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[cyks]

The title is from the wiki.

I have 10 babies in my current fortress and that is much more than I usually have.

What happened?  I have had bigger and richer forts before.  Do I just have more women?

[Grendus]

Not sure if it's related, but sometimes I'll start a fort and by the time the first trade caravan shows up I have a whole base carved out and six bins of mid to high grade stone crafts to trade away. Other times I can't get any of my dwarves to do anything but haul crap around. I think it's just the randomly generated dwarf personalities acting up, maybe you just got a fortress full of slutty dwarves? Or I suppose the ale could just be really strong...

[inaluct]

It depends on how fast your dwarfs form relationships. If you have them crowded together more, you'll get more relationships faster. If you keep them isolated, you'll have relatively few relationships. A good way to keep them apart is to build a massive world-tower with many isolated meeting rooms all over the place.

The world tower idea is always great, not just in this case. :I

[cyks]

World tower?

[inaluct]

A tower big enough to contain the world. Well, almost. Sort of.

Maybe it could contain a very small world. A 90 z-level one covering an embark map.

[Albedo]

There are enough personality variables and inter-workings that no fortress is "average", not even with 200 dwarfs.  Something will be off somewhere.

[eerr]

how long do you keep them idle?

idle dwarves start to fool around.

[cyks]

I have been trying to keep them efficient in terms of maintaining 0 idle (all peasants have multiple jobs).  It sounds like it is the meeting spot factor.  I have had bigger and more numerous meeting spots in all of my other forts at this point, so I guess I am just concentrating them like a comment said earlier.  Although I have had less parties and the few that I had were broken up by freeing the meeting hall.  I am also caging every unused newborn animal leaving MUCH more room for dwarfs to meet.

Update: Two more babies have been born.

[cyks]

They just keep pumping them out, but they are maintaining 10 total babies at a time.  older babies upgrading to child is balancing it out it seems.  Any good ideas how I can increase/decrease this?

Edit: I don't want my military carrying around babies!

[Skorpion]

I don't want my military carrying around babies!

Nonsense! They make wonderful shields against arrows!

[Jim Groovester]

I don't want my military carrying around babies!

Nonsense! They make wonderful shields against arrows!

This morbid course of action is quite useful. Who would you rather take a bolt to the heart and lungs, your legendary champion, or the baby that just popped out of her?

She'll always have more.

They just keep pumping them out, but they are maintaining 10 total babies at a time.  older babies upgrading to child is balancing it out it seems.  Any good ideas how I can increase/decrease this?

Hmm. I just noticed you drew a distinction between children and babies. If you have ten babies, you probably have more children. Probably more than you want. You probably have only a few married couples, and they're probably popping out babies at a pretty constant rate, so babies are growing into children at about the same rate that babies are being born. In any case, large amounts of children are annoyingly common.

There is a setting in the init file controlling birthrates. Its default setting is basically no birthrate cap. If you want more children, give your workers more time to idle and fall in love and get married. If you want less, edit the setting. Or kill a few dwarves' spouses.