Do you count both urban and non urban population for if a domain is a Wilderness/Borderlands/Civilized domain?
Urban population is treated as a separate domain from the hex where the settlement is located, so the urban and peasant populations are accounted for entirely separately. Neither one contributes to the other’s population cap and they are not added together to determine evolution from Wilderness to Borderlands to Civilized:
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Rural domains move up the chain when they have 16 hexes and hit the population cap; since urban population doesn’t count against this cap, it doesn’t contribute.
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Urban settlements move up the chain based on their market class, which is determined by the urban population; since rural population isn’t part of the urban population, it doesn’t contribute to market class.
Oooh, that’s interesting. So one could theoretically have a wilderness metropolis, then.
Maybe not quite that far… A newly-formed domain is civilized if it’s within 50 miles of a “city or large town” (ACKS 125). A “city” is 2500+ families/class III market and a “large town” is 625+ families/class IV market (ACKS 134).
Granted, there’s no explicit rule on when urban settlements cause existing domains to become borderlands/civilized and, personally, I would have large towns project an area of borderlands and save civilized for cities, but it seems that 624 families is the limit on settlement size that would allow the area around it to remain wilderness forever and, by the time you hit metropolis (40000+ families), the surrounding area would almost certainly have become civilized unless, perhaps, you’re doing something specific to prevent that from happening.
I think you could probably keep the surrounding land as depopulated as possible with demographic shifts, but a portion of the “civilized/borderlands/wilderness” taxonomy is determining the random encounter chances - and I think just the general bustle of supporting a city of a given size (trade, garrison) means you’re losing that wilderness distinction.
Unless it’s a dwarven vault or something and it’s established most activity stays underground, and they let the surface go to seed, as it were. (and then all of a sudden a elvish fastness is established without knowing the dwarves were there and we get into a Odd Couple situation)
I think you could probably keep the surrounding land as depopulated as possible with demographic shifts,
That’s something that actually came up in my campaign… The rules say that you pull families from the domain to provide an initial population base when you found an urban settlement, but there’s nothing there about moving population into or out of an existing settlement (or between any two domains, for that matter). I ended up ruling that you can’t move population between domains (with settlements being considered a type of domain), simply because I had players at the time who would have constantly micromanaged it as an optimization exercise, but I’m mildly curious how others have handled that.
Unless it's a dwarven vault or something and it's established most activity stays underground, and they let the surface go to seed, as it were. (and then all of a sudden a elvish fastness is established without knowing the dwarves were there and we get into a Odd Couple situation)Sounds like a fun setup! 