The size of the Dunan Republic

[TMan]

So I already posted this on /r/Suikoden but I decided to investigate what the actual size of the Suiko world is. Here are the results:

"We could take a picture like this and imagine that the man on the middle left has normal feet, it's a safe bet that each block in the road is 1'X1'. By counting the blocks we can see the village is roughly 180ft wide from the west entrance to the start of the bridge.

Then we take this and we see how many 180ft Radat Towns it takes to fill the map left to right then up to down.

The results show that from the mountains west of Crom village to the mountains east of Ryube, there are 122.85 Radats. That's 22,114 ft or 4.182 miles or 6.72 km. Stunningly small.

Meanwhile, the distance from Banner Village to Sajah Village is 92.57 Radats or 16662 ft. That's 3.155 miles or 5.07 km. Wow! For a sense of scale, the island that comprises Northern and the Republic of Ireland is 302 miles at its longest. That's 95.87 times the size of Dunan! For something a little closer in size, you might compare it to Rhode Island, mainland USA's smallest state which is 37m (60km) by 48 m (77km).

Very small indeed! This explains why they are able to get all their wars finished in barely a year! This also explains why they were able to easily build defensible walls around the Muse territory and how each country was able to move army's faster than the other one would know what was happening.

So, why bother figuring this out?! If I were you, I would certainly be asking that question. The answer is- I have no idea! I should really be working!

EDIT: I also decided to calculate world map travel speed. It takes 21 seconds to move from Greenhill to Muse border, a distance of .745 of a mile. That means Riou and crew are moving at 127.7142 mph or 205.5362 kmh! Wow!

[sticky-runes]

When you play Suikoden Tactics, which uses the same locales as Suikoden 4, days pass by as you travel from one island to another (for example, it takes like 13 days or something to travel from Middleport to Obel), but in Suikoden 4 when you're traveling the seas in real time, you never see the sun go down, unless it's a story line event. But then, day and night cycles tend to piss me off in RPGs anyway, so I can live with that inaccuracy.

[TMan]

14 days! Holy moly.

That would make S4 ships either incredibly slow or S4 world ridiculously big.

Point of reference for Dunan above, it's about half the size of the island of Manhattan

[sticky-runes]

I don't know if anyone who has played Suikoden Tactics has bothered to calculated how many in-game days/weeks/months have passed by until they've finished the story and all the side quests...

RPG geography is never real world accurate. It takes me longer to walk to my local post office than it takes a video game character to get from his home town to the nearest castle, even when stopping to fight monsters and shop for new equipment on the way, and they're supposed to be going an "epic voyage". then there's the issue of timing things. Nobody instantly changes into a suit of armour, and I'm no blacksmith, but it probably takes more than three or four blows of a hammer to sharpen somebody's blade.

[TMan]

I definitely agree that there's no reliable way to measure the size of the world (the above conclusions are obviously inaccurate, for example. You wouldn't be able to support L'Renouille's 25,000 people with less than a mile of farm land).

So we might look at this another way. Highland has three companies in S2 right? Each company is supposed to be 25,000 soldiers. At the height of WW2, (from quick research) roughly 10.1% of the population was serving in the military. Let's take the three 25,000 companies to get 75,000 total soldiers, plus add another 25,000 for support such as nurses, cooks, engineers and whatever else was needed.

We then have 100,000 x 10.1% = 1.1 million. We also know that 25,000 people live in the capital city alone and that it is their largest city.

Average population density in middle ages was 30 per sq mile. We need to account for 975,000 people, so let's divide that by 30 miles and we should see how many sq miles Highland likely was- 32,500 sq miles. Almost exactly the same size as Ireland. According to Wikipedia on Dublin: " By 1700, the population had surpassed 60,000, making it the second largest city, after London, in the British Empire."


This is a significantly more realistic picture of the world.

Dunan looks to be about 2 or 2.5 times the size of Highland. The world just got much bigger.