Skyrim does not have a large population, if you don't count bandits, no more then 2000, I add a few out of fantasy, Hunters, traders, people living in the mountains. One would think that there would be a lot more people, 4500 years is a long time. What I do is pretend Skyrim has 18 cities with an average population of 320,000 in those far off regions of Skyrim that you can't go to when you look at the map, it is mostly mountains but i pretend it isn't.

In Oblivion I pretend the scale is larger and one area has a bunch of cities and is inaccessible. All the urban areas depend on the dangerous country side areas for food and trade since they have an abundance of food and raw materials. All in all, I just pretend the world is actually a lot bigger, Im just in the most important area of the world where all the major resources and landmarks are.

Daggerfall was 63,000 square kilometers but had randomly generated areas. They never did this for Oblivion or Skyrim, I figure once you have the game engine and all its features, it would be easy to create variations of it to randomly generate. To bad no randomly generated area mod has ever come out.

I would say population wise during the timeline of Skyrim. These numbers I made up only include citizens and not outlaws or bandits or secluded people who have their own small domain away from the world like renegade wizards or Marauders/Vampires. They could number 400,000-1 million depending on the province.

Skyrim: 5,960,452

Cyrodiil: 10,820,452

High Rock: 3,542,132

HammerFell: 6,421,543

Summerset Isles 5,520,421

Valenwood: 6,845,421

Elswyr: 3,215,632

BlackMarsh 4,860,425

Morrowind 4,525,842

http://forums.uesp.net/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=19903

My estimate for Cyrodiil was based on this, assuming the last post is Legitimate Lore wise. Is it? He said "intended".

We've made an extensive anolysis of the issue in some time ago in http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1282446-population-of-tamriel/page__fromsearch__1

Seems legit.
I dont expect Tamriel to be as populated as an Earth contentinent would be.
It is much more of a wild world after all, and various disasters plus the presence of other sentient, but hostile, races would keep population down.

If you use Daggerfall to scale the continent to, you could get a rough estimate of the size of Tamriel.

If Tamriel became overpopulated, would everyone become infertile until more people died because there wouldn't be enough spare souls for the new people being made?

Of course it's not! Remember that playable Skyrim is not at the right scale! Daggerfall region (the Illiac Bay) was roughly the size of United Kingdom... with hundreds of villages, towns and thousands and thousands of (randomly generated) npcs. At its zenith Rome was populated by 7 MILLIONS people. If Tamriel empire equates IRL roman one, Tamriel could be the size of Europe (without Russia), which counted 50millions inhabitants during middle-age.

I think the city population sizes are a bit high.
For a city to be that size in the medieval period (Tamriel seems to be at medieval/antiquity levels) you need fertile land surrounding it. In the 1400s, Moscow only had a population of 200,000 and that was massive, at a similiar time, London only had about 40,000 people.

Whiterun could have over fifty thousand people, I think. Same with Riften. Windhelm and Solitude I'd say would have upwards of seventy thousand people.
And the rest of Skyrim's cities I'd place at under fifty thousand.

However, I think that Skyrim could have a population of 3 million, probably more. It's just most of them would have to live out in the countryside.

Possibly, but Tamriel is not a medieval place.
Their technology and society is closer to renaissance.
If we count the magic in, they can do things we are uncapable of, such as travelling to other dimensions, creating pocket dimensions, and a whole plethora of fantastic feats.

The point is, 320,000 is too large for a chilly, not too arable landscape, even in the renaissance (though I'd dispute them being at renaissance level technology, I'd ssay a mixture of many).
Can they magically create food? If so, why do they bother to have farms? And why do people sell it if anybody can get it with a little spell.

Their society is not structured like a medieval society.

Irrelevant if they can magically create food or not, doubly irrelevant for the way it is expressed as 'a little spell.'
The reason I pointed magic out is that without magic Tamriel society seems late renaissance predominantly, and with magic factored in they are advanced beyond us.
As I have pointed out above, the largest restricting factor would be that the Arena is a very dangerous place to live.
Which was a way of saying that the numbers seem a tad large.

Im fine with discussing ideas on merits, but I do get a little tetchy when confronted with dismissals in such a condescending tone.
This is a discussion, not a battle and I refuse to continue talking about it with someone who treats it as such.
So adapt and change your tone please.

Your right about them being a mixture of technology, it seems the Elder Scrolls civilization are advanced in terms of Philosophy, Art, Literature and Mathematics. Alchemy was practiced during the Renaissance, people like The Count of Saint Germain who I would say, assuming the accounts of his life are true is an advanced human being similar to a Jesus figure but more Egotistic and still benevolent for the most part.Their technical level is horrible though, they do not even have crossbows, the lost Dwarves who were advanced technically could have made Tamriel like the Technology level in WoW, but they are gone, don't know what happened to them.

During the Renaissance, cities were approaching the 150,000-400,000 but they also had to contend with disease so I would assume similar populations for Tamriel with no sharp declines. I don't recall any huge diseases in the Elder Scrolls Lore, potions can cure it anyway.

Erm...Should I tell em?

The Dwemer were quite the isolationists, and most likely couldn't be bothered to share their secrets, being preoccupied with escaping Mundas and all. The fact that no one has managed to reverse engineer most of their tech is a testament to just how out there these guys were.

I agree, but I didn't say society so...
I wasn't condescending. You read it as being condescending, I never wrote it thinking I was smarter than you or anything.

Reverse-engineering Dwemer tech also has the difficulty of most of their tech still being operational and very intent on killing you, and disabling it often means reducing it to an unusable heap of scrap metal from which no technology can be retrieved. Calcemo and Aicantar seem to be making good progress, and Aicantar even has a remote-controlled Dwemer Spider.

Also, nobody really wants to mess with technology that wiped out the entire race that created said technology.

It is also implied that eventually, technology does evolve to the point where building elf-killing-matter-eating-transforming-robots is possible.

There isn't magic for creating food, but there is magic for transmuting mineral ore, and magic for heating, cooling, and electrical power. There's also magic for light and flying, and healing wounds and curing diseases. The College also provides enchanting services, so I would assume magic lightbulbs and ovens and other utilities are actually more common than as shown ingame. However, due to the Oblivion Crisis and the Great War, distrust of mages has grown and magic development has most likely stalled.

PGE 3 makes reference to the Knahaten Flu in the Second Era, which wiped out most (if not all) of the humans and mer in Black Marsh. Other than that I don't remember anything major.


I think sanitation and reliable food production would be the most important/relevant for maintaining a large population. Large-scale irrigation, pesticides, and fertilizer could greatly increase the productivity of the tiny little farms we see in-game. Unfortunately I don't know of any Tamrielic equivalent to DDT or the Haber-Bosch process, magical or not. I also have this nagging feeling that there isn't magic for plumbing/sanitation purposes, or that if there is it isn't widely used. I don't have anything to back this up, though. I ran into a few toilets in bandit caves in Skyrim (or at least, small rooms containing buckets and books and small tables) but cave plumbing is not city plumbing.

edit: yay pronouns without antecedents! it makes sense in my head, I swear...

There was also the thrassian plaque.



Well, in the argonian account it is mentioned that the imperials tried to bring the large-scale plantations economy to black marsh; plus in morrowind we see some representations of large farms; so I think there should be much more to it than we see in oblivion.
One of the big sanitation issues is the existence of sewers - and at least two huge cities had them - vivec and the imperial city. (don't know about skyrim - still can't play it).

Despite all this, I think these 200 years of the 4th era saw a massive decline in population - Oblivion crysis everywhere, red year in morrowind, umbriel in black marsh, morrowind and Cyrodiil, the great war. I think that the overall population of Tamriel was much higher than under Uriel VII.

The Scrolls are a but a small keyhole-view on Tamriel, relating the N-variable fate-threads of prophetic heroes. The necessary but prophetically irrelevant facets of the world - the thousandfold humdrum burgherfolk; the sprawling city neighborhoods; the endless, undulating fields of grain to feed the teeming many- have been conveniently folded away and back like origami mountains. All the better, I should say, less they should cloud and mince the pure burn of hero's journey washing across the eyelids.

I do hope TES VI has a MASSIVE randomly generated playspace. I realize that Daggerfall's playspace svcked nuts, but with technology now, I'm sure they could make a generator that works much better. Then they could spend some time combing over it, putting in spawns and making sure it all looks natural/good. Then they could go through and add in the dungeons, with quite a bit of space between each dungeon, so exploring is more fulfilling. This would give it a real wilderness.

There is already a multiplayer mod in the alpha stages. Maybe they can mod randomly generated spaces. Add about 100 New Locations, Add 20 New Town Variations, then randomly generated layouts for each, add different colors to the buildings to make each area look more unique. Every city would have a massive wall that you could see for miles, trade cart people, occasional brawls in the streets. As you walk further into the city it has to load like going through a door to generate the next layout. Each Tavern would be 100% unique with different symbols and names, with more occupants. If any mod team was ever organized for that, I would say it would take 5 years to finish, like making a new game.