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[Dimglow]

Is there any way to limit the number of immigrants?
I would be very happy to receive 3-7 immigrants per wave.
Instead I tend to see immigrants like this:
Game begins
4
4
Economy kicks in at this point
17
35
29
24
etc
And at this point all hell breaks loose as whiny nobles and other annoyances take over and ruin my gameplay.
I don't understand how it can be expected that a player have enough infrastructure to support 100+ dwarves within 2 years time. Feeding, clothing, equipping, training and otherwise managing them becomes impossible. By the time I break 100 population I've only seen 3 dwarven caravans and two human ones. How in the world can I be expected to have large stocks of platinum to appease a PMSing mayor?

Also while we're on the subject is there any way to remove children from immigrant waves? I can't stand the children mechanic and want no part of it until an apprentice system or some other caveat is added. Feeding a kid for umpteen years to become a talentless peasant is not fun. I have them set to 0% in the init file but that won't stop immigrant children.

Ideally I'd like to limit myself to 3-7 immigrants per wave, with hopefully decent skills. So any help on how I can change such variables would be appreciated.

[Psieye]

Children: just set them to grow up to adulthood at age 3 or something. Then at least you'll have peasants instead of children when they arrive young.

If you want to have slow immigrants, you'll need to constantly change your init settings to slowly increase your population cap. Though personally, I don't understand why supporting lots of immigrants is troubling. FPS reasons for not wanting immigrants is very understandable, but just keeping them alive? The extra micromanagement I can understand I guess, but with Dwarf Therapist a lot of the management becomes easier. As for the other stuff:

1) Food and booze should be overflowing if you have proper farms and 1~2 skilled farmers.

2) Clothing is not a concern until about 3 years later when the outfits they came in start getting tattered. Currently there's a bug that prevents dwarves from putting on new clothes when they need replacements anyway.

3) Equipment - we're ore rich and magma guaranteed in DF2010. If you've got a lot of dwarves around, it's not hard to churn out some solid equipment unless you don't have either steel or bronze on site. Magma forges can be up within 1 season after breaching all 3 caverns.

4) Training - do they all need training? What do you want of them? A large number of dwarves are destined to be grunts that do a lot of hauling and menial tasks (like making booze).

5) Mandates - do you really need to obey them? If you avoid having a justice system then it's irrelevant. If you want a justice system, then look at the noble's preferences and see what's likely to come up in mandates. Besides, some mandates are impossible to fulfill (SLADE) so you need an Accident chamber anyway in case of troublesome nobles.

[zmc]

Besides, some mandates are impossible to fulfill (SLADE) so you need an Accident chamber anyway in case of troublesome nobles.

"Accident chamber"?! Lawl! Is there a standardized design for this... type of room? 

[Mormoran]

you need an Accident chamber anyway in case of troublesome nobles.

I'm listening, tell us more about this convenient topic... 

[slink]

The easiest one is a small room with a lever in the middle.  I use a 5x5, but I suppose a 3x3 would be sufficient.  Arrange a water inlet and a water outlet, controlled by one or more levers outside the small room.  You might want to protect the outlet with a wall grate so that items don't wash out when you drain the room.  Put a door on the room so that you can lock someone inside.

Step 1.  Assign the lever inside the room to the person whom you intend to have an accident.
Step 2.  Add the lever pulling task to the lever.
Step 3.  While the person is pulling the lever, lock the door.
Step 4.  Get someone to pull the lever(s) that fills the room with water.
Step 5.  Wait until the person inside the room drowns.
Step 6.  Get someone to pull the lever(s) that drains the water out of the room.
Step 7.  Clean up the mess and bury the corpse.

[Psieye]

Besides, some mandates are impossible to fulfill (SLADE) so you need an Accident chamber anyway in case of troublesome nobles.

"Accident chamber"?! Lawl! Is there a standardized design for this... type of room? 

Here's 11 ideas.

[Dimglow]

Children: just set them to grow up to adulthood at age 3 or something. Then at least you'll have peasants instead of children when they arrive young.

If you want to have slow immigrants, you'll need to constantly change your init settings to slowly increase your population cap. Though personally, I don't understand why supporting lots of immigrants is troubling. FPS reasons for not wanting immigrants is very understandable, but just keeping them alive? The extra micromanagement I can understand I guess, but with Dwarf Therapist a lot of the management becomes easier. As for the other stuff:

It isn't an fps issue. First off, as far as I know there is still a very big bug in that underground caverns and civilizations add to your wealth, which is what causes these ridiculous immigration waves.
Let's look at my last fort. I embarked on a cold climate, low vegetation, low trees wasteland with a river running through it. So I am in an area where I am facing limited resources, chosen for that reason. Wood in particular is very limited, despite embarking with a stockpile I knew I'd need to trade to fill my needs just to make enough beds for my dwarves. The amount of wood I can trade for is rather limited, and is far outpaced by 100+ immigrants in a year. I can't even make bedrooms for my dwarves, yet I am still drawing 25 or so a season?

1) Food and booze should be overflowing if you have proper farms and 1~2 skilled farmers.

Sure, but with my water source frozen half the year, minimal native plant life to harvest, and no aquifer it is difficult to get up a tremendous amount of farming easily. When everything freezes over and you get a wave of immigrants that more than doubles your population it can be very taxing on the resources set aside for the season.

3) Equipment - we're ore rich and magma guaranteed in DF2010. If you've got a lot of dwarves around, it's not hard to churn out some solid equipment unless you don't have either steel or bronze on site. Magma forges can be up within 1 season after breaching all 3 caverns.

Making steel or even leather armor for the 15-20 dwarves that become military out of a 30+ wave can take an armorsmith, and a few smelters much longer than one season to accomplish. When another wave arrives before the first is even equipped it starts getting overwhelming.

4) Training - do they all need training? What do you want of them? A large number of dwarves are destined to be grunts that do a lot of hauling and menial tasks (like making booze).

What do I want of them? I don't know, maybe to be dabbling or competent in at least one or two combat skills before I end up being hit with 3 raiding parties of goblins in one raid before my second year ends because my population is almost 100?

Is there no way to adjust immigration waves other than tinkering with population cap every time? If not then that is the method I will follow.

[Psieye]

See that's essential information you skipped in your opening post: that you're embarking in a barren location where resources are scarce. Now your desire to limit immigrants makes sense. I could argue that if you build 70 smelters and get most of your recruits to also smelt and possibly even also forge their own equipment, then it could be manageable but it's a logistics and player control nightmare by that point. Same with farming - it's theoretically possible to flood a huge area on first thaw of embark and get the mud ready in time (seeds and manpower are more straightforward) but having to multitask this with large-scale everything else is taxing yes.

[mwanafalsafa]

I wouldn't mind limiting the size of immigration waves myself. But I'm not sure if lowering and then periodically raising the population cap in the init file will work.

As I understand it the game will stop sending immigrants once the cap is exceeded. But it will exceed the cap by the number of immigrants in the wave.

So if you have 30 dwarves with the cap set at 40, you could still get a wave of 30 dwarves (but no more after that unless you raise the cap).