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[Skanky]

My post was, more than anything, a joke intended for those who edit Wikipedia on a regular basis, but not solely that; I was asking people to be nice to the OP. I dunno. It just seemed like they were ganging up on him. However, you do have a point that the thread title was a little ad hominem...

The OP set the tone of the thread. It is not surprising that people respond in kind.

[JustinKace]

Why is it assumed that pop-cappers are unimaginative when they could just as easily be lazy, or simply have better things to do with their time. Seems like a pretty silly assumption to me.

[krumlink]

It is easy to designate a meeting zone at an area being supported by a single pillar.

[G-Flex]

I don't understand why setting a population cap is seem as illegitimate.

The immigration system is currently rather crude. Toady plans to include options for, say, turning back immigrants, or requesting they not come, or something similar, and without that, you NEED another option to prevent them.

Yes, killing immigrants is one option but:
1) It doesn't fit the mood of every fortress, by a long shot.
2) It has diplomatic repercussions; eventually, nobody wants to immigrate at all.

The POPCAP init setting is just a holdover for immigration control until the time when/if we get in-game options to accomplish the same. There's nothing cheat-like about it. If anything, it's more of a "cheat" to constantly crush immigrants under drawbridges without your parent civ (or dwarves) giving much of a damn.

[Mohreb el Yasim]

in the other hand that could be a chellenge to: a fortress with no popcap (ok something like 140 seems good like after nothing new comes) and go ahead challenge the game try to make an economy with coins, and try to make the mandates your nobles do. but no dwarf killing not even nobles

for the fact that in real people killing eachother too. it is really said and i don't really want to refound that aspect of realisme in my games, i am not playing much becouse i want to review the reallity wich i unlike enougth to play much.

it is funny that Pie mentioned that those are kids how use popcap. I wanted to say just as contrair that those are the kids how still enjoy brutality and mass killing in a game ... hehe we don't have the same reasonment ... maybe he is new in DF thats why he still enjoys killing migrants (it is just a supposition based on his 17 post but i migth be wrong, anyway i think in this forum it is new people are welcome and not seen as 'StUp1d |\|eW-B's')

[duro]

it is funny that Pie mentioned that those are kids how use popcap. I wanted to say just as contrair that those are the kids how still enjoy brutality and mass killing in a game ... hehe we don't have the same reasonment ...

Aside from the peeps on this forum, this can also be an issue of cultural background - i.e. the differences in acceptance or taboo of depictions of violence and boobie nipples in the US and Europe, or the lack of both in the Arab world. From a mainstream point of view childish behavior would be actions or opinions contrary to the predominant local ones.

[Mohreb el Yasim]

i am still from europe so i think it is not an as big difference between europe and US but the fact that something is accepted in cultur dont implie that it is entertrainable for anybody, or for most of us, i haven't said that he could not enjoying that but i have a different point of view and i explained why i don't like killing dwarfes in mass... i just reactad that it is less childish for me to use popcap then to use mass killing engines ... but it is strictly in my opignon

[Nilus]

Bring in a Dragon. Lock the room.

Made me laugh, hard.

Personally, I just build a drowning chamber or something like that.

[anomaly]

I don't use pop caps personally but I would like to say that it is not practical or reasonable to say that people who use them are unimaginative. 

From a realistic perspective (in a fantasy setting, I know it's a little absurd, but still), any fortress who regularly killed off immigrants *should* be flagged hostile by every other dwarven civilization, in my opinion.

Sieges, etc. would ensue.  Maybe this should even generate a lot of unhappy thoughts in the population.

Now, look at it in the other sense.  This is WAY DIFFERENT from a fort saying "Door's closed" to every other dwarven civilization.  Social isolation may ensue, but punishment would be much less severe.

Now my third point is to say that I am a big fan of dwarf fort laissez-faire, so do what you want, but it is very immature to call someone unimaginative just because they don't want to do something that wouldn't make much sense in the context they are doing it in.

[Pie]

I don't use pop caps personally but I would like to say that it is not practical or reasonable to say that people who use them are unimaginative. 

From a realistic perspective (in a fantasy setting, I know it's a little absurd, but still), any fortress who regularly killed off immigrants *should* be flagged hostile by every other dwarven civilization, in my opinion.

Sieges, etc. would ensue.  Maybe this should even generate a lot of unhappy thoughts in the population.

Now, look at it in the other sense.  This is WAY DIFFERENT from a fort saying "Door's closed" to every other dwarven civilization.  Social isolation may ensue, but punishment would be much less severe.

Ah, but that is up to the GAME DESIGNER. He creates the world, I just play it. I don't change it to make it easier, I just play it. If you changed it so that dwarves dug entire z-levels in one second and made it so that there were no cave-ins, and then claimed that you were playing dwarf fortress as it should be played and that you had succeeded in mining out a whole map, doesn't it at least diminish the achievement?

Now my third point is to say that I am a big fan of dwarf fort laissez-faire, so do what you want, but it is very immature to call someone unimaginative just because they don't want to do something that wouldn't make much sense in the context they are doing it in.

Even if the thing that they were doing INSTEAD made much LESS sense in the context?

[Earthquake Damage]

The game designer deliberately gave us a population cap option.  'Nuff said on that point.

[Mohreb el Yasim]

I don't use pop caps personally but I would like to say that it is not practical or reasonable to say that people who use them are unimaginative. 

From a realistic perspective (in a fantasy setting, I know it's a little absurd, but still), any fortress who regularly killed off immigrants *should* be flagged hostile by every other dwarven civilization, in my opinion.

Sieges, etc. would ensue.  Maybe this should even generate a lot of unhappy thoughts in the population.

Now, look at it in the other sense.  This is WAY DIFFERENT from a fort saying "Door's closed" to every other dwarven civilization.  Social isolation may ensue, but punishment would be much less severe.

Ah, but that is up to the GAME DESIGNER. He creates the world, I just play it. I don't change it to make it easier, I just play it. If you changed it so that dwarves dug entire z-levels in one second and made it so that there were no cave-ins, and then claimed that you were playing dwarf fortress as it should be played and that you had succeeded in mining out a whole map, doesn't it at least diminish the achievement?

Now my third point is to say that I am a big fan of dwarf fort laissez-faire, so do what you want, but it is very immature to call someone unimaginative just because they don't want to do something that wouldn't make much sense in the context they are doing it in.

Even if the thing that they were doing INSTEAD made much LESS sense in the context?

don't forget that this is your opignon, it is not the absolute trouth and you shouldn't consider it like the only rigth way to see things, you can't convience people in this way, not after they are more then 6 year old...

[Lord Dullard]

If you want to kill off dwarves for no reason and call it 'logical' or 'non-cheating' (personally I'd call it much more akin to cheating than setting a pop cap), go ahead. But it's stupid to say other people should do the same if it makes the game less enjoyable.

[Demonic Gophers]

Even if one doesn't change the Init options at all, there's still a population cap.  The game is designed with a population cap.  How is it cheating to lower it?

Also, in a 'real situation', FPS wouldn't be a concern, so a higher population would be less of a problem.  And telling people to leave would be an option.

Getting enough food and such to keep a large population healthy and happy isn't that hard, anyway.  The primary reasons I can think of to use a lower population cap are storytelling (which is imaginative) or FPS (which is a hardware limitation).

[John Johnston]

When you say there is no "immigrant problem", you are kidding yourself. There is no "immigrant problem" for you because you HAVE CAPPED YOUR POPULATION. However, if you had not capped your population you would have FPS trouble. Which is a problem. And killing immigrants would solve that problem. Clogging up your fort is a problem, killing immigrants is one solution.

That really depends on your definition of problem.  The "problem" of lower frame rates with more dwarfs is of a different character - it depends what machine you're running the game on, for instance, if you play the same fortress on different machines, which I've done a few times - to the "problem" of having to manage and feed immigrants, which I believe is what most people here usually mean when discussing an "immigrant problem".  I prefer to maintain a good framerate, but it's a only a "problem" external to the running of a fortress, not internal to it.

For that matter, framerate is only somewhat loosely tied to population, and is heavily dependant on the jobs you have your dwarfs doing.  There are circumstances where increasing the population may yield a higher framerate; I'm not entirely sure how, some arcane quirk of the mechanics, but I've seen it happen.

Anyway, having said that, I believe there is a problem of sorts with dwarf population - that the baby/child cap and population cap are separate entities.  This separation means that in a fortress at or above the population cap (whether that's 20 or 200), if there are no dwarf casualties and the baby/child cap is above zero the population will inexorably rise above the population cap (as children mature into adults and open a new "space" in the baby/child cap, for a net gain of 1 dwarf each time) and will not normalise until the dwarves start dying of old age, and that is a problem internal to the game.