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[utunnels]

The idea is keep as many children and as few adult dorfs as possible, as long as you can keep your population above 140 and get a king.

The ideal result is a king and 139 children, but I don't think it is possible because you need to keep some mothers and fathers in case no migrants will come and your fort eventually get old.

Thoughts?

[Thisfox]

That sounds... incredible. Yes. Also, it sounds massively frustrating. If anyone tries it, please tell us about it!

[Pirate Santa]

Your biggest challenge there would be that children will harvest and haul, but they wont do any of the essential jobs like planting, building, brewing, mining.

If you don't mind being rather exploity I think the ideal final setup for a one adult fort would be to setup a magma glass furnace and a sand collection zone and have him produce an infinite supply of masterwork serrated green glass discs and use those to buy everything you need off the caravans.
And also to stock the weapon traps you will need since you won't be able to form a militia.

[utunnels]

Yeah, one adult fort sounds more interesting. Maybe I can start with an atomsmasher and kill 6 dorfs and leave one decent cook and planter...

[Larix]

An obvious problem with the idea - where do you suppose to get the children from? They don't grow on trees. Not without heavy modding, at least. If you want a continuous child supply, the most sustainable approach would likely be a fort divided, with an adults-only and a children-only zone. (O.k., many overseers have some kind of religious taboo against sustainability, but still.)

I think it'd be possible to make a no-adults fort: kids can still demolish buildings, right? So build a well or two to make sure they don't dehydrate and build fifty trade depots. Forbid all but one depot. Whenever a caravan has come, order the depot demolished. Designate a generic non-refuse stockpile over the droppings. Once you're done, unforbid another depot, for the next caravan. This promises, like every all- or mostly-children forts, to be supremely boring, because there's almost nothing to really do. It'd also be quite vulnerable to attacks - even if you set up massive trap corridors, children wandering outside would be easy pickings for ambushes and snatchers, and there'd be little to protect from trapavoiders.

At least there'd be no problem with moods - without own workers, the "tiles uncovered" and "items made" limits should prevent moods reliably.

[Reelya]

leaving just one dorf isn't going to be a good way to get more children. The best thing would be to pair up the starting dwarfs in male/female pairs, have them work and hang out in "couples" burrows. Give them plenty of time off too. This will give them the best chance of pairing up and having kids. Don't kill off the remaining odd one out, because one of your dwarfs might be gay, and you'd need a replacement breeder. If any haven't paired up after 1 year, switch the burrows around of the singles. Any dwarves who get married to the same sex go into the atom smasher (not being homophobic, just to optimize the adults/kids ratio).

If all goes well, each pair should produce 1 child per year, or 3 children / year and it will take 12 years for the first ones to become adults. So you'd have 6 dwarves in pairs, with 36 kids. Once the first kids grow up, you'd have 3 kids reaching adulthood every year, so expect ~3 breeding couples to form every 2 years under optimal conditions. If you had 120 children, an average of 10 would become adults every year so you'd need 20 adult breeders to maintain the numbers, so you'd be looking at a 70% child fort. It wouldn't be so spot on though, as you'd need to only kill off older dwarves when you could be sure of new breeding pairs starting to produce. You'd have to maintain 10 breeder pairs and kill off all older or surplus dwarves.

So, you could carefully groom a fort with over 100 kids, then kill all adults but one and enjoy 1 year of your kiddy harem. But after that the first batch will grow up and you'd have to kill them off or reinstate breeder pairs, so this would actually cut into the child/adult ratio in the long run.

Btw, if you're interested in dwarven genetic engineering/eugenics, it looks like DF only looks at the mother's DNA at least for animals, so you'd want to select breeder mothers based on stats and breeder fathers isn't important.

[Staalo]

You could get loads of childbirths by creating your fort in version .40.07 (with the "dwarves breed like animals" bug). After reaching desired amount of children upgrade to the current version and continue from there.

My .40.07 fort got almost hundred children within three game years, with incredibly complex family ties. Almost all children in the fortress were each others' half brothers or sisters; the duke alone had four children with four different women. It was like one huge underground hillbilly clan.

[Badger Storm]

You could get loads of childbirths by creating your fort in version .40.07 (with the "dwarves breed like animals" bug). After reaching desired amount of children upgrade to the current version and continue from there.

My .40.07 fort got almost hundred children within three game years, with incredibly complex family ties. Almost all children in the fortress were each others' half brothers or sisters; the duke alone had four children with four different women. It was like one huge underground hillbilly clan.

That would explain so, so much about the dwarven psyche.  (But how can you have hillbillies without any hills?)

[Staalo]

Well, if hillbillies aren't possible one could always try to build a dwarven Craster's Keep. Although that would require modding in the White Walkers...

[Reelya]

You could get loads of childbirths by creating your fort in version .40.07 (with the "dwarves breed like animals" bug). After reaching desired amount of children upgrade to the current version and continue from there.

My .40.07 fort got almost hundred children within three game years, with incredibly complex family ties. Almost all children in the fortress were each others' half brothers or sisters; the duke alone had four children with four different women. It was like one huge underground hillbilly clan.

That would explain so, so much about the dwarven psyche.  (But how can you have hillbillies without any hills?)

These ones live inside the hills, not on them.

[Goblins]

Your biggest challenge there would be that children will harvest and haul, but they wont do any of the essential jobs like planting, building, brewing, mining.

If you don't mind being rather exploity I think the ideal final setup for a one adult fort would be to setup a magma glass furnace and a sand collection zone and have him produce an infinite supply of masterwork serrated green glass discs and use those to buy everything you need off the caravans.
And also to stock the weapon traps you will need since you won't be able to form a militia.

Green glass discs?

[Thormgrim]

couldn't you mod dwarves to have litters?  that might help speed it up

[pisskop]

I like the idea.

[Larix]

Make them lay eggs, clutchsize about 20, remove [BABY] and put [CHILD:100] instead.

[Thormgrim]

why not just make it a clutch of 100 and get it over with all at once.