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[Robsoie]

In past version it wasn't too much of a problem, you get lots of dwarves = you create more military squads so you just have to still manage your wanted dwarves and let the military ones just train.

And in case even the military squads were too numerous for your fun, sieges and monsters happened, and because you didn't just played the easy way with traps everywhere and walls/raised bridge, you would deploy your military squad and fight the invaders, solving your population problem until the next migration waves in an epic battle way.
(while hopefully the lost soldiers weren't having much friends in the non-soldier dwarves, so tantrum spiral was managable)

But in df2014 with the nearly non-existing sieges or extremely weak ones, it's indeed a problem.

[NJW2000]

Watching stuff get done by huge numbers of dwaves is fun, and oddly I find food easier the more dwarves I have as I can just designate huge farms and let the excess population toil away.

[Skullsploder]

I love having huge numbers because I like to create masterworks. There is a link here. My current fort is built entirely around the magma forges - everything in it is an add-on to the magma forges I rushed to set up at the start. I have a legendary dwarf for each smithing profession: blacksmith, metalcrafter, weaponsmith, and armoursmith. And I have them making items on repeat with DFhack workflow. Anything not a masterwork gets fed to the furnaces and converted back into precious steel, platinum, silver, and gold, while everything else gets hauled someplace else to have gems or bones or whatever encrusted in it. About a quarter of the population is in the military. Another quarter are legendary craftsdwarves. The remaining half of the population are haulers and busy-bodies that do all the unskilled labour in the fort, and additionally spend their off-time making shit quality weapons and armour to be melted down so that when they mood they produce and become something useful.

Basically, in addition to farming and food making and carpentry and textiles and leatherworking and stonework, with a few workshops and about 4-8 dwarves each, there are a total of four dwarves dedicated to only metalworking, and five forges and ten furnaces that burn constantly. That means there are always 19 dwarves making or destroying metal items. And that's excluding all the hauling involved.

This fort has 80 dwarves; the pop cap I set. This is not enough for the level of industry I'm trying to sustain. Unfortunately, setting the popcap higher will probably send the measly FPS of 30 I currently have down to the HFS.

[fearlesslittletoaster]

I actually find that large numbers are reasonably easy to manage. Here is how I make it work.

I carefully label each dwarf with a profession and general arrival time, for example Gelder-3. During their initial introduction I also give each one a brief review... not a full personality read but at least a glance at the physical attributes and soul attributes. Usually that is enough to send them somewhere appropriate.

 I also enable a basic set of labors on most of them right when they arrive, so I know nobody is going to be idle long enough to be unhappy about it. Then I make sure I have an amazing dining hall, and set up a magma dump over a magma flow to cut down on clutter. At this point the game becomes about mining out the greatest possible wealth for the glory of Armok, and waiting to see what trys to kill me.

Of course I really don't get attached to dwarves at all, except as far as they are useful. I am one of the players who can't even pick the starting seven out of the crowd without looking at the labels because its all about the survival of the hive.   

[Albedo]

First, I hope you're using Dwarf Therapist.  If not, I would completely agree with you. Easy plug-and-play gui doesn't do much of anything that the vanilla version of the game doesn't do via those clumsy hotkey menus (unless you want to cheat).

http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Utilities#Dwarf_Therapist

Once there, it's easy to scan preferences (pop-up w/ mouse-hover), and organize your dwarves by job, by skill, by migration wave (to see who's newly arrived), by "highest moodable skill", by well over a dozen different views. And with filters - bonus.

Then, give each one a distinct and meaningful "nickname" - even if it's just "p#" for all those no-skill peasants. You have a main carpenter? Then "Carptr". Your Trader? I know what I'd call him. This lowers the stress of organizing, coordinating and over-seeing a large population immensely.


If you ARE using that and are still overwhelmed, then, yeah, pop cap is the way to go.

[NJW2000]

It's about the IMPORTANT dwarves, that make a name for themselves: our best craftsman, Zaneg Rithalnis, (bellwars) I know off the top of my head likes training spears, while our cook/baron Cerol Nitemkol I'd recognise in a crowd, and as for Iden Vucartol.... oddly, I can't remember the name of the King. But I know he likes ballista parts....

In essence, it's about how my dwarves impress me. I only know the celebrities, while the faceless crowd I'm fine to tune out.

[NW_Kohaku]

I actually find that large numbers are reasonably easy to manage. Here is how I make it work.

I carefully label each dwarf with a profession and general arrival time, for example Gelder-3. During their initial introduction I also give each one a brief review... not a full personality read but at least a glance at the physical attributes and soul attributes. Usually that is enough to send them somewhere appropriate.

 I also enable a basic set of labors on most of them right when they arrive, so I know nobody is going to be idle long enough to be unhappy about it. Then I make sure I have an amazing dining hall, and set up a magma dump over a magma flow to cut down on clutter. At this point the game becomes about mining out the greatest possible wealth for the glory of Armok, and waiting to see what trys to kill me.

Of course I really don't get attached to dwarves at all, except as far as they are useful. I am one of the players who can't even pick the starting seven out of the crowd without looking at the labels because its all about the survival of the hive.

See, this sort of stuff I just can't do.

If I don't name my characters something that means something, it doesn't work for me.  I go over personalities, about 10 minutes each one, and come up with appropriate names/references for each, usually being named after characters of other media whose personality types I can find correlation to. 

High attrition forts are just sloppy play, and completely undermines the value of all the detail put into individual dwarves.  The point of the game should be developing stories around each of the dwarves, and when they become faceless "Hauler #73" they're failing to fulfill this role. 

Again, it really needs to have immigration waves set to something like 10 per year max if you're doing FANTASTICALLY, and going 2-3 years or so with no migrants if you have a lot of death.   

People treat children as deadweight because there's zero reason to care about children if you have infinite skilled labor coming from nowhere. 

With a system where you got your dwarves a half-dozen at a time, you wouldn't reach full maturity by year 3, and could have the time to develop children into workers with their own story by relation to other, more storied dwarves.

[angelious]

150 i think is the biggest i have ever gone.


when numbers hit that high the management starts to be stressfull and hard...100 to 80 is good.


i dont suggest giving too many fucks about your dorfs. 20 is a small number and you just need to make sure they are working and they have the basic living needs. nothing else needed.

[Koremu]

I don't mind having a large population of dwarves, it's having a huge migration that annoys me. It's almost impossible to get them set in the fortress and properly consider integrating them into the place.

I wish there were a [MIGRANT_CAP] option in D_INIT. Something like:

This allows you to control the number of migrants to your fortress.  The first number is an absolute cap on the number of migrants in a single migration wave.  The second is a percentage of the current number of adults in your fortress (the default is the essentially meaningless 1000% here).  The lower number is used as the cap.  Setting either number to zero will disallow migration to the fortress.

[MIGRANT_CAP:100:1000]

[angelious]

I don't mind having a large population of dwarves, it's having a huge migration that annoys me. It's almost impossible to get them set in the fortress and properly consider integrating them into the place.

I wish there were a [MIGRANT_CAP] option in D_INIT. Something like:

This allows you to control the number of migrants to your fortress.  The first number is an absolute cap on the number of migrants in a single migration wave.  The second is a percentage of the current number of adults in your fortress (the default is the essentially meaningless 1000% here).  The lower number is used as the cap.  Setting either number to zero will disallow migration to the fortress.

[MIGRANT_CAP:100:1000]

your original post talked about just dorfs..but yeah that makes sense.


and yeah huge migrant waves are annoying...i usually post most of them into military and just leave some of the useful ones on duties that i need filled.

[Salmeuk]

High attrition forts are just sloppy play, and completely undermines the value of all the detail put into individual dwarves.  The point of the game should be developing stories around each of the dwarves, and when they become faceless "Hauler #73" they're failing to fulfill this role. 

While I sort of agree with your other points, this right here is great case of the age-old argument, "stop enjoying things that I don't" and "you're having the wrong kind of fun."

Also, while there is surely quite a bit of detail attached to each dwarf there isn't very much value associated with that detail, defining 'value' as inherent narrative worth. Being randomly generated, the personalities and attributes assigned to each dwarf are amazing material to build stories with, but those pools of creative material are a dime-a-dozen. It is an equally 'right' to completely ignore the dwarven back-stories and relationships and all that just to enjoy the mechanical processes of a well-functioning fortress, and since the personalities were generated by a computer there is nothing lost in ignoring their existence. That sort of play is eventually pretty boring, due to various balance issues and mechanical quirks, and I always resort to writing stories for my dwarves. Like I said, I agree that storytelling is the real game in Dwarf Fortress, but you can't profess those sorts of elitist sentiments without my objection.

[Broseph Stalin]

See, this sort of stuff I just can't do.

If I don't name my characters something that means something, it doesn't work for me.  I go over personalities, about 10 minutes each one, and come up with appropriate names/references for each, usually being named after characters of other media whose personality types I can find correlation to. 

High attrition forts are just sloppy play, and completely undermines the value of all the detail put into individual dwarves.  The point of the game should be developing stories around each of the dwarves, and when they become faceless "Hauler #73" they're failing to fulfill this role. 

Again, it really needs to have immigration waves set to something like 10 per year max if you're doing FANTASTICALLY, and going 2-3 years or so with no migrants if you have a lot of death.   

People treat children as deadweight because there's zero reason to care about children if you have infinite skilled labor coming from nowhere. 

With a system where you got your dwarves a half-dozen at a time, you wouldn't reach full maturity by year 3, and could have the time to develop children into workers with their own story by relation to other, more storied dwarves.

I agree with you to an extent but I don't agree with where you've taken it. Smaller forts create rich stories and characters which is something I absolutely adore but I don't think that sprawling high attrition forts are necessarly vapid. There are parts of boatmurdered where the blase way that it's mentioned some faceless nobody got killed really give personality to the fortress.

[Shonai_Dweller]

First time seriously playing with high dwarf numbers here.
Currently at 184 dorfs and it's a lot less stressful than it might be. Military is always around when you need it, mandates and new noble rooms are completed quickly. The internal squabbles between the military commander and champion are developing nicely. The fortress guard strut around trying to looking important. Love stories are going on underneath the surface. It's a fun fort with loads of stories and stuff getting done in a timely fashion.

Textile industry is a new one for me, but I think I'm getting the hang of it.

[NW_Kohaku]

While I sort of agree with your other points, this right here is great case of the age-old argument, "stop enjoying things that I don't" and "you're having the wrong kind of fun."

Also, while there is surely quite a bit of detail attached to each dwarf there isn't very much value associated with that detail, defining 'value' as inherent narrative worth. Being randomly generated, the personalities and attributes assigned to each dwarf are amazing material to build stories with, but those pools of creative material are a dime-a-dozen. It is an equally 'right' to completely ignore the dwarven back-stories and relationships and all that just to enjoy the mechanical processes of a well-functioning fortress, and since the personalities were generated by a computer there is nothing lost in ignoring their existence. That sort of play is eventually pretty boring, due to various balance issues and mechanical quirks, and I always resort to writing stories for my dwarves. Like I said, I agree that storytelling is the real game in Dwarf Fortress, but you can't profess those sorts of elitist sentiments without my objection.

The problem is, the game is designed to make you treat your dwarves as expendable, even when the intent of the game is to give them personality and individuality.  It's schizophrenic design to set up the game such that players are willing to just dump the nameless nobodies out into the caverns to see who crawls back when the rest of the game is about making them individual and important.

[Skullsploder]

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.