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[Qloos]

Worse than invaders!  Atleast invaders go away eventually and take all their stuff, instead of littering my pretty map.

I had started a fortress, saved, changed the max pop in the init to 6 and came back.  But migrants still showed up.  What gives?

[Malicus]

The max pop has a minimum, though I don't remember what it is.  20 or something like that?  If it's set below the minimum, it has no effect, and even if it's set somewhere valid, it's a soft cap, so it just prevents new migrants if it's over the cap already.

[kalida99]

It's wierd, sometimes when you set the Max-Pop low some migrants still come. There's only one way i can think of fixing it, but you would have to give up the dwarf caravan...

[Albedo]

Read wiki "population cap"

[Qloos]

follow up:  I just checked on how many migrants I had actually gotten, for a grand total of *DRUM ROLL* one. . . 

[Sir Pseudonymous]

It would seem that if you change the population cap, even to something lower than your current number, you still get the next wave, but it's smaller than it would otherwise be. It would also appear that setting it just a few higher than your current population also reduces the number in the next wave, so they go over the cap, but not by too many. There also doesn't seem to be a lower limit on the cap; I've been setting the cap to 10 to work on megaprojects at a reasonablelovably frantic framerate, and end up with an initial wave of three or four.

[ItchyBeard]

These forums would be more useful if people didn't repeat theories as fact.

The following is known:

• You're meant to set POPULATON_CAP to 0 if you don't want migrants.
• You may still get some. This is a bug.

There is no evidence of a soft cap. People just get upset when they still get some migrants and start making stuff up. To my knowledge, nobody has done any proper (controlled/repeatable) testing.

One theory is that the pop cap uses census data returned by traders (so if you never have traders it will never update properly). I don't think anybody has tested this either.

Another theory is that migrant waves have a travel time from your capital, and that waves which have been generated and are en route will still arrive, even if you've lowered the cap (personally I think this is wrong - you still get migrants with a pop cap of less than 7 in a new game where you would assume no migrant waves have been generated yet).

From personal experience, if you set the cap to 0 before starting a game you will still get some migrants, but nowhere near as many as you should get (I get the occasional wave of 1 migrant who promptly gets processed by my Welcoming Machine).

There are a lot of bug reports regarding POPULATION_CAP in the bugs forum as it is not working as intended. I'd suggest reading all of the bug threads (search for POPULATION_CAP) for useful insight. Some random comments from Toady from various threads:

As I said in the other thread, I'm going to need a save to fix this.  It's not supposed to push you over unless you have noble immigrants -- nobles and their families come regardless of the popcap. If you are getting waves of regular immigrants that push you over the cap something is broken, and it's something that I can't reproduce.

I'm never able to reproduce these pop cap problems.  I might have a chance if I've got a save and your init file.  The caps seem to check pop correctly for me.