So I was bored for a bit.
Turns out that there is significant disparity among realms right now in terms of either gold or food output per square mile. This is in terms of the stats provided in the region list; so naturally this is a question of purely theoretical concern. What is odd is that realms that have very inefficient scores on, say, gold output per square mile, they are not compensated with great food output per square mile. So, for example, of the 6 realms with the highest gold output per square mile (Astrum, Aurvandil, Corsanctum, D'Hara, Luria Nova, Solaria; 0.3582 gold/sq.mi), the food output/mile is 0.151... the average of the 6 most efficient realms on the food stat is 0.1675. The lowest six are 0.0936.
Similar results exist for the lower end of the spectrum.
It looks like "efficiency of gold production" is a not-too-shabby predictor of "efficiency of food production."
Making it a two-way test, "efficiency of food production" was not quite as strong a predictor of "efficiency of gold production."
In sum, being an efficient gold producer means you're probably a food producer; but being an efficient food producer is not as strong an indicator of being an efficient gold producer.
While these conclusions might seem very abstract and theoretical, I think they're actually worthy of note. It is genuinely strange that realms which are highly efficient at producing gold (my gut instinct is to think "Urban-centric realms") should also be highly efficient at producing food, and that realms which are inefficient at producing gold (again, gut instinct is to say "More rural realms") should also be inefficient at producing food.
I did not discuss a measure of population, because I wanted to get at fundamental, underlying factors. Land area is fixed. I could limit the findings to realms which seem to have populations near maximums to try and make the data more concrete.
But there is another curious finding. I also looked at population density. To get any significant findings on gold/food/land relations, I had to use means-testing for groups, which is not exactly the most robust standard out there. But for the relationship between population density and gold production, there was a simple linear correlation. This is, at first, not surprising: more population density, more cities, more efficient gold production. Makes sense, right?
What is strange is when you look at food. When significant outliers are removed, the correlation between population density and the efficiency of food production is stronger than the correlation between pop. density and the efficiency of gold production. With outliers included (Luria Nova and D'Hara, for the curious), gold is a stronger correlation. But without outliers, food is.
Even if it's not a stronger correlation, it is odd to me that population density (which, in my mind, is a proxy for urbanization) would have a positive, linear relationship with efficiency of food production. This relationship is especially odd given that the efficiency of food production is a fixed, given value from the region list, while population density will vary every day, across seasons, and across years of political changes. That the correlation should exist despite that is peculiar.
My concluding thoughts were that this could be, rather like the "small city effect" in my previous venture into Dwilight data-mining, a sort of "wood/town/bad-land effect," wherein realms with low population densities are simply reflecting the presence of woodlands and badlands, while the higher density realms may be reflecting townslands. I haven't checked through all the data for the frequency of such atypical regions.
