[Medomé]

Yes, lore-wise I'd imagine it to easily be more than 30,000. A lot more.

[cybrxkhan]

30000 would be way small for Cyrodiil. The average city in the world of the late medieval and Renaissance eras in our world easily would have surpassed 30000 - the Chinese already had cities with more htan a million people way before then. If Cyrodiil is similar, then I would expect at least a million people in Cyrodiil, but even then that would be way too low. The estimated population of China was already in the tens of millions, approaching the hundreds of millions, during the Han Dynasty (a contemporary of the Roman Empire). While Cyrodiil isn't necessarily as big as or as populous as China, even if it was merely a fifth of China's population during the medieval era, that would still be tens of millions.

[Ysmir]

I think Cyrodiil would be between the 900,00 to 4.5 Million range. Possibly even more like 6-8 Million.

[Minor Edits]

It's important to keep in mind that the population of Tamriel has been cut in half on two or three ocassions, and that Tamriel is a very lethal place in general. While I think there are far more than 30,000 people in cyrodiil, I doubt the population count is anywhere close to a million.

[Pilaf The Defiler]

That question isn't possible to answer, but we do know that in-game it was massively scaled down. Probably ten times or more.

[Kerr]

I would imagine it is well over a million.

[cybrxkhan]

It's important to keep in mind that the population of Tamriel has been cut in half on two or three ocassions, and that Tamriel is a very lethal place in general. While I think there are far more than 30,000 people in cyrodiil, I doubt the population count is anywhere close to a million.

While this is true, I still think close to a million is way, way too low. Look at the Black Death in real life. Europe's population went from 400 or 500 million to 300 million or something of that sort. Even if the Black Death killed 90% of the population, that would still be around 40 million. And even if you split that into the major states that would still be several million for each.

I think you guys are *really* estimating seriously low when you say Cyrodil's population can only be about one million or less. Ancient Egypt had a population of a few million, and I would gauge that Cyrodil of the third and fourth era, being similar to the medieval and renaissance eras of our world, would have a population at least that much if not many times more, even despite massive population losses.

[Minor Edits]

The ES world is just inherently a much more violent one than our own. The single truest thing ever said in an Elder Scrolls game: "The uncultivated land of monsters is the rule."

[cybrxkhan]

The ES world is just inherently a much more violent one than our own. The single truest thing ever said in an Elder Scrolls game: "The uncultivated land of monsters is the rule."

The medieval world was pretty brutal too and violent compared to our current world, but they still managed tens if not hundreds of millions of people, so I don't really see your point here. There's only so much violence can do. Genghis Khan's conquests, for instance, may have killed millions, but there were still millions more he could not and would not kill.

A population of tens of thousands for Cyrodil would mean the extinction of the Imperials within a matter of generations.

[dzio]

@Minor Edits - That's not necessarily true. One of the consequences of scaling everything down to a manageable level is that all those interesting locations perfect for a monster-slaying adventurer are densely packed, one on top of the other. When you scale it back to the "real" size, the distances between those dangerous locations will increase greatly, and you won't have three monster caves and two bandit camps within shouting distance of every village.

Yes, Tamriel is dangerous, but not nearly as much as the games would have us believe. Otherwise the peoples of Tamriel would still be figuring out what happens when you bang two rocks together. No civilization can develop without at least some stability and safety and the towns and villages of Cyrodiil couldn't exist if their inhabitants had to spend all their time fighting for their lives with goblins, trolls and bandits, instead of growing crops, building boats and chopping down trees.

So I agree with cybrxkhan - you're seriously underestimating the numbers and the dangers of Tamriel are not a good reason to do it.

[BetaB17]

Personally I can barely judge just how dense the population is>_> and scaling it from the game would do little good.
All I can presume is that it supports the largest population of the provinces in the sense that the terrain is fairly good for prosperity and expansion compared to others we've seen<_< plus I presume the cities themselves are much larger and the legions of the empire are present.

In truth, I'm clueless... curse you scaling!!!

[DikaSmausha]

You have to remember in game, the world is scaled down to a 16x16 mile square, and the population is scaled with that. I would say there are at least 5 million people, probably more.

[Aruria]

I'd say between 25,000 and 30,000. It just makes the most sense to me....

[Marelo]

That's ludicrously small... My hometown alone has 15,000 and it's small enough that you can walk anywhere you need to get.

There are eight major cities in the region in Oblivion (though one gets destroyed very quickly). If there were only 30,000 people in the whole of Cyrodiil, that averages out to 3,750 people per city. That is absolutely tiny. Certainly not enough to support the infrastructure, industry, and architecture seen in the region, let alone the military might commanded by the Legion. And that's not even accounting for the scads of bandits and farmers and hunters living outside of the cities.

The general rule of thumb is to multiply the size of everything in the games by 10. But, if anything, multiplying the population by only 10 is incredibly conservative.

[GoatLiver]

I don't know where some of you are getting your information from but ancient cities had very few people in them, obviously the culture and technology where different but they did function. Around 5000 BC estimates put Tell Brak (Syria) as the largest city on Earth with a population around 4000. It is generally accepted that Rome was the first city to have a population of 1 million people, and Beijing was the first Chinese city to have a population of 1 million a thousand and something years later. Also consider that in around 2008 that was the first year in history more people lived in cities than outside cities, so to reflect the time TES is set the population outside cities would be bigger again than all the people found in cities.

That said the population of Cyrodiil has got to be massive, its supposed to be the biggest province and the centre of Tamriel. I voted for 30,000+ however, considering the game Daggerfall features more than 750,000 npc's I would say Cyrodiil alone would have easily twice that in lore, around the 2 million mark maybe a little more.

[Ilaro]

I don't know where some of you are getting your information from but ancient cities had very few people in them, obviously the culture and technology where different but they did function. Around 5000 BC estimates put Tell Brak (Syria) as the largest city on Earth with a population around 4000. It is generally accepted that Rome was the first city to have a population of 1 million people, and Beijing was the first Chinese city to have a population of 1 million a thousand and something years later. Also consider that in around 2008 that was the first year in history more people lived in cities than outside cities, so to reflect the time TES is set the population outside cities would be bigger again than all the people found in cities.

That said the population of Cyrodiil has got to be massive, its supposed to be the biggest province and the centre of Tamriel. I voted for 30,000+ however, considering the game Daggerfall features more than 750,000 npc's I would say Cyrodiil alone would have easily twice that in lore, around the 2 million mark maybe a little more.

You are right about that cities in ancient history were massive with a population of 5000. But around 2000 BC there were cities like Mephis, Thebes and Ur with already 40.000-60.000 and more people.

The elder scrolls resemble much more the medieval time where a city of 10.000 was big, but common. There are many sources about cities bigger than 400.000 around that time. The Imperial city is the largest urban region of Tamriel, so a population of 1 million even only in the Imperial city is very well possible.

[cybrxkhan]

I don't know where some of you are getting your information from but ancient cities had very few people in them, obviously the culture and technology where different but they did function. Around 5000 BC estimates put Tell Brak (Syria) as the largest city on Earth with a population around 4000. It is generally accepted that Rome was the first city to have a population of 1 million people, and Beijing was the first Chinese city to have a population of 1 million a thousand and something years later. Also consider that in around 2008 that was the first year in history more people lived in cities than outside cities, so to reflect the time TES is set the population outside cities would be bigger again than all the people found in cities.

That said the population of Cyrodiil has got to be massive, its supposed to be the biggest province and the centre of Tamriel. I voted for 30,000+ however, considering the game Daggerfall features more than 750,000 npc's I would say Cyrodiil alone would have easily twice that in lore, around the 2 million mark maybe a little more.

To add onto Ilaro's point, remember that the TES world is supposed to be analogous to our medieval and renaissance eras. During those times, there were plenty of cities with tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands or even a million people. I only brought up the example of ancient Egypt to argue how strange it would be argue that Tamriel only had several tens of thousands of people when an ancient civilization (i.e. one more "primitive" than the medieval and renaissance eras) already had at least one to two million in its borders. In reality, Cyrodil in the third and fourth era would probably be equal to parts of Europe in terms of population - even if it is comparable to Europe during the Black Death if we account for all the upheaval, this still means the tens of millions if not approaching a hundred million, and not the tens of thousands.

[the Savage Hippie]

Seven.