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[vjmdhzgr]

I've slowly been working my way up in how many dwarves I have. Initially I'd go for somewhere between 15-25 depending on migrant waves, and then hope to eventually get a decent population growth through children. Slowly I've increased the number up to around 50, though in effect it ends up being less due to the amount of children. My current long running fort has 60 dwarves, I think around 30 of which are children, with only one of them above the age of 4. I don't think I've ever actually managed to reach the point where I get that slow increase of population through children, but for most of the time I've played the game that's been my goal. For me the main reason is that I really prefer that I have just one dwarf in each skill based job. I only want one carpenter, one mason, one armorsmith, and so on, with a few exceptions. With huge migrant waves it's easy to forget what jobs I need fulfilled, but when your engraver dies and you have to wait a year for the next wave of children to grow up, you're going to remember what jobs to give them.

[NW_Kohaku]

The game does kick you back for treating them as faceless nobodies, provided there are some survivors left: Case in point, Rampartpulley, while designed to be very safe, took some very unsafe dwarf labour to create, and furthermore was the proving ground of a few inventions or stolen designs I didn't feel like building "test forts" for. So attrition is high. Maybe about 5-10% per year on average. I lost a legendary macedwarf the other day. Then I noticed when reassigning his Captain's bedroom to the new squad captain, that the dwarf he was married to is a terminally depressed carpenter/dyer named Ingish that I've taken a liking to and have been trying to cheer up. It felt a bit like a light punch to the solar plexus.

That's still fairly backwards design.  You only noticed because both of them were already important to you.

Likewise, Loud Whispers only started REALLY caring about his Silentthunders dwarves when he knew he wasn't getting any more of them except from children.  Which kind of proves the point - their value is directly proportional to their supply and your demand.  It devalues dwarves to flood your fortress with them such that you can't figure out how to handle them all but by giving them suicidal jobs. 

It breeds too much of an RTS Zerg Rush mentality. 

In general, all the resources of DF besides steel and bluemetal are too cheap to make the sort of resource management game and economics that Toady is obviously going for.  This is in large part the reason I wrote things like the Class Warfare thread...  Turning fortress size into different stages of fortress maturity, the same way the old 2d number of obstacles crossed reflected maturity would bring back some balance to the game and also directly aid in its simulation and storytelling.

[Mushroo]

Lotsa different ways to play the game.

My current fort, "Tinthroats," is an example of the "small population, get to know the dwarves" approach. I started with an original 20 dwarves, and now 20 years later,  the population is up to 71 through internal births. There have been 0 dwarf fatalities! I know each of the Original 20 pretty well, and they all have separate living areas so children can grow up in their own bedrooms next to their brothers and sisters.

But... this kind of fort can be boring for me to play. After the first 10 or 20 years, the survival of the dwarves is all but guaranteed (barring stupidity on my part) and it basically becomes an exercise in keeping down frame rate by atom-smashing refuse and trading worn out socks to the merchants. From a storytelling point of view it is basically, "Oh look at this special snowflake dwarf I put all this attention to detail into, now he is crawling around the legendary dining room on his hands and knees cleaning vomit!'

My mostest favoritest way to play the game is high-population with a hive mentality. In this type of fort, I treat all the dwarves (including the starting 7, who are simply the "play now" pre-gens) as nameless and replaceable. I enjoy the challenge of building a fort that can survive the loss of any individual. In this type of challenge fort, I don't even set labors on my dwarves (with the sole exception of a strange mood dwarf who becomes legendary in a random craft skill) so if no migrant weaponsmiths arrive, no weapons get made!

What's most fun for me is, each time I start a new fort, deciding what are going to be the constraints, what is going to be my philosophy as an overlord this time?

[NW_Kohaku]

My mostest favoritest way to play the game is high-population with a hive mentality. In this type of fort, I treat all the dwarves (including the starting 7, who are simply the "play now" pre-gens) as nameless and replaceable. I enjoy the challenge of building a fort that can survive the loss of any individual. In this type of challenge fort, I don't even set labors on my dwarves (with the sole exception of a strange mood dwarf who becomes legendary in a random craft skill) so if no migrant weaponsmiths arrive, no weapons get made!

You must have a LOT of rotten mussels.  It's not as bad as 40d, but I still get 1/4th of my migrants as fisherdwarves.  (Not even fish cleaners, always all labors enabled, which means they only fish, never clean the fish.)

And a dwarf only taking one job (or having two or three minor jobs you don't need running all the time like presser and thresher) is basically the only way the vanilla game properly works... although even that is a problem, as the game will give you a "doctor" with skills, but who hates other dwarves so much they refuse to treat patients.  As personalities become more and more important, there's more and more necessity in using things like Dwarf Therapist.

[angelious]

Lotsa different ways to play the game.

My current fort, "Tinthroats," is an example of the "small population, get to know the dwarves" approach. I started with an original 20 dwarves, and now 20 years later,  the population is up to 71 through internal births. There have been 0 dwarf fatalities! I know each of the Original 20 pretty well, and they all have separate living areas so children can grow up in their own bedrooms next to their brothers and sisters.

But... this kind of fort can be boring for me to play. After the first 10 or 20 years, the survival of the dwarves is all but guaranteed (barring stupidity on my part) and it basically becomes an exercise in keeping down frame rate by atom-smashing refuse and trading worn out socks to the merchants. From a storytelling point of view it is basically, "Oh look at this special snowflake dwarf I put all this attention to detail into, now he is crawling around the legendary dining room on his hands and knees cleaning vomit!'

My mostest favoritest way to play the game is high-population with a hive mentality. In this type of fort, I treat all the dwarves (including the starting 7, who are simply the "play now" pre-gens) as nameless and replaceable. I enjoy the challenge of building a fort that can survive the loss of any individual. In this type of challenge fort, I don't even set labors on my dwarves (with the sole exception of a strange mood dwarf who becomes legendary in a random craft skill) so if no migrant weaponsmiths arrive, no weapons get made!

What's most fun for me is, each time I start a new fort, deciding what are going to be the constraints, what is going to be my philosophy as an overlord this time?

my first fort was something along the lines of every life is sacred.

then i changed to the more pragmatic view of trying to get as succesfull and working fort as possible


nowadays i am just looking for trouble and doing shits for giggles.

[Dorsidwarf]

I get really stressed trying to play a fort with less than 40 dwarves. It's an endless cycle of breaks, lack of bodies, and never, ever quite enough talent to do several things at once.

[Numeroid]

I also have to have lots of dwarves. As for the story aspect of the game, I don't particularly care about individual dwarves, I care more about the fruits of their civilizations. Great halls, artifacts, etc.

In any case, I find it hard to function if I don't eventually get about 80 dwarves. It took a lot of beardpower to build my current fort, which I'm quite proud of It's certainly one of my more grand forts.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[SyrusLD]

I lately really started to prefer taking a closer look into who my dwarves are, focussing more on their personalities and preferences. The more dwarves come in the migrant waves, the less I can do that - and the more stressful it gets, so I highly prefer smaller numbers. Sadly, having only 20 dwarves for example limits what you can do, my military already takes up 10-15 dwarves most of the time, and when their discipline skill gets very high they will never ever do anything but train (unless I missed something?! ... or unless I disable training in the barracks for the inactive squad every month...). Not to mention until shortly ago I didn't know sieges were set to start only at 80 dwarves due to the entity raws - of course now I set it to 50, but I feel like setting it to less would just be a bit too crazy for me.

I love the depth the personalities offer, the only thing that annoyed me a bit in my last fortress was that pretty much EVERYONE was a pessismist and "never happy". I actually had one dwarf who was "never the slightest bit cheerful about anything" - best thing was to keep her away from any stress at all, even though she luckily wasn't also very vulnerable to stress; still, even the high value living quarter, dining room and constantly creating masterfully prepared food (she was one of my cooks) didn't make her very happy. Quite frustrating when you always see her go "didn't feel anything about [the most amazing thing ever]".

On the other hand, I had a "perfectionist" dwarf in my previous fortress, who I unknowingly of that made an engraver - I can tell you, I loved that "engraved a masterwork"-spam he created. Didn't pay much attention to personalities in that fortress due to having more dwarves around; this dwarf was pretty much who got me interested in it.


Overall I like the balance. Neither having too many nor too few dwarves appeals to me for a standard fortress, though I got some ideas for "more challenging" fortresses with really, really few dwarves. I also love seeing a fortress grow through births over time, starting with fewer dwarves and slowly seeing the numbers rise, looking forward to every child becoming and adult at some point (still don't know why I need so many legendary planters though...).
Too many dwarves is also a bit annoying due to the low FPS, things might get done "faster" in ingame time, but they surely don't get done faster in reallife time anymore. (Then again, normal people don't stockpile thousands of ...everything.)

I like getting more "attached" to my dwarves, even though it then pains me when they ... suffer an absolutly unexpected and unforseeable accident.

So yeah, depending on what I want my fortress to be - more focussed on the single dwarf or more focussed on the whole thing - high numbers of dwarves can be stressful. But actually, for me, not having stuff get done is even more stressful and annoying. (I just wish the game could somehow handle more dwarves more easily, but then I'd not be able to keep track of their personalities and all anymore...I really enjoy advancing through the ingame years. Smaller populations make that easier, even though the caravan/diplomat spam, having 3 entities of each species around, can get quite ... taxing. Ugh...)

[Skullsploder]

Ramping my popcap up to 100 now, so that I can actually get sieges. I really love playing huge, sprawling forts with tons and tons of dwarves, but I just don't have the hardware for it. When my FPS gets down to about 10 it's only a matter of time until I just give up. Basically, it feels more dwarfy to me to have hundreds of dwarves running around and doing industrial things, and I still get to pick out interesting stories.

Side note: How are you guys achieving natural population growth? I've had forts go ten years in 40.24 without a single in-fort marriage occurring. Migrant couples produce babies but I don't get any new non-migrant couples.

[NW_Kohaku]

Honestly, I don't think small fort pops are bad.  In fact, I find them easier to manage, since I generally only need so much.  I don't have to use the dreaded "repeat" button, and can simply look at my stocks and declare I need 30 of something, period.  It's a much easier way of managing things, and doesn't wind up with the need to start desperately excavating more fortress to fill with stockpiles to stash the overabundance of crap I'll never use just because "I wanted to keep my dwarves busy".

Side note: How are you guys achieving natural population growth? I've had forts go ten years in 40.24 without a single in-fort marriage occurring. Migrant couples produce babies but I don't get any new non-migrant couples.

Migrant couples are easy ways to get new kids, but if you want a marriage, you generally need to go out of your way to facilitate it. 

Set them up in the same (technically, two overlapping) bedroom (which probably should be 2x3 or something similar in size) with two beds, plus maybe a table (dining room burrowed to only be theirs) and chair. You'll probably want to set up burrows that narrow their possible break time areas to only be their shared room.  Lower their labors so they don't haul, and have regular breaks to chill with each other, or if you want them to marry NOW, turn off all labors until they idle there all the time, with nothing to do BUT develop a relationship. 

Since some dwarves have conflicting personalities, you might want to set up a "swinger's pad" where multiple males and females are put in close proximity, and you can let them sort out who marries who, specifically, instead of forced arranged marriages.  (For those of you with these degenerate modern "morals" of "free choice" and not just closing your eyes and thinking of Dwarfland while doing your civic duty and repopulating the race...)

[NJW2000]

Gah. Burrows. Labours. Too complex.

LOCK THEM IN THERE.

[SyrusLD]

Side note: How are you guys achieving natural population growth? I've had forts go ten years in 40.24 without a single in-fort marriage occurring. Migrant couples produce babies but I don't get any new non-migrant couples.

I didn't really keep track of how many marriages I did get, but it really helps to have them bunch up in a small area. A small meeting area did the trick for me, getting me at least a few marriages - which produced a ton of children. Two of the migrants also seem to have been married when they arrived - they got 16 children overall...Within 18 years I my dwarves had about 25 children (only a few arrived as migrants), probably even more. My cap was set to 55 and just now I reached 80 dwarves. I'd actually say that this growth was a bit too fast, because there are always about 15 children around...for future fortresses which aim on growing via births I should consider a way to utilize the children for farming a bit more I guess...


But yeah, putting them together in a small space works wonders.


Also, if you want to get sieges with less population, go in the entity_defaults.txt and change [PROGRESS_TRIGGER_POP_SIEGE:3] (for goblins for example) to a lower number, I think I read that 1 means you get a siege at 20 dwarves and 2 should be at 50 ... or so...

[Skullsploder]

Cool, thanks guys. Good to know that marriage is still possible in 40.24, I remember a 40.xx thread where people tried locking tons of dwarves in tiny spaces for ages and got no marriages.

Also, if you want to get sieges with less population, go in the entity_defaults.txt and change [PROGRESS_TRIGGER_POP_SIEGE:3] (for goblins for example) to a lower number, I think I read that 1 means you get a siege at 20 dwarves and 2 should be at 50 ... or so...

Does this work post-worldgen?

[SyrusLD]

I don't think so ... and, I'm playing 40.23, because I'm too lazy to update. But I doubt that marriage is broken in .24 ... who knows though.

[Loud Whispers]

Side note: How are you guys achieving natural population growth? I've had forts go ten years in 40.24 without a single in-fort marriage occurring. Migrant couples produce babies but I don't get any new non-migrant couples.

Manual mandatory socialization sessions to induce relationships. If you want things to happen on their own, have a solitary small dining room - they'll get close on their terms. They'll also end up forming large social networks, prone to tantrums upon the deaths of popular Dwarves.