Population numbers

It's not a secret that the Azeroth isn't the most realistic of worlds around, in between all the magic and anachronistic items (even if you ignore all the firearms and gnomish/goblin machines and only focus on "mediveal" weapons... you've only narrowed it down to a 1500 year timespan). The world is designed with more "Rule of cool" in mind than immersion.

The population figures provided by the rpg (available on wowwiki) in particular seem taken straight out a hat. With Stormwind city either 200 000 or 50 000 citzens and the rest of the kingdom shares ~21 000. Giving us a urbanization level of 71 or 90 % (the percentage of the population living in a city). In other words: the kingdom of Stormwind have a higher urbanization level than the majority of modern earth.

Again, as mentioned, this is inconsequential really because it was never designed to be a realistic world.

But... for fun I decided to calculate what Stormwinds population would be if it was somewhat realistic. Using this as basis for my calculations.

Assuming Stormwind has a population of 50 000 and that the kingdom is extremely fertile (like france) I concluded that the total population is: 7 716 049 ( (50 000 / 18)^2 ).

Beyond Stormwind, Goldshire would have a population of between 40 000 and 20 000. Moonbrook would have been between 36 000 and 12 000, Lakeshire between 32 400 and 7 200. Darkshire between 29 160 and <8000. The kingdom would have between 17 and 3 cities (population over 8 000) and between 272 and 6 towns (population between 8 000 and 1 000), based on what end of the population spectrum we are.

Despite all this, assuming the maximum amount of cities and towns... it would only have a urbanisation level of approximately 6-10%. The vast majority would probably live in villages in Westfall, Elwynn and in the mountains surrounding the city, but Duskwood and Redridge would still have population in the tens of thousands.

The kingdom would be approximately 200 617 square kilometers, making it a roughly the same size as Belarus or Kyrgystan. 55% of it would be settled, the rest would be completely untouched wilderness.

Now imagine how much time would it take for Blizzard to make everything on that huge territory with as much details as they made it in the "Good ol' world".

WoW wouldn't have been out untill now.

All that can be taken into account in any roleplay as a "Realistic fact", don't you think?

Good job by the way, counting all this takes time, I know.

Fun population facts: There are more Dwarves living in Stormwind (28.000) Then in Ironforge (17.400)
The population of Stormwind (200.000) alone is allmost as high as the *whole* Horde
combined (292.000)

Keln: Perhaps. It'd be tricky though, given warcraft's very DnD-like style.

Dorik: There's a tiny little problem with assuming Stormwinds population is 200 000 and that is the high elven part of the city.

If there's 200 000 in the city, then 20 000 of them are High elves. Add Theramores 1-2 000 elves to this... Now... 90 % of the Thalassian elves are blood elves. So if the high elven population is 21-22 000 elves... then the blood elves number 210-220 000. Making the blood elves 71-75 % of the horde. That's quite impressive for a race that's supposedly all but extinct, don't you think.

Oh... and if we apply the methods I used above to those numbers... Stormwind would have a population of 123 million instead.

Instead I opted for the other population figure that circles the lore, 50 000 (sometimes 25 000 is mentioned as well). The elves in Stormwind would then be about 5 000 (making the elves in the horde number ~60-70 000 including civilians)) and the dwarves 7 000.

What does Stormwind have to do with horde population? And wasn't it about 90% of the high elfs that got snuffed?