Araxiel
commented
6 months ago Thinking about it, it's not just the northern hemisphere that was affected, the entire earth ended up in a bit of an ice age dropping the global temperatures by a couple of degrees and having ash be everywhere. That's enough to cause massive problems to crop harvests and thus extreme widespread famine and climate change everywhere.
Being isolated and not needing the goods from Europe and such doesn't save you from a local famine.
I need to decide how lethal the great event was (and also decide on a name).
OTL in 1850 there were around 1.2 billion people on Earth. The Black Death caused some some 30% of the entire world's population.
So right now I figure, depending on region, the global death count should be around 50% of the world's population. Northern Hemisphere should go all the way up to 80%, while equatorial areas closer 30% if not all the way down to 10%, depending on their level of "globalization".
Edit: Actually, seeing my reasoning in the comment below, I'm bumping up the numbers by a lot. It should probably be closer to an average of like 70% of the world's population that ceased to exist compared to OTL (this also includes not just deaths but also reduction of birth rates).
So let's say ITL the world's population in 1950 is only about 20% of ours. However since the game starts at the beginning of recovery in the 1860s, let's assume around 40% of that, at least in the places that had some time to recover. Like central Europe for example should be like 10% of OTL even in the 60s.