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[cbfog]

obviously when the game starts out you have 7 dwarves and they must do pretty much everything (which is why I give them names like "stony" "woody" and "boozy" etc.) but once the migrants start arriving i find myself, while well set for booze and food, tunnelling out bedrooms and creating beds for dwarves who mostly stand around drinking or organizing parties in my statue garden. these guys are mostly useless for the operation of my fort and i generally only use about 1/4 of the available dwarves at any time to create an excess of goods for everyone else while all the others mill around doing nothing.

i would draft them all, but having a gigantic military seems sort of useless when faced with only a few goblins and kobolds.
also most of the migrants are totally useless like soap makers or animal dissectors and they bring along their useless children too

i don't know what to do with these jerks besides turn them into hauling mules or conscript them

[Ghostpaw]

Arena battles with captured enemies of war?

[Dareon Clearwater]

I generally wind up doubling and trebling up on workshops.  I think one fort I'm running has three craftsdwarves' shops, 5 mason's, and 2 breweries.  And I still have 20-30 idlers.

[cbfog]

can i maybe kill them by forcing them to sleep in the mud or dig down into the ground until they drown themselves, or maybe have them all throw a party in a stature garden and open up a hatch above it to release a lake full of water on them and drown them

that way i could kill all the useless leeches and only save the guys who actually work

[zagibu]

The easiest way to get rid of them is to have a deep pit at the entrance of your fort bridged by a retractable bridge. Or the dwarven atom smasher, if you don't mind exploiting game bugs. The smasher also has the feature that it doesn't produce corpses or other remains.

[Samyotix]

Suggestions:

a) Fortress guard
(20 dwarves, or 10% of the population). If you set them to unarmed, they'll be legendary wrestlers soonish; you won't be able to assign them back to civilian duties once they're champions.

b) Royal Guard
(8 dwarves?). Only after you get nobles.

c) More workshops, more labor-intensive industry.
(Don't grow Plump Helmet ... grow all the plants, run querns, farmers' workshops. Grow Dimple Cup, run querns, auto-mill dyed thread only, set "Use only dyed cloth", add dyeries and cloth workshops (or just churn out cloth crafts at your craftsdwarves' workshops)...

d) Standing (well, sparring) army.
When there's not a lot to do: Draft some. To get the hauling done once the siege is over, undraft them ...  

[juckto]

Stupidly huge projects of doom. I've got about 20 guys building an aqueduct over a canyon. I lose 3-5 every time a siege occurs, which is pretty often since I have babysnatcher's off.

Churn out some picks and turn them all into miners, and just mine the shit out of everything.

[Dasleah]

Huh. In a Fortress of 100+ Dwarves it's rare for me to have more than 1 Idler at a time. I just always plan a couple steps ahead (ensuring that I have enough spare bedrooms, plus about 20 more, digging out the aristocracy wing, the underground lakes, the tunnels to the tower outposts, melting goblin metal...)

I normally put Idlers on plant collection, Brewing, or Engraving.

[Doppel]

I mostly try to leave some "training digging area" unmined and give lots of them picks to mine it out (soil is great). I also make lots of them engravers (smoothing the boulders on the map) and a lot haulers. Imo haulers are essential and thus i mostly make even specific haulers, some only haul stone, others wood and others refuse, and so on, or use them to massively dump kablilions of stuff. Also a mood can turn one straight into legendary.

[Joseph Miles]

I like to make them build MASSIVE things from excess rock lying around, like huge towers and stuff. And every time, whatever they're building happens to have a death chamber. Then, I give them the honor of being the first to use the new death chamber. Keeps them busy for awhile, gets you a nice death tower, and then it cleanses the fortress.  

[sneakey pete]

I usually have a labor shortage, but now that i think about it, its probably something to do with the town/palace/army guards that i have. Need... more... haulers  

[Derakon]

I tend to end up with eight smelters running nonstop on my maps (the ones with magma, anyway). The whole dyed-cloth industry is good too, as long as you have enough bags that you can handle having twenty or so filled with single units of dimple cup dye. If you have sand, set up two glassworks, one to gather sand, and the other to churn out raw green glass and terraria; use the first to train a gemcutter (and as fodder to train a gemsetter) and the second for fortress defense. Designate entire floors for smoothing, and then engraving when that's done.  Gather every plant on the map. Chop down every tree. Make sure you have enough stockpile space to store the results. Make siege engines in your mines and set them to auto-repeat (this is a good way to train dwarves for stat-gain).

Generally I find that my forts end up with a handful of legendary dwarves - three miners, a smith, a farmer/brewer, a few engravers, et cetera - a bunch of variably-skilled grunts for things like furnace operating, and a crapton of haulers trying to keep up with the rest of 'em. A single brewing job can generate six hauling tasks (one for the barrel of booze, five for each of the seeds). An armorsmith working full-tilt on nothing but gauntlets and boots will rapidly clutter up his workshop, too. And of course, I have ore stockpiles that need continual replenishment so that my furnace operators don't have to walk across half the map to get their ore. This tends to keep a good 80% of my fort busy, and the rest get drafted into my army.

[RPB]

quote:Originally posted by cbfog:
<STRONG>these guys are mostly useless for the operation of my fort and i generally only use about 1/4 of the available dwarves at any time to create an excess of goods for everyone else while all the others mill around doing nothing.</STRONG>

Clearly you aren't generating nearly enough excess.

I keep up a good sized military, but mostly what I do is assign immigrants to nonstop work in various luxury trades (clothesmaking, glassmaking, etc.) When they hit legendary, I turn them back into haulers to keep up with the giant mounds of junk that everyone else is generating. Keeps everyone busy with relatively little fuss, and you end up with a lot of wealth and legendary dwarves.

[Solara]

Right now I've got every non-vital dwarf building towers connected by long rickety wooden bridges. Then I'm going to do some rewalling, flood most of the old fort so that there's no way to enter or leave, and the legend of the reclusive Sky Dwarves will be born.  

...then I'm going to try and drive a few handpicked individuals insane and watch the fun.

[Kagus]

This forum is so delightfully twisted, I can hardly contain my glee...