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[noodle0117]

I'm thinking of starting a succession game once the new release comes out with the idea that the entire fortress is a giant prison for migrants.

If the only dwarves that are allowed to work were the starting seven, how many migrant prisoners (who can do nothing but sit and be idle) could I realistically support in terms of food, rooms, and booze while also having enough leftover dwarf-labor to dig out the fort, expand, and gather candy/magma?

Has a similar idea ever been launched in the community games before?

If not, would people actually be interested in such a game?

[GavJ]

Probably as many as your computer can simulate without FPS death.

I suggest relying on livestock for as much as possible. Livestock create yarn and food without dwarves doing nearly as much labor as the equivalent amount of plants: shearing and butchering are instantaneous except for leading the animal to the workshop, which could be immediately next to pasture. Booze doesn't matter, since prisoners don't deserve booze only your 7 need enough for themselves, which is trivially easy.

The only real bottleneck is how anal retentive you want to be about delivering food and resources to the prisoners. If they have a common room in the prison you can drop stuff, for instance, then hauling is minimal. If you expect to hand deliver to each cell, then you might have a bottleneck there (either in hauling or building an insane cart system). Similarly for water - common well is easy. Individual cell water supplies is a lot trickier.

If you insist on agriculture or can't find enough secure pastureland, then quarry bushes are the next most efficient food source. They don't cover clothing though.

[noodle0117]

Planning to make it a common jail (prisoners kept in a single giant room rather than individual cells) so that food delivery is easier. Also planning to embark on a frozen biome. Can't remember but do frozen biomes have grass on the surface?

[GavJ]

Glaciers don't. Tundras and mountains can and usually do have some grass. But it tends to be spotty in mountains. Tundras I don't know how fully it covers, because I've never bothered looking under the snow with 'K'  Just try an embark and look at tiles and see about what % coverage you see.

You might need to give a llama something like a 7x7 instead of 4x4 or something in a tundra, depending.  Mountains can be trickier for pastures since they don't span z levels.

Undergroudn grazing (natural or artificially dug) is always an option too. Still much less work than farming.



So yeah, big pasture area, butchers and stuff in the middle. And a hole right there dropping straight down to the prison common room. Maybe with a bridge airlock if you want to roleplay "stopping prisoners scaling the walls"

[Panando]

If you embark on glacier you eliminate vermin, that has both pros and cons for keeping prisoners (vermin eats food, but starving dwarves eat vermin), probably mostly pros.

If caravans are legal, you can bulk-order stuff from the caravans, some things which can be bulk-ordered in absurd quantities include leather and leather products (bags, clothes) and animals (in cages) and meat (in barrels), so you cna get HUGE quantities of leather clothes (except socks) and food, just from ordering it from the mountainhomes. You can get in lesser but still large quantities wood logs and wood products (like barrels), and some other kinds of food like fish and cheese. Plants cannot be bulk ordered (except perhaps from humans if you run fixmerchants), but if you're careful to keep no plants in stocks, caravans will bring at least a dozen stacks of five plants (not that prisoners need booze). All this stuff can be paid for with prepared meals and trap components.

So if you really game the caravans system you can feed and clothe a huge number of dwarves with virtually no production to speak of, just a few steel trap components each year.

I once ran a prison fort. It was pretty fun. When I saw a lot of blinking starving signs, I would have a few pieces of meat dumped into the prison and let the mob of prisoners fight over it. Good times.

[vjmdhzgr]

Starving dwarves don't actually eat vermin they just pretend to hunt them as an excuse to ruin your fortress.

[kingubu]

You can capture vermin and then tame them and give them to the prisoners as pets.

Then when they start starving they'll eat their pets giving them the largest negative thought in the game. 

[Henny]

I might be wrong, but isn't the difficulty of keeping grazing animals on mountains that the grass on the surface doesn't regrow, like, at all?

[Larix]

Yep. Mountains may have starting grass, but it never regrows. Oceans have no grass and no regrowth (but the actual ocean biome is only the part underwater and the narrow strip of beach). All other biomes that i know of will grow new grass on exposed soil, including tundras, badlands and deserts.

For mass production of clothes, plants are the only decent option apart from bulk-imported leather: yarn just can't provide a decent supply, you can only shear adult animals, only once per year each, and each shearing harvest produces a single thread/bolt of cloth. A single farm tile of pig tail can easily generate 15 bolts of cloth per year, about 40 are possible with high skill and rope reeds; two such tiles can produce more cloth per year than a maximum-size herd of sheep.

If you drafted the imprisoned dwarfs to the military, you could issue them all a standard uniform of leather boots (high or low), leather armour and bone greaves/leggings, covering all the required body parts with non-rottable equipment.

With enough skill in the relevant labours, dwarfs can support rather large numbers of dependants; my quasi-hermitish game had a dwarf handle all the needs of herself and five children living with her, i.e. housing, clothing, food and drink. And she started with no skill in any relevant job. With division of labour and skilled workers, much higher ratios should be possible.

I'd recommend disabling artefacts in d_init.txt or severely limiting mining operations to keep the artefact limit low.

[Melting Sky]

You could run a sealed fort with a huge number of "prisoners" that do nothing but eat, sleep and socialize but you will run into problems if you try to actually run this place as a fort. By this I mean trying to dig down to the candy, actually fighting off enemies etc. You will basically be running a zero military or animal only millitary which comes with a lot of limitations. Mechanized defenses will be very important. I guess you could make your 7 guards into marksmen but you could never expose them to any sort of threat such as enemies that can fire back or get to them behind the fortifications since the loss of even a single guard would be catastrophic. For food you would probably want to farm and breed turkeys or some other egg layer. Put prisoners in leather armor that won't wear out to prevent clothing issues.

I think the main problem would be that as a community game it will force an extremely dull and conservative style of play that revolves around insane turtleing and micro-management. The players would have to be of a high skill level and play very conservatively for it not to end on their turn. Each of the 7 guard dwarves would have to spend so much of their time supporting prisoners that there wouldn't be much time to do fun stuff like exploring the deeps, mega projects etc.

[krenshala]

Well, he said migrants would be prisoners.  The starting seven will eventually create at least one mated pair, and thus offspring.  In theory you could get two pairs, which might be enough to form a viable breeding pool (can't brain enough for the math right now, but it might need four pairs for it to work).

[noodle0117]

By this I mean trying to dig down to the candy, actually fighting off enemies etc.

I am noodle, the guy who broke through and demolished the initial wave of hell in a community game without a single military casualty (only the miner died).

Everything else though could be problematic. But that's just more FUN.

[Melting Sky]

By this I mean trying to dig down to the candy, actually fighting off enemies etc.

I am noodle, the guy who broke through and demolished the initial wave of hell in a community game without a single military casualty (only the miner died).

Everything else though could be problematic. But that's just more FUN.

Yes, but try doing that with a single miner that can only work 1/20th of his time because the rest of it is spent hauling food around for prisoners. It's not that HFS can't be defeated without taking losses if you drop the mountain on them etc. but the amount of dwarf power it takes to first dig down to the HFS and then set up the area properly for containing and killing them just won't be there in a set up where your only useable dwarves spend almost all of their time doing maintenance tasks for the prisoners. I think with enough time you could eventually pull it off but we are talking about mega projects that take decades to complete, dozens of community player turns, and you know how community games are. One player rarely finishes the projects of those that came before them. Even with a normal fort where you have 20 or 30 times more spare man dwarf power it is hard for a single player to get larger projects done in a turn.

I actually like the idea of this challenge. It's neat, but I think it might be better as a personal challenge rather than a community game given that a turn of a single year will result in very little getting done beyond the maintenance of the prisoners. I think it will be the hauling that will end up being the greatest challenge in this fort. Everything that can be automated will have to be and the fort's layout will have to be immaculately efficient when it comes to the number of steps taken to haul things to their final destination. It will be a fort that will require a great deal of time and patience in order to get projects done.

[Arcvasti]

I've gotten up to ~120 prisoners supported by the starting 7 when I tried doing something similar. Main problem was accidentally killing them by dropping pancakes[egg biscuits, whatever] on their head. My final design was a 2X1 cell for each prisoner with a grate leading to an artificial river below and a bed. Food was dropped from above onto the water grate when the prisoner was sleeping. I never really figured out how to automate the whole thing and just relied on lots of egg-layers to feed the prisoners. I also included a larger common area for prisoners awaiting individual cells. My eventual goal was to get vampire blood into the water source, as that would make managing the prisoners much easier.

FAKEEDIT: If you're doing a common area and such, then that will be WAY easier. You could probably support a LOT of prisoners. But it wouldn't be a very interesting succession game. Maybe have it so that only MOST and not ALL of the migrants are prisoners? 1-2 "escorts" with each wave of "prisoners"? That way you could have a military/fortress guard and have other projects going as well as doing the whole prison thing.

[Melting Sky]

I'm curious, if you leave turkey eggs just sitting in the nest boxes, will hungry dwarves pick them up and eat them? If so you might be able to free your guards from much of their day to day maintenance duties by just putting a load of turkeys down with the prisoners as their primary food source. Booze would still have to be made and distributed but it would cut in half the hauling jobs required to serve the prisoners their rations.

By having your farmer/brewer live down there with the prisoners you could definitely radically cut down on the hauling distances. You would want to compensate this poor farmer/brewer by assigning him to a very lavish room within the cell block and deck him out in some snazzy masterwork armor and weapons just in case one of those filthy criminals decides to take a shot at him.

If you eventually got a vampire prisoner you could arrange for an accident around the well and remove the need to provide both food and drink to the prison populace.

The more I think about this challenge the more I am tempted to give it a shot myself. It would make for a very interesting exercise in efficient design.