thanks for the support. I'm working on the theory. I would write the fan fiction but not that good at writing.

qoute from redguards, their history and their heros.
Hunding belonged to the sword-singers. This element of empire society grew from the desert artisans and was initially recruited from the young sons and daughters of the high families. They built the first temple to the unknown gods of War and build a training hall "The Hall of the Virtues of War". Within a few generations the way of the sword - the song of the blade - had become their life. The people of the blade kept their poetry and artisanship in building beautiful swords woven with magic and powers from the unknown gods. The greatest among them became known as Ansei or "Saints of the Sword". Each of these began their own training schools teaching their individual way of the sword. Those Ansei of the highest virtue wandered the country side engaging in battle, righting wrongs, and seeking to end the strife.

sounds to me a lot like the BOS of fallout. but I'm grasping at straws here. both this and fallout came out at differnet times from different parrent companys but bethesday could use this to combine the two doubt it though.

Keep going, the demense is not nearly upon you! Let your seeded thought garden be nourished in lighter rambling and the echoes of a shunned brilliance, to reach higher sweet release! [you will hear a chime soon and wake only to realize the neghbors are cooking long johns for your pet fish]

ok got somethign else. what about the hist. in fallout 3 we meet a living tree maybe a hist? I know long way from black marsh but still if it was nuclear war same thing could have happend in many parts of the world. then also think about the sap you have to drink to talk to the living tree. hist sap? makes you wonder. then again could be just mad me....

Believe me, your mad. You're drawing conclusions when there is nothing but similarities to draw upon. I'm not gonna lie, the very idea of the Fallout universe mingling with the TES universe would pretty much make me never wanna come near Bethesda again. They are too different. Heck, Fallout only diverges from the real world after the second world war, while TES can't even relate to being in the same universe (by that I mean the place where galaxies are) as Earth. Thus, your conclusions can really come to nothing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iBmQneuFKE&feature=PlayList&p=83134E45A07C9EA7&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=41

You have to cut the relative sizes of Morrowind and Oblivion's cities a break. I don't actually think that there are 10 buildings in each district of the Imperial City, I think it's enormous! A sprawling, endless capital, bursting with tens of thousands of every race Tamriel has to offer. I don't see Bruma as having 20 houses, I see it as an enormous old-style town, roaring with Nordic culture, countless taverns.
I see the Imperial Garrison of the Imperial City as being very large, a few thousand strong (the Battle of Bruma was dinky, but what do you expect? Use your imagination!) That Ocato could spare no troops was but a plot device!
With the newer TES games, you have to use your reasoning and imagination.

Umm, Its quite clear that Harold simply got infected with a virus known as the forced evolutionary virus, or F.E.V. Which was effectively a bio-weapon that was under development prior to the onslaught of nuclear hellfire and annihilation in the fallout timeline. Its got nothing to do with radiation. You sir are mad...Don't cross universes and attempt to have a serious discussion on lore.

as for the original issue, the games are just inconsistent when it comes to scale. Daggerfall is probably the most accurate representation found in the games.

I never tried walking much in Arena, how was its scale?

ok I had a little too much skooma earlyer I'm over my delusional theorys. but anyways in arena you couldn't walk from one town to another because the game keeps regenerateing random cells as you walk through the wilderness and its impossible to reach anywhere without fast traveling. that was fixed in daggerfall where you could travel from one town to another by foot but it took you a while but very much possible.

There wasn't any scale in the strict sense of the word. Around every city there was just a vast (endless?) wilderness area of 6-pixel pre-generated rock-tree-dungeon-tree. You couldn't actually travel from one city to the other without fast travelling.


It's important to understand that all of the games are just a translation of what the world is actually like. They are a scaled representation (some scaled more than others due to technical restraints), not an actual representation.

redmer, insanity is the path to creativity and that leads to imagination and einstein himself once said...

"Imagination is more important than knowledge, knowledge is limited, imagination encircles the world."

Stay true and always let your wisdom and insanity guide you, so what if they call you by the name of the madgod, to earn the title of a daedric prince is a great honour.

there is a difference between crackpot and impossible. his theory is the later. i dont have anything against crackpot theories as long as they have proof.

If Cyrodiil were portrayed life-size it would take 10 real-life days to cross from west to east without stopping at normal walking speed.

Compare that with how long it takes in game to have an idea of the difference in scale.


Or to look at it another way. The whole in game province of Cryodiil would fit over 500 times into the life-size imperial city island.

That number seems a bit big. At 4 square miles represented ingame, are you saying that the Imperial City island is the size of Georgia (the US state) and the Imperial city is almost as big?

I just took a google map and zoomed out to roughly the size of a map of Tamriel I had up. The comparison is very rough, but I'd say Conneticut, or maybe New Hampshire, would be a closer comparison.

And... yes. The Imperial City is meant to be FRIGGIN HUGE!!!!!!111!!11one!!1111! In a world with magic backing up both production and transportation, such a thing is entirely possible. However, it's also entirely possible that it is nowhere near so populated as it once was, due to the climate change that both drove the Nords completely from Atmora, and turned Cyrodil subtropical to temperate (depending on what part you're in).

Cyrodiil is 1000ish miles west to east. The imperial city isle is about 80 miles across, i.e. 6000ish square miles.

The imperial city is huge (a metropolis of 500,000 to a million ppl like ancient rome) and in lore it covers only a tiny fraction of the island in 'lake' rumare (it could easily be described as a sea).

Where do these numbers come from? How do you know to use the same rule when scaling the cities with the provence?

Overland distances have been given in the lore. e.g. the distance from Mournhold to the summit of Red Mountain.

And this is how the Imperial City is decribed in lore:




Tamriel is a continent not a small island. It's not as large as north america, but it's still a very big place.

In lore the Imperial city is a metropolis on a huge island within an inland sea. There are numerous towns and villages on the same island. The island on it's own is as big as some states and countries.

The Niben is not a 'river'... again it's a sea like the persian gulf or the red sea. You would not be able to see from one side of it to the other, the curve of the globe would prevent that. The Niben is over a hundred miles wide east of Bravil.

And Bravil is a large city. The cities present in Oblivion are not the little towns portrated in game, they are the largest cities in Cyrodiil... each with thousands or tens of thousands of inhabitants. There are other more minor cities and hundreds of towns and villages that don't appear in game at all because the scale is so compressed.


Every computer RPG compresses the scale (well except Daggerfall). Waterdeep is nothing like it's portrayed in the NWN games, for example.

Some of us feel that Oblivion goes a bit too far though, especially with the distant land which stretches suspension of disbelief beyond breaking point.


http://img133.imageshack.us/img133/6766/sizeoftamriel.jpg <- I pasted a roughly scaled copy of a map of Cyrodiil onto a map of the united states. Cyrodiil looks to be about the size of Texas.

Oh cool, so there is a way of knowing, but what is the distance from Red Mtn. to Mournhold?

I loved that version of the Imperial City, unfortunately it was murdered by the limestone city. R.I.P.

This is a bit more reasonable, except the 6000 square miles. 2000 square miles with a city occupying about 2/3rds of it is gi-freaking-normously huge.
Let's put it into perspective: the New York City's city limits contains 308 square miles, Vienna is 153, Los Angeles (which is huge if you know it) is about 500. Modern-day Rome is 580 (I imagine this also contains some of the territory the city-state used to own and not just the city-limits). These places all have populations between one and ten million people.

It's not a matter of industry, its a matter of logistics and population. Even if you had the spacious houses that is represented in most of the districts for all the population, thus creating a low population density, the Imperial City's population could easily hit 50 million people at 2000 square miles. That is about the entire population of South Korea. If you are going to boil down and represent a sprawling megalopolis of 50 million people, then it certainly will not end up looking like it did in Oblivion. Not to mention that you then have to worry about growing food for a city this large. And it definitely looks like a good portion of Tamriel sticks with subsistence or near subsistence farming, eating up valuable land... oh wait, what am I saying. With the huge scale we're using for this scenario, land is plentiful.

And this is before we even think about the fact that the city used to be an Ayleid city who defined the city's inner and outer walls and the Imperials only kept it in shape. Ayleids. Heartland High-Elves. You know, the guys who can't or don't reproduce all that often? Sure they kept human and beast-folk slaves and they had Daedra serving them, probably eclipsing their population by 1.5 or so. But 1/3 of 50 million is still 17 million, not counting their other cities in Cyrodiil.

It was mentioned somewhere way back when that ingame Oblivion encompassed either 4 or 6 square miles. The rest is just extrapolation and (wrong-headed) conjecture.

edit: Ok, IC being a small fraction of Rumare Island, I'll accept. But I will not accept a ballpark estimate of the IC's size to be anywhere but between 300 and 500 square miles.

What people mean is that the Imperial Province is really big, which for this case is a very valid size unit. The exact mathematical size is not that important.

It is gameplay thing,but on the other hand u have all sorts of fanatics,killers and so they slowly destroy population.

Excuse my rudeness but what the hell are you talking about?

What fanatics and killers are attaking people and slowly destroying the population?

I mean unless you count retired washed up COC's that are bored and depressed and decide to go on killin sprees in all the cities....

The scale of the Imperial City Island and Lake Rumare is about the same as if you put the State of Maryland in Lake Superior.

You also seem to forget, in lore, the Imperial City island is not one island.


Please note that this book is found in Oblivion.

It may APPEAR to be one island, but is so bridged over and such that it's like Venice and Rome had a baby. Then, sprinkle with fantasy, mix up the races, and overfeed said baby to a ridiculous degree, and presto! Instant Imperial City recipe.