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[Afghani84]

Hi guys,

I'm relatively new to the game, so I'm thinking of capping my population at 100 or so until I feel comfortable to deal with even more lazy alcoholics. I'm not trying to take away the "fun" of the game but it gets overwhelming pretty fast with some migrant waves if you're not familiar with most of the aspects of the game.

The question is whether that would be detrimental for me in the end or not. I've been trying to find information on factors influencing siege sizes. Some threads say that sieges become bigger and more frequent with increasing wealth. Is there a population factor in there as well? So the more dwarves you have, the more goblins/elves/humans will attack? Or maybe a time factor? The longer your fortress stands, the harder the other civilizations try to make your area dwarf-free again?

If the siege size is population-based, the cap would not be detrimental to my capacity to defend the fortress. If wealth is the factor, I should see that I slowly increase the cap as I dig down deeper and find more ores...not that bad either. But if it is based on time, the cap would be really detrimental. I wouldn't get new dwarves while my enemies rise in numbers.

Anyone know what factors come to play here? Maybe something I didn't think of?
Thanks

[Merendel]

As I recall the only hard cutoff where population effects siege is 80 dwarves.  you need to hit (or exceed) that number to get sieges but haveing more will not make a significant impact on the size of sieges.  I tend to cap my fortresses in the 100 to 150 range and have plenty of huge sieges.   They do seem to get biger as my fortress wealth increases but that could just be observer error so take it with a grain of salt.

IMO haveing 100-150 dwarves is not a significant detriment to defending your fortress over say 300 dwarves.  Well trained dwarves tend to rip apart sieges often eating up odds of 10 to 1 without any losses if there are no archers.  Additionaly it is compleatly viable to trap the hell out of your entrance and deal with all sieges that way with little more than a token force of military to mop up small hotspots.   I'm a big fan of a room of zigzaged paths formed by raising bridge walls with only the later half of the path trapped.  the squads of enemies tend to stop once the leader dies to the traps so the extra time lets them all get into the room at which point the entrances seal up, the bridges lower and the blood of armok (magma) fills the room to dispose of the survivors and their equipment composed of inferior materials.

Also consider unless your makeing a truely massive fortress its hard to get more than 30 or so dwarves with full time employment performing repetitive crafts.  30-40 haulers will keep the fortress tidy and those craftsdwarves supplied leaving the rest for military.  You might need more than that for kick starting a mega project in a timely manner but military can make decent short term laborers in a pinch.

[XXSockXX]

AFAIK goblin sieges are wealth based, except that you don't get any before 80 population. They seem to increase for me until a size of about 80 goblins and 20 building destroyers and then seem to stagnate at that level. If their leader comes with a siege and gets killed, they won't bring mounted squads anymore, but will still bring trolls.

Undead sieges are -according the wiki- both wealth and population based. They seem to vary much more however, I've had first sieges with a single corpse at around 100 population and first sieges with 40 corpses and 3 necromancers at 30 population.