Re: Re: Childbirth

From: Roderick and Ellen Robertson <rjremr_at_...>
Date: Sat, 17 Jul 2004 11:34:15 -0700

> In other words, fertility is not a constant....over large populations
> of course the fertility rate will tend to average out, but I think
> you are better off modelling so many births per year per 100 women of
> childbearing age type approach, rather than trying to start with
> fertility rate of one woman. Even better, figure the numbers you
> want, then calculate everything backwards from there.

Well, of course, there's two different things being addressed:

"How does pregnancy affect the PC/PC's wife" and "Birth rate for the Tribe/Clan/Village/etc"

The model I'm developing is for the first question - no way would I bother to roll that sort of thing over a clan or village! For a Village/clan model (like KoDP-style play) I'd probably just do some sort of comparison of Births to Deaths (though it would probably be easy enough to do a computer program that tracked it all for you, including all the tedious die rolling. Start out by generating a population (Ask the user how many people in the unit, name it, then generate a starting population with names, ages, families, etc). Every year run "Update Pop" to determine if fertile women have babies, who dies, etc. You could even have *when* things happen.

Hmmm....

RR
It is by my order and for the good of the state that the bearer of this has done what he has done.
- Richelieu