Mice population

In my campaign, the mouseholds can harvest enough wild food to feed themselves, but different areas have different selections. And then you have non-food goods. So, for instance, people in the south will pay a pretty penny for the beer brewed in a far-northern mousehold, while my setting’s Sprucetuck-equivalent makes a good trade selling medicines and elixirs.

Sure. A topic near and dear to my heart, which actually leads me to something I really love about this game. Mice actually could, conceivably, have cities, supported by foraged wild food, precisely because of their biological differences from humans. Since we had the suggestion that mouse cities would need mouse agriculture, I just wanted to raise the rationale for how you could have mouse cities without mouse agriculture (like I do in my campaign), without falling back to “It’s just a show, I should really just relax.”

Sure. My friends should start arriving in about half an hour. Tonight, we plan to make characters and play our first session. I’ll probably post about it here and on my OP page. If any of this kind of stuff comes up, I’ll certainly mention it in this thread, too.

If one chooses a hunter/gatherer society for the mice I guess one has to change the factor between city dwellers and non city dwellers. A farmer culture might have 10% of the total population as city dwellers but I think that would be too much for a hunter/gatherer society since the travels to gather food would be to long if too many mice live in the same spot and there won’t be the same amounts of food left over as there will be if you one has hard working farmer familes. Therefore, if they are, hunters/gathers fewer mice should live in cities and the cities should be smaller than in our human Middle Ages and Ancient mediterranean cultures.

Not at all–that was the point of what I wrote above. The same area that can support 1 human can support 500 mice, if you use those daily caloric intake figures I cited above. At that rate, you could have cities of mice as densely populated as any medieval town, supported entirely by foraged wild foods with no problem.

Not at all–that was the point of what I wrote above. If you use the daily caloric intake values I cited above, then the same area that can support 1 human can support 500 mice. So you could easily have mouse cities as densely populated as any medieval city, supported entirely by foraged wild foods, with no problem whatsoever.

Not at all–that was the point of what I wrote above. If you use the daily caloric intake values I cited above, then the same area that supports 1 human could support 500 mice. So, you could have mouse cities as densely populated as any medieval city, and support that population entirely with foraged wild foods.

Of course, I didn’t really, well, öh, let’s just leave that :slight_smile:

10 000 mice in a sq km then.
I guess that if you’re a city dweller you do daily raids for food and come back for the night. If at mouse normally can travel 1 km/day (1,5 in a hurry) he or she maybe can travel half that if they are collecting food? That would give us a maximum support area of 0.5 km ^2 * pi ~ 0.8 sq km which would give support for 0.8*10 000 = 8 000 mice maximum for a city of hunter/gatherers.

Then of course one could add up with some food surplus via some farming but on the other hand they need some mice who doesn’t do any foraging like smiths and so on. A city with 3 000 mice as been mentioned as the biggest city doesn’t seem to far fetched (at least if we accept intelligent organized mice :slight_smile:

Did some other thinking. When the roman empire was at one of it’s peaks it had an standing army of half a million soldiers and about fifty million inhabitants. Since the roman empire was fairly organized 1% standing army might be a maximum or the other way around, one soldier in a standing army needs 100 mixed people.

If there are about 100 mice in the The Guard there has to be 10 000 mice to support them. Then some other cities has standing troops.

Of course it’s different with a conscript army that you just raise for some months. It was a problem for the romans before they got an professional army that the farmers was away from their farms to long and didn’t produce food and the farms wasn’t managed. I guess the rebellion army from Barkstone might have been such an army that met sometimes and trained and then temporarily gathered in full force to assault Lockhaven.

I think we need tens of thousands of mice to support the structure in The Territories but not necessarily one hundred thousand mice.

Thanks for writing ‘‘wild mice’’. It has inspired to some real freaky semi hermit trapper mice encounters for our patrol.

This was a very interesting thread, some thoughts to add:
While these are anthropomorphic mice, they are still mice. Some of the discussion is framing them as hunter/gatherers. As a general rule mice aren’t carnivores, they are near the bottom of the food chain, and they can subsist in areas that carnivores and omnivores can’t. There is a Hunter skill (note there is no Butcher skill), but the implication is that it is used less for getting food and more for dealing with larger animals.

I would also guess that the territories have an even greater population density than is normally encountered in ‘real life’ since the mice are actively driving off predators. Then again, I can’t say I’ve heard the Mouse Guard characters mention having any siblings, let alone the number of offspring the average field mouse produces. Though, if medieval mortality rates for humans apply here, I would assume a rather large number of children in each household.

I’m starting to wonder what the mouse populations are outside of the Territories. If the carnivores there are finding food, then mice are dying. If there are no mice beyond the Scent Line or those mice flee to the Territories, the Line alone may not be enough of a deterrent…

I’m sorry if I missed this earlier in the conversation but we must also take into consideration Nature. The nature of the average mouse will determine the level of civilization of any given community. Let’s also not forget that harvesters are closer to scavengers than anything as they do not sow their own crops. The numbers will have to be adjusted to take these things into consideration.

Why fight the bear at all? I like how the Guard did it in the 2010 edition of Free Comic Book Day. instead of trying to kill the bear, appease it into not attacking your settlements with a monthly offering of food. You’d need at least three or four hunting missions to gather the food the bear needs anyhow. Then a mission to haul the food safely to the bear’s lair.

(but I do think the max range of 20K mice feels about right. I wonder how many more exist in the Wild country?)