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[someone12345]

Nearly fifty useless immigrants, mostly peasants, children, and rangers have arrived at my fort. What do I do with them? Lower a bridge on top of them? It will be hard to deal with so many useless idiots in the second spring of my current fort. This raises the population to almost seigeable numbers, and a second year seige will probably kill my fort. What do I do?

edit: changed wording

[AutomataKittay]

change the /data/init/d_init.txt POPULATION_CAP to 50 before starting game up and wait for caravan trade and leave off the map. That should tell the mountainhome to stop sending so many people.

But if you don't wanna change the cap, start cracking out crossbows with wood or bone, and a bunch of bone bolts and quivers. Draft them all into your militia to die gloriously against anything that wanders in. I don't know if being able to siege resets when it goes below 80.

If not that, seal up and don't let anything in and out. Churn out traps and make sure it don't get in the way of caravan wagons' path.

[Garath]

I've never had a siege as the first goblin action. Even if I had invaders off for a megaproject and later turned it on when I had a huge fort and unfathomable wealth, they started a year or two, three of ambushes. And while your migrants eventually want rooms for themself, 10 beds in a dormitory will do for them untill you have time to make those rooms. No need to stop important work just to take care of the new arrivals.

Back on sieges, consider too that there are many, many threads of people wondering if the ambushes will ever change to sieges and they have enough population and wealth, but there are few to no people asking why the sieges came early (except for undead sieges. First time I got one in spring year 2 caught me off guard too. Death and destruction didn't happen because I turtled). I'd honestly be surprised if anyone regularly got a goblin siege before year 4, maybe even later

[sirdave79]

Train all their moodable skills in weapon/armour/black smithing with your magma forges!

[WhimsyWink]

I was muttering to myself the other night because I had population of 20 before the immigration ... 44 came rolling in ... 30 of them children ... and then the adults started having kids LOL

[smjjames]

I just make them all haulers or something. If some have military skills, then you could start the military from them.

What I do is use DwarfTherapist to see if any of them have skills that I need or want, otherwise I just chuck them into the hauler profession.

[someone12345]

I will make half of them mechanics to crank out tons of mechanisms for traps. I will make the other half meatshields soldiers. I do have a legendary weaponsmith (mooded), so they can have nice weapons.

change the /data/init/d_init.txt POPULATION_CAP to 50 before starting game up and wait for caravan trade and leave off the map. That should tell the mountainhome to stop sending so many people.

But if you don't wanna change the cap, start cracking out crossbows with wood or bone, and a bunch of bone bolts and quivers. Draft them all into your militia to die gloriously against anything that wanders in. I don't know if being able to siege resets when it goes below 80.

If not that, seal up and don't let anything in and out. Churn out traps and make sure it don't get in the way of caravan wagons' path.

The liason is not comming for another seven months. Changing the cap will not help right now.

[Cobbler89]

Personally, I always saw massive migrant waves as the answer to the high death tolls involved in goblin ambushes and the like (or in any risky undertaking within the fort, or random !!fun!!, you get the picture). Take some extra care to protect the dwarves with particularly developed skills, try not to let all the soldiers with any actual combat ability get killed, engrave every last inch of the fortress to maximize happiness despite the continual fatalities... I guess my dwarves aren't any better off than any other player's, but by gum, I'm not going to be the one being cruel to them beating up migrants or deliberately desensitizing everyone or turning the fortress into a nightmare of clockwork. They'll just have to deal with life and death as they come, and I'll do what I can to help.

Yeah, I'm a little weird by this forum's standards.

If you want to keep all the "useless idiots" out, you could build a wall along your borders. (Or, you know, seal off your entrance from the inside, if you don't need plants from the surface or anything.) They'd all be slaughtered if the goblins come, which I guess would give the goblins something to do with all your real citizens buried out of reach.

[mek42]

Use burrow for two forts.  One for the skilled and the other for the unskilled.