Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Captacha]

Hello DF players. I'm trying to deal with migrants lately but I have been unsuccessful as of yet. I had the idea to stop new migrants from coming into my fort using a dwarven atom smasher outside my fort, but that is... less than ideal. It generates a bunch of ghosts which scare my dwarves,and I can't make enough slabs to stop them from coming. Also, once I'm ready to start letting migrant waves in, they tend to be 40+ in size, which is far too much for me to handle. I have one more question besides how to solve this problem, do migrant waves increase based on the size of your fort/amount of dwarves, or is it always fairly random?

Thanks

[JTTCOTE1]

The first two have a fixed range of numbers. After that, it depends on your fortress wealth as reported by the last caravan. Therefore, if you kill off every dwarf caravan (e.g. atom smasher on the way OUT of the fort after you trade) then you won't get migrants in huge waves.


Or, set the pop cap.

[hiroshi42]

The Immigration:Migrant wave size page might help.  In short migrants are determined by the created wealth of the fortress as reported by the last dwarven caravan to leave the fort alive unless there are a lot of dead things in the units list. 
One thing to keep in mind is that there is a population_cap in the d_init file.  It can be found near the child_cap which can prevent new pregnancies in dwarves.  The pop cap requires either the liason or caravan (don't remember which) to successfully leave the map for it to be updated unless you use the dfhack utility to manually make the update.

[weenog]

I tried just building a wall to seal the fortress as soon as my Original Seven were inside, and putting a huge corpse stockpile outside so each migrant wave could stockpile the last one that died of starvation/thirst/crazy.  Eventually one of the ghosts I got was the murdery type, and it wiped out my fortress, wall be damned.  I think the same approach I tried before could still work, but with two small adjustments.  If I leave carpenter and mason workshops outside the wall, as well as tools for mining a quarry and chopping trees, I could have migrants make coffins for previous migrants, and avoid the ghost problem.

[Larix]

Just to reinforce what hiroshi42 said, there's a Population_cap setting in the file d_init. Setting that to something less than 200 regulates migration somewhat, and causes migration to eventually stop entirely if your current population is clearly above the cap. This number is what the game assumes you _want_ to have in your fortress, so if you're utterly unwilling to have that many, the most obvious way should be to change that number to what you want instead of murdering the immigrants the game mistakenly assumes you're asking for.

I'd really prefer it if wasting immigrants was a method to deliberately invite fun - by the dwarfs labelling you traitors and going to war with you (maybe even including an automatic loyalty cascade); but this would probably be a bit harsh unless the population cap could be set inside the game, e.g. during the outpost liaison negotiations.

[Victor6]

Personally, I'd recommend you keep killing them. Migrants are pretty dumb, but once you've slaughtered a thousand or so they eventually give up.
Build additional craftsdwarf's workshops and train the stonecrafters via the memorial slabs. A decent mason and stonecrafter will easily outpace the rate of migrant slaughter.
Coffins are easier if you don't Atom smash the migrants (drowning or starvation are good alternatives) - There's always free space in old mine tunnels you can reuse as a migrant tomb. For maximum efficiency have the migrants build their own coffins.

Children can be trickier to kill, but I'd recommend just maiming them so your doctors have something to practice on.

[Garath]

note that the idea of the game is that if one fort is done, you start a new one in the same world. Right now you're driving your civilization towards extinction, since migrants are historical figures nowadays. With the new update history is (supposed to be) going to progress during your game, which means killing 30 migrants 3x per year might cause some real trouble if you're at war with humans for example

ofcourse, you could always just make a new world for each fort, or switch home civilization.

[Victor6]

At the rate sentients breed I doubt 90 deaths a year is going to kill a civ. If it does then sieges are going to be catastrophic for the attackers and the game will get very boring, very fast, as you wipe out all your neighbors.

Potentially you'd end up creating slaughterhouse forts in order to weaken the dwarf civs and prolong the world.

[Raphite1]

An individual dwarf can produce more resources than it consumes, so there should be no such thing as "too many migrants" on a map that isn't severely limited in natural resources. Just set them farming, fishing, training, etc.

[crossmr]

I started a new fort. I didn't really do anything to generate wealth. I started a small plump helmet farm, mined out some bedrooms (bed and door each), and made a dining room with a couple tables and chairs, and produced about 20 mugs just incase I really wanted to buy something from a caravan. First dwarf caravan came and went, my fourth wave was like 37 migrants. What a pain. I think it was because as I was mining in my starting level, I exposed a couple pieces of platinum. Didn't do anything with them, but they end up showing up in a hallway.. at least I guess. I didn't really make anything else.
No engraving, nothing like that.

[enizer]

i like setting the population cap when i don't want more migrants, but yeah..
i hate getting only like 3 migrants per season, but on the other hand,
those 40+ migrant waves, have NEVER been welcome, in ANY fort

worst i had was when i had a fort of around 35, and then had a migrant wave of 57 dwarves
"ok.. apparently the last caravan brought word that we struck gold, this is true, but what the?
 i hope you guys like camping because we were not expecting even a third of this"