Guild Wars 2

I’ve been getting really interested in the guild wars lore lately and I was wondering, lore-wise (excluding players), what race has the highest population?

Humans for sure, they may have lost Ascalon but they still control Kryta, have a majority population in Elona and a xenophobic lockdown in Cantha.

In second it’s likely the Charr, their race has only been growing since the retaking of Ascalon, and before that they already numbered high enough to send armies to Orr, Kryta and of course Ascalon.

Q: What are the population figures of the races in modern Tyria, and how are they maintaining themselves in an era of war?

Jeff Grubb: We have no census that the present time, but the main cities indicate large populations of the major races. Humans have been in decline for centuries, given the losses of Ascalon and Orr, but are still populous in the lands they do control. Asura and norn populations have risen since they arrived in this part of the world, and charr have seen both an increase in children, but an increasing number of threats to their land, so their numbers remain stable with their constant warfare. The sylvari are appearing with greater and greater frequency since the twelve Firstborn emerged from the Tree, and given that they do not seem to age or die, the potential exists that they will eventually outnumber all the other races combined. For the moment, they lag behind the others as the youngest of the major races.

http://ashenfold.com/ashenfold-cartel-interview-with-jeff-grubb-and-eric-flannum/

Surely it would be currently be the charr or humans. At the moment we nothing of the Charr homelands so can’t make a judgement there. Neither do we know anything currently of Cantha or Elona whose populations would bolster the humans substantially. More importantly, we don’t know what will happen to Orr once the corruption is cleansed, if it once more becomes a human kingdom, that would again increase the humans population. Ultimately, we have no idea but hopefully some of the possibilities will be dealt with in new content and expansions…

The humans have the highest population followed by char then the norns, asura and sylvari. Now the sylvari population will only keep growing depending on the pale tree and the other sylvari making tree so they could at most out populate the norns and asura if they wanted to.

For all we know the charr could possibly outnumber humanity. Remember they have the Blood Legion Homelands up north of Ascalon, and if I remember right they have lands east of the blazeridge steppes as well. It’s speculation, but I would say Charr and Humanity are close ties for first.

Narcemus.1348:

For all we know the charr could possibly outnumber humanity. Remember they have the Blood Legion Homelands up north of Ascalon, and if I remember right they have lands east of the blazeridge steppes as well. It’s speculation, but I would say Charr and Humanity are close ties for first.

Charrs only inhabit Ascalon at the moment I think. If they would still have some ground in the Blazeridge or the Blood legion homelands, i think we would know and Ascalon woudn’t be filled with the members and leadersof all the legions. Besiedes, Blood legion homelands is cut off by the Flame legion and the Blazeridge is full of ogres atm.

Humans probably win if you count Elona, Cantha, and whatever other holdings they may have. Within Tyria, though, the charr probably win on the basis that it’s much more reasonable to count the Ash and Blood Legions than it is to count the Elonian and Canthan humans that are politically and geographically distant from Kryta.

Sylvari are canonically the smallest, and unlike many, I suspect they may actually prove to be the slowest breeders in the long run since their rate of growth is limited by the Pale Tree – they could establish a foothold quickly, but they have less potential to go exponential without growing more Tree. Of the asura and norn… if I had to guess, I’d actually say the asura have the higher population. While both can be antisocial, asura are generally more gregarious and have a culture more suited to high population density – furthermore, while I’m pretty certain we’ve seen the entire norn territory or close to it, asura territory could extend into unexplored territory west of Rata Sum (and there’s a currently unusable-by-players gate in Rata Sum pointing in that direction). We haven’t even seen the golem-operated farms that asura apparently use to grow food yet.

PS @ Gandarel: The charr do indeed have land outside of Ascalon. Ascalon is actually Iron Legion territory – the homelands of the other legions are elsewhere. The reason why we see members of other legions in Ascalon is that Iron, Ash and Blood have a mutual defence arrangement.

Yeah Drax, it all honestly depends on how far the Charr’s control over the lands east of the Blazeridge goes. I mean I would assume, based on Blood Legion Homelands and Iron Legion Homelands, that the Ash Legion territory is about the same size, but this doesn’t have to be the case. Charr territory could extend much further than we imagine, should ArenaNet wish. As for humanity, Kryta is rather small (although very well populated), and Elona most likely has a higher presence of undead than humans (thinking form the perspective of an emperor, you want an army that can easily put down a rebellion of your people), Cantha honestly has the best chance of adding to the population base of humanity with it’s isolationism, but nothing is honestly certain.

I could see Ash being the largest of the territories, actually – but also the least fertile, with Ash Legion members in their homeland living a nomadic lifestyle.

My gut feeling, though, is that the Charr-held Ascalon has about the same population as modern Kryta – probably less, but not a lot less. Ebonhawke is probably no more than a third of the population of Kryta, while the three High Legions are said to be of roughly the same power – while ‘population’ and ‘power’ are not necessarily one to one (the Blood Legion’s power base is probably more charrpower-intensive, for instance) it’s probably reasonable to say the charr total roughly two Krytas of population (more if you include the Flame Legion and the smaller legions that supposedly exist but we never see ingame – maybe make it 3 Krytas in total), while Ebonhawke + Kryta is probably around 1.2 Krytas.

If you assume the human population of Elona is roughly the same as it was in GW1 – while it covered much more territory than modern Kryta, it also had a sparser population, although there were a few moderately-sized cities. I’d probably estimate the Elonian population at about two Krytas.

Cantha is the real wild card, of course – again using GW1 estimates, Shing Jea, the Kurzicks and the Luxons are probably a fairly small total population – maybe about 0.8 Krytas – but there’s also the fact that Kaineng is a city that’s larger than modern explorable Kryta (seriously, look up the world map and compare the area of Kaineng from GW1 with explorable Kryta in GW2) and much more densely populated than Divinity’s Reach. Unless there’s been a big die-off, throwing Cantha into the mix probably means humans outnumber every other race combined unless one of them has a big population somewhere we can’t access.

Plagiarised.2865:

I’ve been getting really interested in the guild wars lore lately and I was wondering, lore-wise (excluding players), what race has the highest population?

Depends on how far you go. If you’re just talking about continental Tyria, my bet would be asura, human, or charr. If you’re talking about the supercontinent that Tyria and Elona are part of, I’d go charr – we don’t know how large their territory is, but Ascalon is just ~1/3rd-1/4th of it. Maybe less, since the Blood Legion controls both north of Ascalon and east of the Blazeridge Mountains (and we don’t know where the Ash Legion’s territory is either). But it depends on two unknown factors: how many humans Joko keeps alive in Elona, and how large the charr territory is off the map.

If you’re going worldwide, I’d presume humans, unless Cantha has had a major falling out, in which again I’d say charr or humans.

Gandarel.5091:

Narcemus.1348:

For all we know the charr could possibly outnumber humanity. Remember they have the Blood Legion Homelands up north of Ascalon, and if I remember right they have lands east of the blazeridge steppes as well. It’s speculation, but I would say Charr and Humanity are close ties for first.

Charrs only inhabit Ascalon at the moment I think. If they would still have some ground in the Blazeridge or the Blood legion homelands, i think we would know and Ascalon woudn’t be filled with the members and leadersof all the legions. Besiedes, Blood legion homelands is cut off by the Flame legion and the Blazeridge is full of ogres atm.

East of the Blazeridge Mountains – not steppes (though technically it’d be east of both) – lies the Blood Legion capital where Bangar rules from. The Mountains aren’t charr lands, but on the other side of them is.

Charr inhabit far more than Ascalon, Gandarel – Ascalon is only the Iron Legion’s territory. Ash and Blood rule their own territories, and Blood’s seems to be the largest. Ascalon isn’t filled with the “leaders of all the Legions” – Malice and Bangar, the Ash and Blood Imperators respectively, aren’t in Ascalon and they only have 2 tribunes (afaik) in Ascalon each, both being stationed in the Black Citadel, whereas the Iron Legion has about 10 Tribunes. That’s 16 unaccounted for Tribunes, roughly, and 2 unaccounted for Imperators.

Narcemus.1348:

I mean I would assume, based on Blood Legion Homelands and Iron Legion Homelands, that the Ash Legion territory is about the same size, but this doesn’t have to be the case.

Blood Legion territory goes off the map – at least their capital is off the map to the east, and I’d presume their territory would go from the Blood Legion Homelands to at least said capital, where ever it is. So it’s not the same size as Ascalon. And the Blood Legion itself is the largest of the three legions too, I believe.

The thing with Cantha Drax, is that a lot changed just in the instance of GW1, let alone the in-between period. I mean Shiro’s plague struck turning people into afflicted and having those afflicted go around killing others, then you had the Am Fah and the Jade Brotherhood constantly going around killing each other and killing innocent bystanders. By the end of GW1 a large part of the population had to have died, although we do not have any numbers, but even aside from that, the afflicted, Am Fah, and Jade Brotherhood continued to go around killing for 7 years! After this ended one of the biggest wars in Cantha’s history (prior to the in-between times) began, the Winds of Change. The Ministry of Purity finally took out the Afflicted, but it was at a large cost of lives. Many peasants got caught up in the fervor and ran to their deaths during the story, only then did the story begin. The Ministry of Purity took their war to the Am Fah, Jade Brotherhood, and the Tengu. This cost all sides dearly, eventually turning us against them. By the end the death toll had to be immense, even in such an overly populated city as Kaineng. And yet somehow the next emperor assembled an army and completely subjugated the Kurzick and Luxon people, and was able to push out a majority of the other races in the land (we cannot know whether they pushed EVERY race out). The cost of lives in this war is unknown, but based on the thought processes of many people in the Winds of Change story I cannot imagine that Usoku had no resistance. There were many people who saw, like us, the horrors of the Ministry of Purity. This is entirely speculative, but I cannot imagine a Cantha that is anywhere close to as densely populated as it was in GW1.

That’s true, but…

Have a look at the world map of Tyria (here). Compare the size of Cantha on that map with the GW1 map of Cantha and just how much of Cantha, explored and unexplorable, is covered in city. And not a nice suburban city like Divinity’s Reach or Lion’s Arch where most families seem to have their own discrete buildings to live in, but one where people are packed into buildings that are built about as large as Canthan architectural knowledge can get them without collapsing under their own weight.

Even taking into account distortion of area due to representing a globe with a square map, we’re looking at Kaineng City being roughly the size of modern Kryta with a population density that exceeds anything seen in GW2 with the possible exception of the pyramid of Rata Sum. A city of that scale and density could probably afford to lose over half of its citizens and still outpopulate the entirety of explorable Tyria.

Personally, my gut feeling is that as of the end of Winds of Change, Cantha is still sufficiently overpopulated to be uncomfortable – and that’s part of how Usoku was able to drum up support for his wars of expansion.

Now, GW2 Cantha is likely to be less densely populated – but that’s because it’s expanded into a larger area. Given a couple of centuries without further disasters and land to expand into, I can certainly see GW2 Cantha being at least as populated as pre-GW1 Cantha (consider, after all, that the reason why it was so overpopulated was due to refugees from parts of Cantha rendered uninhabitable by the Jade Wind – if those territories were to be reclaimed, there’s no reason for the Canthan population not to grow to its pre-Jade Wind level. Which may actually have been higher than its pre-GW1 level, considering that the refugees stuffing Kaineng are those that were displaced by the Jade Wind but not killed by it).

Jeff Grubb once said in a Q&A (I believe during PAX) that their 5 major races have around the same population as each other.

I believe that is highly unlikely. Even if he just meant the Tyria that we can see, the charr would have a major advantage over the asura and the sylvari especially with the inclusion of the Blood Legion Homelands. The world as a whole, I cannot see the sylvari or asura coming close to human and charr populations.

hmm. “Around” may be Jeff’s relative term to say that all the playable races have an ‘adequate’ population. he does specify in the quote I posted above though, that sylvari lag behing the other races because they are so knew.

captaincrash.6528:

Jeff Grubb once said in a Q&A (I believe during PAX) that their 5 major races have around the same population as each other.

Actually, what he said – and it was linked to and quoted in this very thread, in fact – was that the asura and norn populations have risen, while humans declined, and charr remained about the same, with sylvari steadily increasing. And he also said that the major cities “indicate large populations of the major races.”

He gave no actual comparison of numbers – just population rates.

Unless you refer to a different interview asking the same question.

The line referred to Dustfinger was said, but it was in an old interview that has been superseded by more recent indications that the populations are different. I suspect it was a case of starting with an ideal of the races being equal in population as part of being of roughly equal power, but then they had the realisation that this jut didn’t work (because a) some races are more powerful than others on the basis of considering the average individual, and b) when you consider their respective cultures and size and nature of their territories, it’s just not realistic for their populations to be the same).