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[Bogotyr]

So I am not getting any migrants at the moment so I am trying to grow my population the old fashioned way. I have 5 married couples in my fort, but they don't seem to be getting very busy.  Does anyone know the exact mechanics of what causes pregnancy?  I have plenty of food and drinks, little stress, a light workload, the married women are kept from danger, and they all seem pretty happy.  Do I have to make sure that the married couples idle together? Socialize together? Sleep at the same time? Is it really just spores and there is nothing I can do? I have a 1 year old and 2 four year olds and some older kids.  So some births are happening, but it's not the one baby per couple per year that is rumored. 

[orius]

Take them off their jobs and military duty and burrow them all together where they can get busy from being bored.  Just make sure it's stocked with food and booze.

[Moeteru]

Just to check, you aren't currently above the limits you've set in d_init.txt are you?
Specifically there are limits on both the total number of children and the ratio of N_children / N_adults. The strict population cap also prevents new pregnancies.
Failing that my advice is the same as orius. Make sure the couples have plenty of free time.

[PatrikLundell]

Same advice as above:
- I make nuptial encouragement suites out of an overlapping bedroom of two beds with two double tile food stockpiles (with barrels!) one for booze and one for roasts. Once the stockpiles are stocked (with one empty barrel and one being filled) the two subjects are goaded into their bedrooms using a burrow for just the two of them and set up a tavern zone associated to the general tavern over the room. Once they FINALLY get inside I disable the tavern and wait for everyone else to leave, after which I lock the door and enable the tavern again. This gets them socializing, which is great for, well, socializing, and eventually marriage (assuming they're compatible). They may have to be let out if they run out of booze or food. Once the marriage announcement appears, I remove the tavern zone and wait, using DFHackery to check when the female falls pregnant, which happens after the two have spent time in adjacent tiles and then one of them moved, but not every time. If you're not using DFHack I'd probably just leave them to their own devices for two weeks or so to make reasonably sure they've consummated their marriage. Sleeping beside each other does not result in pregnancy as far as I've seen, but I think I've observed a case where the female got impregnated while the male was asleep, but not the reverse.
- Once the dorfs aren't doing their duty to proliferate properly, it's time to draw them back into their (now common) bedroom by adding them to the burrow (unfortunately there's no way to enable/disable burrows with dorfs still assigned to them currently) and pull them back into the burrow, with the same hassles as the first time. I use a tavern zone to give them another reason to go to their room beyond eat/drink/sleep, but once they're safely in there (they can escape, which is annoying), and everyone else have been kicked out the tavern zone is disabled so they don't have anything to do but to eat/drink/sleep/procreate, which typically doesn't take long. Kicking others out probably isn't necessary, nor is locking the doors (apart from the escape stupidity), but, well, modern sensibilities consider it rude to have others present when procreational activities are ongoing (which isn't reflected either in the game, nor, to some extent, historical practices).

Note that this is based on 0.47.04 and earlier, but I don't think this logic has changed beyond dorfs having become a little better at getting hitched on their own. However, I haven't heard any indication that they're more active at procreating ("better", assuming you want more dwarflets, rather than consider them to be a nuisance).

[orius]

I wouldn't know that well, I've never really tried forcing dorfs to get together.  I've had married dorfs show up at my forts that would pop out kids on a regular basis, but I've been turning the child cap really low to 10 kids/5% maximum too.  Kids generally just suck up booze and food without doing anything useful, so I wanted to minimize them for FPS reasons.  The current version has better FPS performance it seems, so I could dial that back a bit.  I've also been keeping the population cap low, only 10-15 dwarves above my current, and that seems to have been blocking the big migration waves that are half kids.  I'm not entirely sure though because I've been testing different game versions over the last few months.  I might want more kids in the fort so that they do consume the food and booze since that gets too easily overproduced too.  As for dorfs getting hitched, the dorfs do occasionally socialize, but it's low priority for me since it's not actual work. 

[Bogotyr]

Thanks for the help all.  I was aware that getting dwarves to marry was a chore and have a lovemaking suite set up for this purpose.  I actually just use two bedrooms each with their own door and a common hallway with a third set of doors.  I assign one bedroom to each dwarf in the couple and lock them in when they come to sleep (have to unassign any bedrooms anywhere else). Sometimes the simple act of assigning the bedroom will make them move some of their stuff there even if they aren't sleepy.  Once both are locked in their beds, I lock the door to the common hallway, unlock the bedrooms, and designate a tavern (food and drinks have already been stored in the hallway.  Then I just wait for them to get married.  If after becoming lovers they don't marry after a few months I assume that at least one of them is not the marrying type and let them out.  So far 5 couples have gotten married this way 

However, I didn't realize that even after getting married dwarves are still bad at finding their spouses and making time for their family duties.  I have started calling them back into the lovemaking suite and so far a baby has resulted.  The same process for calling them into the suite still works when they are married.  I just assign both of the bedrooms in the suite to the couple.  Once one of them comes and gets locked in, the other will choose the other bedroom when he or she gets sleepy.