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[DTF]

I tend to find very large migration waves obnoxious as well.

Same here. It's the problem of migrants coming with their entire family and the family's friends and the family friends' pets and the family friends pets' hairdressers.
In earlier versions you maybe got a married couple and that was that.

You also kind of lose the impression of progress if your fort is at 70 pop after year 1. It's like starting out with a small inn on some uninhabitated land and ending up with Las Vegas 12 months later.

[krenshala]

Those extra large waves are annoying, but when you are expecting to be attacked by zombies soon, they can be useful.  In my last fortress I knew I was going to get ambushed by a necro shortly, and had a whoppin' 16 dwarves (6 already drafted and training) when I got my second migrant wave:

    A migrant has arrived.

Um ... more would be useful now.

On the bright side, it was an adult (that was drafted) and not a child.

[gestahl]

Back when historics first started showing up as migrants. Usually went wave1)~7 wave2)~7...wave3)75+, over 50% children

[Yee]

Only one bad wave? After several waves, my fortress had a population of 100 dwarves and 50% of them were children. Maybe there was a dwarven school nearby and they confused my fortress with the local playground.

[☼!!Troll Fur Sock!!☼]

You mean it is possible to confuse a large, burned are that once was full of trees, with rotting corpses everywhere, magma leaking from walls, with long, covered in blood spikes near the entrance an burning elephants engraved on main gate... with a playground?
Dwarven children surely are badass.

[Shoep]

The only thing i don't like about migrant waves, is that i personally check every single one of them for indicators of being a vampire..

I love the big waves, though. In my current fort i had so many migrants that i drafted them all into my military. I have a fortress of 200 dwarves now, of which 50 are in my personal army.. They haven't seen much action yet, but i like to think they might save my fortress one day should my traps fail to protect..

[Tirion]

Any wave that arrives far from my fort's gates, and is massacred by hostiles with no chance of retrieving the bodies safely before ghosts ensue. Slabbing a big migrant wave is quite a task.
Bonus point if necromancers lurk on the map.

[MasterShizzle]

Big migrant waves for me = cheap labor. Every time I get a wave of 20 or more I don't even bother to look at it. Go to Dwarf Therapist, sort by migrant wave, highlight the whole wave, then right-click and change everyone into a Peon.

Once that's done I can do a quick scan to see if anyone has useful skills. Usually not, after wave 3 or so. Even if I get someone like a High Master Clothier, when my own clothier is only Master, I'll still prefer to Peon-ize them rather than displace a dwarf.

Once they arrive, though, they usually don't have much to do. I make my forts with one (MAYBE two) dwarves in each skilled labor, then everyone else is in the peasantry. To keep the idlers down with Migrant waves I just have the miners dig out a couple of floors, gulag-style. Then the peasants quantum-stockpile the stone.

[Babylon]

I only get large waves the first year.  After that they die down to 5 or 6 dwarves per wave.  St that point I could usually really use some reinforcements.

[Naryar]

Unlike in 0.31. where migrant quality was pretty bad, I really like what I'm getting in 0.34.

Sure I still get the useless soap makers or cheese makers or fish dissectors or some shit but at least they can be used as haulers, military, and most of the time they have one or several useful skills.

also I never get large migration waves in the first year, I usually get them in the second year.

[jellyman]

You can get migrants from previous fortresses if you abandon and start new in the same world.  If you have a string of fortresses that all crumble with tantrum spirals then you start getting migrant waves with dwarves trained to high level in your favourite skills that go insane from grief the moment they step in your fortress.  Or in one case I had one catch a strange mood and butcher one of my existing dwarves.