I finally reached 200 population in my new fortress, and have noticed that it now crashes quite frequently and seemingly at random. I used to have 130+ dwarves and 140+ animals (now down to less than 40 animals after I butchered them all to speed the game back up) and it ran without crashing, so I thought pathfinding wouldn't be a problem for 200 dwarves if I toned down the animals a bit. Right now I barely have 30 animals, and half of them are aging wardogs that should be dying of old age soon.
One thing I thought might be crashing the game is that there's perhaps too many items in my game. I have 35+ dedicated farmers, a quarter of which are either legendary or master, and the rest are at least proficient. This has resulted in a MASSIVE influx of all five crops which are being converted to crafts/cooking items. I also always trade for more items to every caravan that passes by~ I don't think the screen below counts the fairly sizeable pigtail thread/cloth cache I have as plants.
The other thing I thought might be happening is too many jobs are being called for. I have all my dwarves set to harvest, since I can't harvest my plots without them rotting if I only have farmers harvest.
In addition, I never got the bookkeeper until around 195 dwarves (I hate the little bugger) so I've got several hundred unmelted items laying around due to the various sieges I fended off, and probably a thousand dinky little items scattered around the outside of the fort. Stocking the shops I just built might be pushing it to the edge. Plus, the noble spam of 'adjusting prices' has gotten insane.
I'm leaning towards the bookkeeper doing SOMETHING to the game to make it crash, since I was playing fine at 180 dwarves and 4000 food without it crashing once.
Of course, it might be my computer too- right now, I'm playing it on a:
Athlon 64 3200+
1.5 GB RAM
windows XP pro (updated to newest patch)
ATI 9600XT 256 MB (Omega Drivers)
(It's an old setup, but DF only uses ~40-70% of the CPU to run depending on what I'm doing)
Anyway, just giving you a heads up on this.
This probably isn't a priority bug since I doubt anyone gets to 200 dwarves without beating the game first. But, if you want the savegame I can send it to you.
I'm planning to start a new fortress anyway, as my real goal was to see if I could get to 200 dwarves without the fortress imploding on itself. The conclusion? Unexpected TOTAL success, the fortress runs smooth as silk with almost no danger of 'critical mass misery chaining'. (Hell, I can probably push it to 250 or higher even with the bookkeeper and every noble in the game if I can get it to quit crashing on me)