I've run into a weird problem that I wonder if you guys could help me out with. I recently for some reason got the notion to make a post-apocalyptic setting, real Mad Max like, my idea was to make it like you'd see from a 1980s B-movie. The world was destroyed in a nuclear war between the US and USSR in the 'near future' of the year 2000, so it's a world where you got road warriors driving the highways in armed and armored old muscle cars, radioactive mutant monsters, tribes of busty barbarian motorcycle riding amazons with giant hair; shit like that. Everything in it is just there because I think it's cool.

But the problem I ran into that's driving me nuts is that I want the main, big settlement in the wasteland that I creatively named 'New Dodge City' to be a real seedy, sketchy hive of scum and villainy, with a nasty, grimy nightlife full of bars, casinos, brothels and strip clubs, and yet I still want it to feel somewhat small and ramshackle and desperate too. I don't want a huge modern-ish city because I want it to feel like human civilization is hanging on by a thread, but I also don't want a Bethesda tier """city""" that's only like 5 or 6 buildings either. My hangup here is scale, I don't actually know what comprises a big city or a small city or whatever. I can't visualize at all what it would look like. Is 5,000 people a lot? Would a city of 10,000 be too much? Could it still feel like a seedy wretched hive of scum and villainy with only 2,000 people or would that just look like some podunk small town?

I don't know why I'm getting so hung up on this detail that doesn't matter much but it really is driving me up a wall.