Azrael20
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How many people are actually living in towns and cities?

Fri 21 Jan 2022, 06:24

The Poland map is chock full of towns and cities that should, at least theoretically, have people willing to buy and sell, which seems like it'd negate a lot of the scrounging, scavenging, and survival aspects of the game. How many people do most of these settlements have? are they abandoned? Still have thousands but under military/marauder rule?
 
andresk
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Re: How many people are actually living in towns and cities?

Fri 21 Jan 2022, 11:37

It would probably be hard to keep thousands alive in large settlements. What you would most likely be looking at with the breakdown of supply lines, infrastructure, communications and even simple transport due to the lack of fuel are spread out communities farming around their homes/villages for themselves, with maybe some trade for more specialised products/resources. Largely like a pre-industrial society with bits and pieces of working technology helping people out. Most of service and office jobs would be irrelevant by this point and most of the population would have to be focusing on producing food for themselves and their families.
 
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omnipus
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Re: How many people are actually living in towns and cities?

Fri 21 Jan 2022, 19:38

My thinking on it is that you'd see a mix of everything. Most larger cities would probably have at most half of their prewar population -- even if they weren't hit by nukes they were almost definitely hit by famine, disease, unrest, or people just fled them in general for things they thought looked less like targets. The same would be true in smaller towns and villages that were near the fighting and pretty much any point. Some of those people may have returned home.

Plenty of villages (the kind that don't show up on the travel map but do exist every few km in Poland) would probably be almost entirely abandoned , if they weren't close enough to a good source of food or a very essential industry that could support their survival, or if they had been attacked or occupied by bandits, or if enough of the people had been "conscripted," or if disease had been bad enough. There's a sort of minimum viable population level in a world like this.

For those reasons and more, I think you'd see a lot of boom and bust cycles. Whole populations might migrate away pretty quickly if their fields fail or they suffer huge numbers of casualties or if they just performed some sort of commercial function that's meaningless now. People would hear of a new place that needs people and is a good bet -- and then have to hope that by the time they get there the place hasn't barricaded itself against outsiders. Lots of towns are probably at war with their neighbors, scared of being overwhelmed, and so on. Some towns most of the population has now been replaced by whatever military unit has decided to canton there.
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atraangelis
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Re: How many people are actually living in towns and cities?

Fri 21 Jan 2022, 20:17

The hardest part to grasp in TW2000 is the civilian population.
The book does a so so job of sharing that information. As a GM you kind of have to extrapolate that.
Remember the nuclear war was about a year ago from the time of the start of the game. the actual war was much earlier in 98, when naval forces knocked out trade and supply lines. This is the actual fall of the society. look how just covid caused so many supply shortages.. imagine the entirety of the shipping infrastructure was obliterated. No aircraft moving in and out of warzones ect...
The year preceding 2000 was the great freeze when many in Europe froze to death.

1000000 people in the area of 10km will self destruct real fast as resources dry up. If you cant trade for it you kill for it.

So when looking at society , population centers are some what medieval. Isolated small agricultural enclaves that may or may not know who is living near them as between those enclaves are the marauders.

A group will only survive based on the amount of food and shelter it can produce. Excess will be culled.
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Re: How many people are actually living in towns and cities?

Mon 24 Jan 2022, 15:19

It is a horrible situation but if you want an example of what the frontlines of WW3 in Poland would look like then the East of Ukraine in the Donbas region would be an example.
 
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Re: How many people are actually living in towns and cities?

Tue 25 Jan 2022, 01:48

It is a horrible situation but if you want an example of what the frontlines of WW3 in Poland would look like then the East of Ukraine in the Donbas region would be an example.
I beg to differ. Neither Donbas nor Syria have endured the total collapse of their surrounding infrastructure. In fact, in both cases, major neighbors - and one might say: war-faring parties - have ensured that supplies from outside keep the population alive, both during ongoing fighting as well as during periods of calm. This is nothing like Europe during the Twilight War, especially Poland and other frontline states. It just makes the world of a difference, if a regional or super power participates in a war or if it rolls over a country twice or more and then decides to nuke it in several iterations of exchange. By 2000, Poland will look like Hiroshima and Dresden in 1945, but without the limitless supplies of Allied occupation.
The hardest part to grasp in TW2000 is the civilian population.

The book does a so so job of sharing that information. As a GM you kind of have to extrapolate that.
Yes it is and yes it does (not), so yes we will have to.

I've dipped my toe into historical demography, though it's been quite some time ago. There are four major factors in the culling of the world's population in T2K4, which are mentioned:
  • Nuclear exchange.
  • Collapses of food chains.
  • The record cold temperatures of the winter of '98-'99; though only for cities.
  • Virulent, of which epidemics typhoid fever, cholera, bubonic plague are especially mentioned.
The total loss of population world-wide is given as "nearly" 50 percent. Below, I will argue, why this is misleading, where to expect the largest losses and what the overall structure of losses will look like. For the understanding of this post, it is important to remember the following facts about T2K4:
  • We don't know the scope of the war beyond Europe and a short look at Israel. It is likely that major engagements were fought outside Europe and the North Atlantic as well as numerous smaller actions took place, but we're generally uninformed about this. Obviously, major action outside of Europe might have major consequences on all I'm going to state now.
  • What we know about the timeline of the actual war years is almost exclusively sorted by years. FL made the—I'd like to add: "wise"—decision, not to be too specific on dates, figures and the general quantity of things. Exact numbers are for experts and draw critique more than they sell books.
  • We're left largely in the dark on the Peace Dividend, European Integration and other historical developments of the European political landscape for the 1990s. So we have to draw analogies from what happened in our history to figure out what might have happened in the T2K4 1990s. As a classical historian, I like analogies, we work with them all the time. However, they give us more counterfactual history disguised as the real thing than what historians of contemporary decades are used to work with.
So, for starters, let's pretend that the 1990s of T2K4 went more or less as did the decade we knew, until the Soviets decided to kill us all (and themselves in the process). Then, let's get a couple of things straight that are important to understand the state of the world in T2K4:
  • The downfall of human globalized society happened some time ago, when looking at calendars or determining how long people can survive in situations of complete collapse.
  • The downfall of human globalized society happened quite recently, though, when looking at the span of a single life, which is important for measuring the actual loss of knowledge on how to do things.
Furthermore, the war started in 1997 and the game starts after the fall of Kalisz in April 2000. So, it's a lifer altering event for every human being and it will determine the history of its world for generations, but almost everybody will remember "before the war" quite clearly. To put it into perspective: Once the next Covid-winter is over, in early 2023, we'll have had to deal with that pandemic as long as Poland had to endure Word War Three.

European population will have suffered dramatically from the war, long before the nuclear exchange, since the start of major hostilities along the full North-South axis of the continent will lead to a refugee crisis of unknown proportion: historical Europe by 1998 had a population of approximately 500 million, without the USSR. That's about 100 million more than in 1945, but warfare has become much more deadly and swift, without as much resilience in infrastructure and supplies, since globalization is much more pronounced by 1997.

Once the nukes start flying, supply chains aren't broken, they're obliterated and won't come back without major efforts on the European continent. Cities will be empty, long before the winter of '98-'99 hits. That is due to the simple fact that cities cannot be sustained and only skeleton populations will be able to be kept, in order to staff remnants of infrastructure such as hospitals, rail-yards, airports, maritime and riverine ports as well as safeguarding and staffing civil and military institutions. The majority of the remnant population will be living in refugee camps, where they are not in the way of military operations, can be supplied and put to work on every plot of land now used for farming. The lucky refugees might have made it to Southern and South-Western Europe, in Spain, Italy, Portugal or Southern France, but those countries cannot feed all of Europe. Those living under the sway of Soviet occupational forces might not be allowed to flee for as long as Western refugees and Scandinavian refugees will not be able to leave the Scandinavian peninsula.

This means that large parts of each countries' population will be living in the hinterland for 15-30 months, once the game begins. Actually, moving towards the front might be a smart choice, not only for able-bodied people, who join armies to fight, in order to move up in the food chain, but also for those that are unfit or unwilling to fight, but hope to find a job in the massive trains of the warring armies. At some point, each and every maintenance battalion will be staffed by more civilians than soldiers, and so will every logistics, supply and any other rear-echelon unit.

After the coldest winter "in living memory", refugee camps will be sites of burial. Once supplying the refugee camps fails, unrests will follow. Putting them down will be a mix of diplomacy, force and abandonment. As we know firsthand today, certain epidemics don't hit hardest after the cold of winter, but during. Historically, 1997 sees the first human infection with an avian influenza A H5N1, while 1998 sees a hybrid of human, bird and swine flu viruses detected in pigs. Typhoid fever and cholera are almost natural inhabitants of refugee camps and the bubonic plague, while long eradicated in Europe, could be reintroduced by ships from the USA or Southeast Asia, like India, as well as Madagascar.

But what will kill Europe more than the war, the nukes and the epidemics (or more likely: pandemics) is famine. Historically, in 1998, the European countries of today's EU 27 (so without the UK, but including most of Eastern Europe, some of Scandinavia and most of the rest) imports close to 100 million tons of agricultural products. Europe is far from self-sufficient, even while being more productive in agricultural means than ever before. Once nukes fly, domestic production will cease to exist on a large scale, with massive crop failure and mass-deaths of livestock. While emergency programs might be implemented, where every patch of arable land will be turned over into fields, this is extremely inefficient, hardly industrialized and mechanized work and producing far below, what Europe needs. And this is before the great freeze. Which bring me to this:
Remember the nuclear war was about a year ago from the time of the start of the game. the actual war was much earlier in 98, when naval forces knocked out trade and supply lines. This is the actual fall of the society. look how just covid caused so many supply shortages.. imagine the entirety of the shipping infrastructure was obliterated. No aircraft moving in and out of warzones ect...
The year preceding 2000 was the great freeze when many in Europe froze to death.
Actually, this is off by a year each approximately. The war started in 1997 with the US president fulfilling his campaign promises right away and the USSR reacting soon(ish) by invading Poland. The great freeze is over by at least a year, once Operation Reset finally fails at Kalisz. The bottom line is this: Supply chains will be strained from the very first day of fighting at the latest. The collapse of these chains will happen, once the nukes fly, at the latest. Though it is conceivable that the start of the second round of fighting, in 1998, will already make re-building strategic food reserves for all countries in Europe very, very hard. So, if the supply chains die in 1998, this gives Europe what, one and a half years, maybe even two years to die in waves of famine. Politicians might try to avoid it, they might start importing grain through ports in Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal etc., but these countries will just become targets because of it. The USSR might loose grain production in Ukraine and other parts, due to nuclear attacks, but it could in theory try to supply through Asia, which makes an escalation of the war across the world very likely.
1000000 people in the area of 10km will self destruct real fast as resources dry up. If you cant trade for it you kill for it.
Actually, even 10,000 people in a radius of 10 km will self-destruct almost immediately, once supplies run out. More so, in an environment, where state control is compromised, but weapons are plenty.

So, what population can Europe support without the marvels of modern agriculture technology and large parts of its strategic grain reserves and even its soil tainted? Well, we'd have to look at historical population numbers before the onset of the industrial and agricultural revolutions, meaning around 1800. Historical demography is a tough discipline, but Western Europe had about 120 million (give or take a couple of million) people in 1800 and Eastern Europe, without the lands of the USSR, had around 30-35 million people living there. Reminder: Before the Twilight War, we were at 500 million people, now the maximum of sustainable population is likely less than a third, quite likely only a quarter or so, since large parts of prime arable land will be tainted, machinery demolished and the necessary labor force dead, displaced or fighting.
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Ursus Maior
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Re: How many people are actually living in towns and cities?

Tue 25 Jan 2022, 01:49

So when looking at society , population centers are some what medieval. Isolated small agricultural enclaves that may or may not know who is living near them as between those enclaves are the marauders.

A group will only survive based on the amount of food and shelter it can produce. Excess will be culled.
Medieval is about the way to go, I agree. Earlier editions of Twilight: 2000 put Kraków at 80,000 people, which is way to high. That's the city's population during the 1890s, but in 1800 the population was only about 25,000. That's not far away from earlier centuries, between 1500 and 1700, where the population 20,000 to 30.000, depending on the importance of the city and the way of counting.

One might add a chunk, if in T2K4 Kraków is still garrisoned by remnants of a Polish division, but that would strain the city's supplies so much, an aggressive strategy of securing arable land and ressources might force the city to expand its sphere of militarily. Beyond large cities with major garrisons, of which Lublin, and to some extant Legnica, might be the last, there might be some towns around, as well as larger camps of displaced persons and prisoners; victims of the last few battles. All in all, I'd put the population of the 10 largest cities and towns, including the above, at no more than 100,000 people, maybe 150,000, if you feel generous. Beyond that, small towns, camps and larger garrisons or forts might add another 50,000-100,000 people. The rest of people in Poland will be living on farms and in villages, largely trying to be self-sufficient, but getting extorted by warlords and local "big men" in the process.

So, how many is the rest? Well, Poland had about 10 million people living on its soil in 1800, which is about a quarter of it's population during the 1990s. As students of Polish history can attest, though, the concept of "Poland" changed rapidly between 1772 and 1945, with boundaries and population getting shifted around like sand dunes. Anyway, 10 million might be the limit sustainable historically within the boundaries of what by 2000 is still called "Poland", but since Poland has been the central battlefield of World War Three and its nuclear exchange, I'd be surprised if a fraction of that population actually exists. So, what's left?

During the Thirty Years War, which was accompanied by massive outbreaks of bubonic plague, the lands of modern Germany were fought over bitterly. The period between 1618 and 1648 saw the total collapse of societies in parts of the country as well as the loss of around one third of the overall population. That would mean 6-7 million people in Poland of 10 million sustainable. The number seems plausible for Poland, too, but I'd add another factor for the nukes.

Making an educated guess, I'd put the population for Poland in 2000 at no more than 5 million. A couple of million more might have survived the famine, plagues of various kinds and the other hardships, but be displaced elsewhere. They might come home some day, or they might not. In the end, it won't matter: Their stories are yet to be played out.
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andresk
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Re: How many people are actually living in towns and cities?

Tue 25 Jan 2022, 16:45

Bravo Ursus Major, you pretty much said everything I've been thinking (but also have the capacity to put it into words, unlike me :D ). This covers pretty much everything that I've been trying to go over on the discord every time the topic arises.
The rules as written seem to oversell the collapse of society on the individual level and undersell it in the economical sense.
So when in the rulebook you seem to have Mad Max or Bethesda Fallout-esque bandits and "happy" communities living their lives, in my mind it would be far more realistic to make the main antagonist be the lack of supply/infrastructure/food and leave the marauder groups for more morally grey situations than have them be the objectively bad guys. (Even though the rulebooks don't paint anyone strictly black and white, I think this kind of setting would be perfect for universal grey and grey morality all around) This is the perfect place to blur the lines of "self defense militia of X village" and "just another band of marauders".
 
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Re: How many people are actually living in towns and cities?

Tue 25 Jan 2022, 18:37

Once nukes fly, domestic production will cease to exist on a large scale, with massive crop failure and mass-deaths of livestock.

I wonder, though. How all-encompassing a nuclear engagement are we postulating?

With a finite number of warheads launched, and with every warhead — especially if we assume mainly tactical nukes in the 1-100kt yield range being used — affecting a finite area ... for every patch of real estate directly affected by a nuclear strike, shouldn't the land unaffected cover a much larger area still? And that's assuming a fairly even coverage of nuclear strikes. Wouldn't a reasonable assumption be that strikes are largely focused on certain geographical points, whether it be infrastructure, troop concentrations, etc, thus leaving even more farmland unmolested?

What kinds of targets are we assuming were being targeted, anyway? Is either side trying to engage in a nuclear version of the Allies' "moral warfare" from WWII? Deliberate ground strikes, to maximise contamination (which otherwise would be a much smaller issue)?

The greatest effect of the war — nuclear and otherwise — on agriculture I rather suspect would be that with a buckling infrastructure, the supply of petrol for tractors becomes patchy, or dries up altogether. This would force farmers to either revert to muscle-driven agriculture (animal-drawn, or in the extreme, human drawn), or else find out how to cook their own fuel snappish.

Either way, yields would certainly plummet, both for grain and other produce as well as for hay to keep livestock fed, but I have hard time envisioning that it would disappear entirely.
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omnipus
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Re: How many people are actually living in towns and cities?

Tue 25 Jan 2022, 20:35

These factors all overlap. Farming doesn't have to disappear entirely for there to be very rapidly be 1/2 or 1/4 of how much food there was last year. Less food means more infighting for survival, which means less security and more danger in every community and on all of the roads between communities. Those that are supported by a powerful strongman or fighting force may have more stability but their reach is still going to be pretty small. Therefore there's still a population limit on what they can sustain, and it will probably be aggressively defended.

It doesn't take a nuclear winter to achieve this, either. 4E isn't very forthcoming with a list of nuclear targets, for instance, but extrapolating from what's there and what's in past editions says that we're not just talking about a dozen or so tactical nukes. We're talking about a lot of battlefield nukes targeting army operations, but also strategic exchanges directed at industrial centers and military targets. Each of these devastates the entire surrounding community, when there's not enough national/global infrastructure left to make a declaration of emergency mean anything. These people on the outskirts of a nuclear strike (say, near Kiev, Birmingham, Corpus Christi, Long Beach, Vladivostok, Warsaw, London, Bremen... the list is likely many times longer than this) are the first ones to be "on their own" but they're not the last, as you're now talking about hundreds of thousands to millions of refugees fleeing these places, and overwhelming the resources of wherever they go -- until they're stopped at the end of a gun, most likely.

With ports and transport hubs destroyed, material doesn't easily move anywhere. This means over the course of a couple of years that a lot of things start to break. Things that are important for preserving what is left of advanced civilization, where it exists. Vehicles, computers, generators, construction equipment, infrastructure. The systems for producing things we take as much for granted as weather observations and forecasts. Places that provide these things or allow you to move them around are targeted specifically. Now how do you repair the places that do the repairing? You don't. Especially if a lot of the brain trust for doing so is dead or dying.

Which, finally, is guaranteed to happen on a large scale because all of the following interact and overlap and reinforce each other:
* not enough food leads to malnutrition
* malnutrition (and radiation exposure) significantly decrease immune system functioning
* the medical system is strained to the same point of collapse as everything else
* mass death and a general inability to locate and isolate it leads to epidemics
* desperation leads to low-intensity violence in many, many places
* supplies aren't coming beyond what you can already get within a few hundred miles, maybe

So yeah, I imagine it would get pretty medieval. Societally, too -- because feudalism was a system that sort of made sense for the scale of human operations at that time, and now we're sort of back to it. The difference being that there are people around with advanced knowledge of medicine, engineering, science. A fiefdom over here can potentially still use radios or the internet to communicate with a fiefdom way over there. But do people have the basic needs to make any of that matter? The fall will be softer in places that had less technologically advanced lives to begin with, but the struggle is almost certain to spread there, too.
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