SVlad wrote:And what is the average number of children Loroi have? With their women ration they need only 1-2 childes per woman to maintain population. And with 400 years lifespan it means approximately one encounter in 300 hundred years. For males situation would be just a bit better - one encounter in 30 years. And, because of the uneven distribution of males, most males wouldn't have sex for decades.
Even if each Loroi woman would have 10 childes per life, numbers wouldn't be much better. One encounter per year for popular males, and one in decade for other.
An average number wouldn't be very descriptive, because the number varies by individual greatly according to gender, class, circumstance, lifespan, and era. A Loroi civilian female might have zero offspring, and a high-ranking Loroi male might have many thousands.
Female Loroi fertility declines with age. A week-long series of mating encounters might result in pregnancy rates as high as 80% for very young Loroi females in their reproductive prime, but for a female Loroi over 50 (who constitute the majority of the population with sufficient status to earn recurring time with a male), fertility rates drop to something closer to recognizable human levels. Male fertility also diminishes, though to a lesser degree, as they age.
Most female Loroi -- even in peacetime -- won't live past age 150 or 200, and those that die before then are likely to die very young.
Even in times of peace, the Loroi population is always growing; there is usually need for growth somewhere, and so even males in established areas that have capped growth will be matched with females brought in from frontier areas. And for the Loroi, times of true peace are few and far between.
Even though the population can theoretically be held static through this access control system, Loroi proclivity and longevity still exert enormous pressure for growth. In times when population growth was curtailed, the males were still kept very busy, but by an ever smaller percentage of the female population -- mostly older, high-ranking warrior females. In extreme cases, the top-ranking females might have a male exclusively assigned to her, who she visited every day, and she might even go so far as to use contraception. The more common this became, the more imminent the end of such restrictions would become, as more and more of the high-ranking females would inevitably become hedonistic and/or attached to their males, their subordinates and opponents (who wanted reproductive rights for themselves) would resent this and recognize it as a weakness, and a conflict of Homeric proportions would ensue. However, such a hypothetical situation of zero population growth has not been widely in effect for more than a thousand years; since then the Loroi have always been at war or actively expanding, or both.
GeoModder wrote:Loroi males must have a busy time at the frontline systems. Military casualty rates are way up, and the surviving combat veterans after each in-the-field deployment likely are eligible to quality time with a male.
Which makes me wonder: Arioch, does a "host" of males follow the fleet/army deployments in the Seren, Tinza, -and Maiad sectors? Like medieval/renaissance armies on Earth had a whole camp of women (and their children) at their trail?
The females are usually brought to the males, rather than the other way around, as part of leave.
