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[Baro]

We've all heard of locking them away or flooding them to death, but what about a way to deal with immigrants that's actually helpful??

What I do is make sure I always have a good mix of spare weapons on hand.  I usually always play on temperate maps with hordes of elephants.

So, just turn unwanted pop into hunters.  They go off and grab a crossbow or an axe or what ever you want to give them, and get killed.

How is this helpfull?  Well, every now and then one of those poor fools you sent off actually slays an elephant and gets some huge skill boosts.  I've had an immigrant become a competent marksdwarf without me paying attention.

So, 90% of them are killed, and the ones that arn't become quite valuable.  And it adds a little role-play to your immigration policy.  Only those strong enough to slay an elephant may enter the fortress!!

[UncleSporky]

The problem with that is when your dwarves run out to harvest their bodies and loot and get flattened.

While I do make some of my migrants into hunters for the hell of it, I usually turn them all into stone haulers/detailers for the few months they're with me until they get tired.  Then they go sleep in the mass bedroom that is coincidentally right next to the farms.  They also never wake up.  Coincidentally.

[Solara]

Only problem with this strategy is when the immigrants piss off the whole herd and get chased right up to the front door of the fortrss...

[Bobberroo]

quote:Originally posted by Solara:
<STRONG>Only problem with this strategy is when the immigrants piss off the whole herd and get chased right up to the front door of the fortrss...</STRONG>

Ah, but then you fill that area with traps and presto! Elephants for the whole family.

[Solara]

quote:Originally posted by Bobberroo:
<STRONG>

Ah, but then you fill that area with traps and presto! Elephants for the whole family.</STRONG>

Sure, it sounds simple, but in actual practice things like this tend to go disastrously wrong.

Oh, and also, if I ever did this:

quote:So, 90% of them are killed, and the ones that arn't become quite valuable. And it adds a little role-play to your immigration policy. Only those strong enough to slay an elephant may enter the fortress!!

Screw the crossbows! Only those strong enough to slay an elephant with their bare hands may enter the fortress.  

IMHO the flash flood is still the best way to go, though. At least your dwarves can safely collect all their nice gear after the bodies rot away.

[Garthor]

Me?  I don't get rid of immigrants.  I consider it a challenge to house 110 dwarves in my fortress.

[Arcanum]

Do the stinkers ever stop coming?  I got up to around 80-100, was doing ok (a few food problems, but nothing serious), and then a cat flooded my fortress...

[UncleSporky]

I have found that the best way to avoid immigrants altogether (if you can make do with 8 dwarves) is to build your trade depot within a floodable room before they arrive in your first fall.  Kill them once a year and nobody else will ever come to your fortress.  Also, you can stop killing them at any time once you feel you're ready for immigrants.

[Zereth]

Another problem with sending immigrants out to hunt is your dwarves trying to get the stuff they drop when they die.

[gimlet]

There should be a hunt naked option     I'm gonna wrestle this elephant and stick my thumb up his butt - that should piss him off!

[Aquillion]

I never had such a big problem with immigrants unless I'm unlucky enough to have them arrive during some other disaster.  All you have to do is mark about a hundred rooms for digging out near the beginning of the game, set dwarfs on repeat-building beds and doors forever, and constantly expand your farm.

Remember when setting up your farm at the end of each winter that it is extremely easy to dig out a little more and make your muddy area bigger, but extremely hard to enlarge it during the rest of the year.  Make it as big as you can possibly imagine yourself needing, then double that size, and increase it by a sizable amount over that every year.  If, at any time, you notice that your entire field is getting planted, double it in size the next winter.  Set your farming dwarves to do nothing but farming during any season but winter; if they're ever idle, you need a larger farm.  If they're never idle, you need more farmers.  Assign a fixed percentage of new dwarves who arrive to farming, and never, ever, allow a new wave of immigrants to enter without setting at least this percentage of them to full-time farmers.  And so on.  You can never, ever have enough food.  If you are doing it right, you will need at least one dwarf and a workshop devoted entirely to spitting out barrels to support this; your food supplies should be going up madly during any season but the winter, and should be increasing overall year-to-year almost as fast.

You will probably want to give your farmers other tasks during the winter, of course, but don't forget to switch them back later.

Oh, and one other thing.  Your dining room.  It's actually one of the easiest places to screw up, which is a shame because it's actually very easy to handle.  Just make it large.  Bigness will increase its value and let you add more table-and-chair pairs (only one chair to a table!)  You should detail it eventually, too.  Dwarves visit the dining room regularly, so a little bit invested there can buy you a lot more goodwill than effort wasted somewhere else.

Wells are one other place that tend to get overwhelmed.  As your fortress gets larger, you'll need wells everywhere...  don't forget to put traps around all of them to catch anything that crawls out.

[JT]

I remember Toady mentioning at some point that fortresses that stockpiled food in an earlier version were greeted by interesting houseguests... and I don't mean vermin. =)

Maybe it was a Req or something.  Point is, I recall reading somewhere that eventually, or even currently, it can be a bad idea to have too too much food.