Talk:The Empire/@comment-5982125-20140928043535/@comment-5982125-20140928044642

That is why there's that mountain range cutting off 1/4th of their territory from the rest of it. That was the border, originally... but they simply couldn't grow enough food and harvest enough resources on their existing land to support their exploding population. I mean, when you conquer a huge swathe of previously-divided, constantly-fighting land like that and interlink it with a system of roads, common currency, peace, stability... population's going to take off. Too much of their land was devoted to cash crops, resource-gathering, lumber production, urbanization, etc, so they basically took more land and established big state-run agricultural collectives to feed their population --- and it actually works really well, since they're used to this type of communal work and they didn't have to engineer famine and whatnot to collectivize an sustinence-farming argicultural peasantry by force like the Soviet Union.