100,000 to 200,000 men lost out of a home population of something like 30 million (I really don't understand how they maintain that with their Khemer Rouge style policies, but that's WOGM, so WOGM it is) is really damn brutal.
I'm working on the assumption that their population is more like 10-15 million, myself. As you note, multiple rounds of mass exodus of refugees, deliberate killing of probably hundreds of thousands of dissidents and minorities and maybe millions, plus decades of willfully destructive agrarian infrastructure-busting.
I'm fairly sure that Victoria's territory barely has thirty million today today, so they absolutely don't have that. If we assume that their stupidity caused high-end Year Zero casualties -- 25%, for the record -- assume that they got 50% of Quebec's population somehow (it was honestly probably less), and that after the initial die-off their growth just stopped, which is basically the effect the Collapse had on global population growth, so sure...
...almost exactly twenty million.
They probably had refugees fleeing New England
well before the nominal founding of Victoria. Realistically, some time in the early 2030s it would have become obvious that the federal government wasn't up to the task of saving New England from "Vanilla ISIS" or whatever memetic derogatory name the Christian Marines and their backers got in those days. LBGT people, racial minorities, and educated people in general would have started to get out while they could.
And then the economy of the region would have collapsed even harder than it did before the Christian Marines became powerful and relevant. A huge amount of it hinges on white-collar service-sector stuff and high-tech stuff. Even if the proto-Victorians weren't active retroculturists, they were still
violent militant assholes. Big corporations would be closing down their offices in New England and pulling out, along with their workforces. Because Raytheon or Oracle or various other companies whose big office buildings I've driven past up there
might keep their offices open through a huge crippling recession if that was all that was wrong... but they sure wouldn't keep them open if violent warlord militias were terrorizing stuff.
So the population decline wouldn't
just be the Khmer Rouge shit. It would already have been declining as people afraid of the Christian Marines fled to parts of the country that,
while still in terrible shape, at least weren't overtly being terrorized by alt-right militias.
And
THEN you'd compound that with what happened when the CMC actually took over, started purging people and staging mass killings, and ultimately instituted the Khmer Rouge horrors of retro culture.
I'd say twenty million is optimistic, even, though to be fair the Victorian population may have begun to rebound a bit with a generation since the
worst famines and killings that accompanied the CMC brutally bludgeoning all remaining noncompliance and totally destroying the old way of life back in the 2040s and '50s.
Oh yes! There's blood in the water now!
Sara Goldblum:
[voice lowers a bit, and she exaggerates the faint rasp that's usually there]
"If you can make God bleed, people will cease to believe in him. There will be blood in the water, and the sharks will come..."
[Everyone in the room younger than sixty stares at her uncomprehendingly]
Population of 30 million, maximum, based on realworld populations of the occupied areas; I did the numbers earlier. 20 million is more plausible, but we'll be generous and use the high end numbers for Vic population.
Black slaves sharecroppers constitute at least 10-15%, using US population demographics IRL.
Use the lower number. 3 million.
Firstly, the black population may be de facto slaves, but they
sure as hell count as part of the labor force for demographic-economic purposes.
Also, New England isn't an ideal frictionless spherical cow in a vacuum. It has its own demographics.
en.wikipedia.org
Today, blacks make up roughly 7% of the New England population,
specifically. That 10-15% average reflects higher concentrations in urban areas in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic, and in all parts of the South, but also much lower concentrations in the Western states and in rural areas north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Then you allow for blacks having been one of the demographics that would be disproportionately likely to flee if
at all possible.
27 million left.
Half the population are women, who do no work outside the home.
~13.5 million.
Making a big assumption there. Victorians aren't robots that march mindlessly off economic cliffs. They're going to make allowances for "if a man dies and no male relative is capable of taking over his property, his widow can run it" or something. You can also expect to see women being in general
worked harder on farms and as support personnel for businesses, often doing this work quietly in the background. Officially Victorian women are probably 'sheltered' from having to work by their mighty manly men (see alt-right fantasies)... but the reality cannot ever have been that way.
Farmwives work their
asses off.
25% of 13.5 million is roughly 3.4 million people.
We just killed, crippled or captured 100-150,000 of that in about a month.
Roughly 3% of their young adult males, possibly as high as 4.5%, just......went away.
Notably, those men were already "away," because they were on such frequent foreign deployment that they simply were not around most of the time to work on farms or in factories or to make babies.
That doesn't negate the demographic effects of their sudden disappearance, but it does mean that to a large extent those effects have already been "priced into" the Victorian economy. The price has already been partially paid.
If we really got their entire army, then we shouldn't do exchanges. Every man we send back is probably a man we'll have fight again (If they're not purged) and even if they don't force their prisoners back to the colors they still have one more warm body to prop up their regime.
I'm not saying MISTREAT the victorian prisoners, I'm just saying we don't send them home until this war is done.
I mean.
What if the Victorians (I know, this is out of left field) offer to sign a peace treaty?
People don't think this can happen. People didn't think the Leamington force would sit still and entrench after the Battle of Essex.
Turns out, when you beat or scare the shit out of Victorians, sometimes they depart from the generic rulebook. They are not robots to march blindly and mindlessly off a cliff forever.
If they offer, what do we say or do?
Word of GM from Discord states that Victoria is pretty much on life support from this defeat, and is a another mobilization without support from Russia in the short-term, and economic reform In the long-term is going to have major issues.
I mean yes.
At the same time, that may be for reasons more complicated than "demographic hit from losing the army."
The Victorians have just lost their ability to demand tribute of various kinds, and it's likely that tributes of food, resources, and industrial supplies were a big part of what kept their state running. We know, for instance, that the Victorians and Russians kept the Soo Locks open by coercing the people around them to work like slaves, so that they'd retain access to metals mined from areas around Lake Superior. The Victorians just
very permanently lost their ability to coerce that kind of tribute,
hard. Now they need to source ore from elsewhere, and getting it from anywhere in the Upper Great Lakes region has just become very much more expensive, if not impossible. Similarly, they may have been extracting tributes of food from various places, or of industrial goods from New York, or at least extracting "tribute" in the sense of "you are coerced into selling us these things at unprofitable prices." Or they may have been looting and extracting ongoing wealth from looting, likewise.
Foreign tourism revenues are likely down since the news coverage of this war made Victoria the obvious horrible heavies,
and they lost.
Streams of Russian aid and outbound foreign exchange expenditure they'd normally spend on economic concerns will have to be redirected to rebuild the military, and that will in turn hurt the civilian economy.
And all of that is before the Viks even THINK about mobilizing.
So yeah, they're in bad shape probably. But the demographic hit isn't the only, and may not even be the largest, reason why.
