Mapping: Rural Population Density

In my post Mapping: Representing Civilize Areas, I was toying with icon use for representing population density in rural areas. Thinking that the population of villages and hamlets would range from perhaps a hundred or so up to nearly a thousand, I was wondering if a single icon could effectively communicate the varying population densities. I'm rather happy with the way this turned out.

Each dot represents 50 people. Small clusters of 100 to 200 people are spread out every mile or so along the rivers and roads. The village of Fenrow hosts about 850 people. Even if that number were not known by the person reading the map, they would still get a very good sense of relative population density. It would also be easy to "tweak" populations for campaigns that were more sparsely populated, merely by lowering the number of people each dot represents. The large brown hexagons represent towns with populations in the thousands. The icon in the hex is intended to represent a stronghold, but I'm toying with it representing a thousand people. There would be one to ten thousand people in a town (an so, one to ten icons).

One "dot" = 50 people