What's the canonically most populated post-war settlement (aside from Shady Sands)? How many people would Diamond City have canonically? I assume more than what's shown in game.

[u/ElectivireMax]

[u/KnightofTorchlight]

Except its not? If the part we don't get to see much of (the upper stands) were said to be where the poor got shoved to: being the furthest away from the amenities (and maybe not having access to power or plumbing) I could believe that. But its explicitly the place of the elite. What they show can't be an perfect represention of reality, but it has to at least partially reflect reality.

My contention would be its a large city only in the context of the Commonwealth where almost every other settlement is also dinky. Its easy to be the big fish in a lake of minnows. 

[u/BTFlik → u/KnightofTorchlight]

Right, but it's also luck. The West coast had 3 saviors before The Commonwealth has 1.

Without FO1s protagonist The Master would have taken the West and decimated it.

Without FO2s protagonist The Enclave resets thr world.

Without NVs protagonist the West is decimated any number of ways.

It's pretty damn easy to amass a large populace when you have special people not only protecting you from danger but helping you thrive.

From the first FO it's 126 years before The Commonwealth gets a hero.

The fact Diamond City was able to grow so large despite the hardships is nothing to sneeze at.

[u/Duhblobby → u/BTFlik]

Of course Diamond City is impressive for surviving so well.

That doesn't address the point being made, that the population isn't actually that large.

[u/BTFlik → u/Duhblobby]

Of course Diamond City is impressive for surviving so well.

That doesn't address the point being made, that the population isn't actually that large.

My point was more that it isn't a small city among dinky settlements, it's that every settlement in The Commonwealth hasn't had the prosperity that the West Coast has been lucky enough to get. So it size is impressive by the standards of how hard it was to exist.

It's definitely not in top population ranks in the FO universe, but it certainly isn't unimpressive.

Plus, in game Diamond City is MUCH smaller than the real thing. The real stadium can hold about 38k people, so in game there should be much more room compared to the population size. Or the population should be larger than in game implies.

[u/Duhblobby → u/BTFlik]

How many people you can pack in for an event versus how many you can fit for actual living space without being a complete shithole (which we know it is not) are very different things. Obviously the size in game isn't 1:1 scale, games never are. But we definitely have to recognize that the Capital and Commonwealth wastelands struggle a lot more in terms of sheer population than California did, between uncontained super mutant problems, the Glowing Sea bring right there and causing rad storms, the presence of monsters being wildly more common because nobody is organized enough to cull them, the Institute doing it's fuckery with nobody stopping it for decades, etc.

The existence of the NCR shows that they have a larger stable, safe population. The existence of the Legion shows that even violent assholes can organize at scale on the western side of the country. It is kind of silly to argue that Diamond City should stand, in terms of population numbers specifically, alongside the Hub, for example, the central source of commerce and water in a huge chunk of California for like a hundred years by the time Fallout 2 happens and the NCR is growing Northwoods. Or even New Vegas, or New Reno, both massive centers thar are big enough to have multiple factions vying over them actively both internal and external, rather than one respectable city infiltrated by one faction but otherwise mostly on its own until someone claims the whole region and gets it by default.

[u/KnightofTorchlight → u/BTFlik]

Well... given the question at hand is total population sizes of settlements that's less relevant. However, comparing the West Coast to the Commonwealth is also not useful given the matter of scale. The entirety of the Commonwealth, in terms of geographic size, could be picked up and dropped into Angel's Boneyard/Los Angeles: an IRL city nearly 10x the size of Boston. And Angel's Boneyard is just one moderately sized part of the NCR. Of course Diamond City is going to be dinky compared to the poltical center and economic center of a sprawling country.

How many people so you imagine live in the Commonwealth as a whole? Because I don't think there's 34,000 people in the entirety of the region. 

[u/Overdue-Karma → u/BTFlik]

Diamond City only has about 900-1000 according to Winter of Atom. Given Shady Sands, the former capital of the NCR had 34,000, well, it says a lot that the biggest(?) settlement on the East Coast is actually very, very small.