Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Iosyn]

Don't engrave early on or else with all the the crafting you'll be doing your created wealth will shoot right up. I know how it feels though; get a nice working fort up; had the first few migrant waves-- and then bang, 25 bloody cheesemakers on the horizon. That's been the end of many a fort for me. Who needs sieges when you get bloody useless dwarves trying to invade every month or so.

Just smooth the dining room and domitories for the moment. You can always engrave later-- and your engravers will have probably skilled up by then, so the engravings will actually be worth more-- and if that's the case you're probably going to want extra wealth to attract titans and sieges.

Best thing you can do is lower the popcap.

[Scruffy]

I usually start with a 40 dorf pop cap and raise it to 60 or 80 after I manage to dig most of my fort into proper shape.

..The last time I forgot to alter the pop cap led to getting one of my biggest waves ever. Reclaimed a wealthy fort in a resurrecting husk weather biome. The first 2 hardcoded waves were ok and I managed to get them to safety but then the third one came.. Boom! 71 migrants. A map full of zombified animals and dwarves. I managed to save perhaps a dozen while the rest either died from starvation while running away or got killed. I had to permanetly seal the above ground thanks to that horde of husk/zombie dwarves.

[Andal]

I was recently working on a fort that got migrant bombed (though thankfully not at the rate that Scruffy had to deal with! Ouch, man.). No smoothing, no engraving, and relatively low-quality crafts produced to buy bare essentials from the caravans.

First wave! 3.
Second wave. 4. Going good so far, working on designing and designating the permanent fortress.
...
Third wave. 42 bloody migrants. My booze stockpile is decimated. Plans are thrown into disarray, and I struggle back to my feet.
Fourth wave. 27 migrants.
...
Screw you too, Mountainhome.

[Bartinyou]

Out of curiousity, for those of you being overwhelmed by large migrant waves, what are your plans for each migrant wave?

For example, I usually put my first 2 waves (the relatively small ones) towards specialty crafts (eg masonry/stone detailing/manager/woodcutting).  Then when the 3rd wave comes usually between 25-45 dwarves I put 6 towards furnace operating, 10 towards farming, and then depending on how many more I get i spread them around farming/crafting professions.  Any subsequent migrant waves go into the military with exceptions made for usefully skilled dwarves.  The only time I find myself getting overwhelmed is when a certain mountainhome decides to unload 10-20 kids per a migrant wave, this can force my focus purely on farming for a couple migrant waves.

[Sutremaine]

The first couple of dozen migrants do hauling for a while. I bring skilled dwarves and usually try to get their skills built up, and at the start there isn't any need to stockpile anything but food. So there's a lot of stuff that needs tidying up, because the workshops will start getting cluttered sooner or later. There's also stone hauling. That doesn't get done at all for pretty much the first year.

Your sarcasm is duly noted. However, the difficulty is in relegating construction work to your 20 new citizens, as well as balancing other jobs so no other branch of industry gets ignored. Then you have to equip, clothe, feed, and provide quarters for these newcomers while trying to keep them busy in order to stave off excessive party-throwing.

If they're not providing equipment, clothing, food, or living quarters, then what are you doing to try and keep them busy?

Don't set meeting areas from furniture, use meeting zones instead. No more parties, ever.

[vadia]

I figure out how they are(n't) useful -- let them do what's useful at the time and draft the rest. 
During their training breaks I have them do random usefullish jobs (carve rocks/bones, butcher/tan, fish [in the pond without any fish] etc.,)

[wuphonsreach]

Well, my plan of attack as soon as any migrant wave shows up is to pause the game and fire up Dwarf Therapist.  It has a nifty feature that lets you sort by migration wave, which puts all the midgets migrants at the bottom of the list.  And you can do this as soon as the first one hits the map edge rather then waiting for all of them to appear.

- Anyone with fishing labors gets them turned off.

- Anyone with wood cutting or hunting or mining has shown up with a weapon and I don't turn those off until they get close to or inside the fort.  Don't disable those 3 labors until the dwarf is on the map or within the fort, or they'll drop their weapon out in the invisible no-man's land of the map edge.

- Anyone who has a skill, in a skill-based industry that I care about, who is only dabbling when I already have a master/legendary dwarf, gets that skill turned off.  This is engravers, leatherworkers, clothiers, weapon/armor smiths, masons, mechanics, cooks, brewers, planters.  Unless I'm in a period where I need more bodies for a profession and don't care about skill level.

- I look for dwarves that have very long lists of skills.  Such as 15-25 different skills, all at low levels.  Those get investigated a bit more closely for signs of vampirism.

Once they get inside, they don't do much except haul for a while, until I need to expand an industry or setup a permanent military squad.  Most of them get all the junk skills turned on such as milling, plant processing, spinning, weaving, wood burning, lye making, in the hopes that they will eventually become useful members of society.

[vadia]

I just noticed a lot of relations in my dwarves.  Maybe the cousins are the migrants.