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[Rollory]

I've seen this mentioned before, but it just happened to me - about 200 animals, not a single foal or kitten or puppy.  Going to save and make a backup if that's of any use.

[GrimmSweeper]

!

So how'd you manage 200 animals in the first place? They just migrated?

[Rollory]

Started with 3 horses, 3 dogs, 3 cats.  8th year of this game.  Didn't butcher any horses at all until this past winter, didn't have any fighting for the first 3-4 years.

[Aquillion]

So what you're saying is that they just stopped breeding?  That's not precisely a bug, more of a known limitation.  There is an arbitrary hard cap on the number of creatures in your fortress, above which they will not breed.

[Rollory]

Yep, you're right.  I just started getting kittens again.

[dav]

It would be nice to be able to declare upper limits either for all animals, or for groups of animals.  If your computer's faster or you love animals more, you can declare limits of 300 or 400 or 1000 animals, or only 20 cats, or whatever.  It would be a handy raw/init file.  Or birth rate could drop closer to replacement rate, or something.

[Rollory]

Actually there is one potential problem with a hard cap.  What if, once you fall back below the cap, some animals breed more than others?  You could end up with your cat population squeezing the dogs and horses down to fractions of what you want them as.

Of course you could go around butchering kittens.  

Seems to me there should be a better way.

[Aquillion]

One logical solution would be to make the hard caps different for each type of creature based on usefulness, e.g. cats stop breeding once you hit a total of 600 creatures, but horses don't stop until you hit 700, and dogs don't stop until 800.  I don't know what the real caps are, so those numbers are totally meaningless, but you get the idea.