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[Grimmash]

I am wondering what would happen if I reduce the population cap during an ongoing fortress game.  I have about 150 dwarves, and my thought is to reduce the cap to roughly 100, and then use missions to send groups out to colonized the holdings as I take them.

Has anyone tried this?  Does it work?  Will it just crash my game?

Thanks!

[delphonso]

Haven't tried this specifically - however if you drop the pop cap below your current population, the game will just patiently wait until it drops below the pop cap before introducing new dwarves.

Same works for visitors - imagine your tavern has 30 useless ingrates. If you drop the visitor cap to 10, those visitors will drink your booze and distract your workers until they choose to leave, then no more will show up at least until there are only 9 left in the tavern.

That said - if you're sending them off on missions, and you want/expect them to return - they won't. They'll wait outside the edge of your map until the population is below 100. I also don't think you'll be able to request anyone until your population lowers below 100.

[Sarmatian123]

Don't you need total population at 140 citizens to maintain your metropolis status?

[trib]

I've changed the pop cap a lot during a fortress and it doesn't affect anything except migrants/births if you change the hard cap. Never noticed any bugs or crashes from it.

[Grimmash]

Don't you need total population at 140 citizens to maintain your metropolis status?

I am not terribly concerned about that status.  I already have a queen living in my fort, and when I send raids out our pop drops below 140.  It doesn't seem to matter.  Also, I mostly just don't care and would be fine if the monarch decided to leave.

[Saiko Kila]

I change the caps all the time and have no problems (it should really be configurable for the save or fortress). The monarch won't leave. It just affects new migrants and conceptions. Oh, and there's no cap for naturalised citizens, so you can still get new citizens this way in current version.

[Leonidas]

Same works for visitors - imagine your tavern has 30 useless ingrates. If you drop the visitor cap to 10, those visitors will drink your booze and distract your workers until they choose to leave, then no more will show up at least until there are only 9 left in the tavern.

That's not how it worked for me, just a few versions ago. When I dropped my visitor cap, the excess visitors left immediately. I remember it because they carried off several books, and half of them were killed by hostile wildlife.

[delphonso]

Could be the case, for sure. I permanently have a visitor cap of 10 and have had that for quite some time, so the details might be incorrect.

In either case, I'm pretty confident that won't happen to the dwarves in your fort, should you lower the cap.

[PatrikLundell]

I've reduced the visitor cap on a number of occasions, and visitors just left at the normal rate, with no new visitors arriving until the number of visitors was below the new cap. There certainly wasn't any sudden mass departure (and visitors steal books all the time, but provided you've got writing material at hand they probably write more books than they take).