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[BuGGaTon]

Anyone else getting an utterly absurd number of children migrating into their fortresses?  It's sickening!  I've 47 dorfs, 17 of whom are useless kiddies.  This last wave brought 6 kids and only 8 actual adults!

[GhostDwemer]

Sounds like real life in an non technological society. Birth rates were high because the kids kept dying. Of course, if you want less children, you can always set the child population cap to 0:0.

[Headless]

I suspect it will get worse.  Most of my forts were normal.  But one of them (1 out of about 5) ended up with nearly 50 children.   Out of a total of 110 ish.  So if you have started getting tones of kids i suspect there is a something that is affecting it and you will keep getting tones of kids.

Couse my sample size is one so i really have no idea.

[BuGGaTon]

They're not being born, they're arriving.  I thought that child pop cap had no bearing on migrant children?

Yeah this is the 2nd migrant wave in which I've had an exhausting number of useless peasants.  :/

[Eldin00]

I've also had a couple of forts started on .40.23 that had ridiculous numbers of child migrants. In the worst, in the first 4 migrant waves combined, I got 32 adults and 31 children in total. And I do set my child counts lower than the default, but not all the way to 0. But this setting appears to have no effect on migrant children. Other forts I've started, sometimes even in the same world, have gotten more normal counts of child migrants. So I'm not sure what triggers a fort to be overwhelmed by kids.

[Codyo]

The Baby_Child cap won't do anything for migrant waves and migrant pregnancies. It's a matter of luck with migrants, if parents migrate to the fort they're going to drag their kids along. It's easy for parents in legends to have a dozen kids. Then you'll have a large family coming in taking up most of the migrant wave.

You may be able to get less children by lowering the maturity age for dwarves. If you can find the RAWs for dwarves, you set the [CHILD:12] token from 12 years to 2 years, 5 years, or whatever you want. Even if you do get migrant children, they won't take too long to grow up in this case.

If you set the child pop cap to 10:1000 then the limit on children will be 10 kids at a time, unless migrants show up. I don't know what the second number really means, it's supposed to be a percentage of the adults in the fortress. Don't know what that is supposed to do with the cap though.

Sounds like real life in an non technological society. Birth rates were high because the kids kept dying. Of course, if you want less children, you can always set the child population cap to 0:0.

That's half of it, but the infant mortality rate was high too as you said, so huge families should not be common. Or we would have seen massive population booms in the middle ages.

[PatrikLundell]

Interesting, since I have the opposite problem, i.e. very few children in total. Most of this is from 0.40.19, but something like 4 fortresses had a total of probably 6 children born and one migrant over a 10 or so year period. In one fortress I gave the two migrant coupled (both fertile according to DT) 3 months off, but no children a year later. In the next one I resorted to "mating", i.e. burrow the 3 migrant couples I had into their rooms until I saw them actually side-by-side, and I still only got one child, and that one was early, i.e. conceived before my cattle handling of them. The next year, same thing, 1 out of three (different couple).
The only fiddling related to this I've done is to reduce pop cap to 50 and absolute pop cap to 80, leaving the child ratios unchanged.
On 0.40.13 I DID have the massive child wave issue. My current 0.40.23 fortress is only 1½ years old and has received only one couple, but no children have been produced yet.

Peasants are not useless, if they've got potential, since training is typically fairly quick. I'd certainly take a peasant with potential for useful skills than another master wax worker or potter (although given how powerful glass making is, a potter would probably pull his weight if you've got clay and magma) any day. If they don't have any potential and aren't liable to be subjected to babymashing, you've got some militia recruits or haulers...

The description of the percentage indicates that you could have 10 children to each adult as a maximum, provided the other cap isn't hit first, so lowering that ought to have a reducing effect.

[Eldin00]

I've only seen the issue of consistently large waves of immigrant children in worlds generated on 0.40.23. And only on some forts even then. But when the issue hits, I get wave after wave of migrants that are around 50% children.

As to the child cap, if I understand it correctly, no dwarves will become pregnant in your fortress if the total number of children is currently at or above the first number, or the percentage of your total population composed of children is currently at or above the 2nd number (in my experience with adjusting these values, it feels like any number 100 or above for the 2nd number does not restrict pregnancies at all, which makes the default value of 1000 seem odd)

So far as I know, the cap has no impact on dwarves who are already pregnant when either threshold is reached, migrant children, or dwarves who migrate already pregnant.

[BuGGaTon]

Peasants are fine, useless peasants (children) are awful!  I put all peasants in the military on one season on, one season off training and hauling.  I've got 68 dwarfs right now, I should have a half decent army setting up.  But no, I've got only 44 short people ready for assignments!  :S

[Badger Storm]

I've noticed that some forts, for whatever reason, have shit-tons of kids (incidentally, these are the forts where everybody is related to everybody else) and others where there are almost no kids.  I only welcome kids if they're 9 years or older.  All those little toddlers can go take a hike into the crocodile-infested caverns.

[utunnels]

Well it seems that is random. I don't get too many children in migrant waves. And I don't really hate children (I just ignore them, no rooms for them anyway). That's part of the fun facts of DF: not every time goes like you expected.
I'm a fan of stairs and don't use minecarts, so my forts usually rely on haulers and masons, tons of  them. Children can at least do some farming jobs. Babies, however, is another story.

[Aslandus]

I generally don't pay attention to the kids, they sometimes help with the planting and start parties but usually don't do anything that draws hate from me, and I keep tons of extra food and booze around so their nonworking bellies are no problem...

[Magnumcannon]

I recently atom-smashed 36 kids to oblivion because they were doing nothing but drink the fortress booze and occupy rooms. They're a real problem when you want to get workers to produce, instead, you get leeches to suck your fortress resources.

[Pirate Santa]

I had a fort a dozen versions back that had this problem. Every wave that came was at least a quarter children, but usually closer to half.
It made trying to set up industries incredibly frustrating as there just wasn't enough dwarves to go round.
Then of course in the third year the fort struck native silver, native gold and native platinum and got besieged by over 100 goblins and trolls, up from the 10 goblins the year before.
The fort did not survive.

[BuGGaTon]

With the new version, what level of sadness am I expecting from my dwarfs if I slay the children in whatever fashion?  They've all got nice rooms, great food, great booze, massive dining hall and all that shit.  They're pretty chipper.  Will this cause the dreaded tantrum spiral or can I just drown the fuckers?