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Author Topic: Migrants  (Read 1120 times)

Zink

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Migrants
« on: March 10, 2009, 10:17:47 pm »

Migrant waves seem to be too large.  Often I get the first wave as 20+ dwarves- which can more than quadruple the population.  While this might not be as much of a problem for a mature fortress, it's pretty crippling early on.  It's very hard to suddenly find accomodations and also work for four times as many dwarves as you had a second ago.  It's also very hard to plan for- without really knowing how many migrants you get or when they arrive, it's difficult to decide how many resources to dedicate to future immigrants.  And aside from intentionally stunting your growth or constant fiddling with the population cap, you have no control over migrants.
Additionally, assuming you have jobs for all these new dwarves, it's very tedious and time-consuming to edit each dwarf's labors and custom name/profession.
So I propose a twofold solution:
1. make migrant numbers a little bit controllable from init.text: even just the ability to set a range, like "between 5 and 17 dwarves per wave", or "at least 6 per wave".  Would prevent new fortresses from being inundated with cheap unskilled laborers from the capitol.
2. allow the creation of a permanent set of customizable profiles that the player can just assign to a dwarf from his menu, which would automatically set his labors to whatever that predefined profile contains.  IE, create a "wood industry worker" profile that changes the labors of any dwarf holding it to woodcutting, carpentry, architecture, wood burning, and wood hauling, or something.
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inaluct

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Re: Migrants
« Reply #1 on: March 10, 2009, 10:58:23 pm »

First one has been suggested ad nauseum. Second one, probably a good idea. It would make setting up new migrants incomparably easier.
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Pyro93735

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Re: Migrants
« Reply #2 on: March 11, 2009, 01:20:52 am »

Second idea is fantastic - would help in a lot of the same ways that Toady letting us save embark profiles helped. 'Twould save us some time from treading through pages of text to get our dwarves to not act like fools and let us get back to building fantastic contraptions instead.
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Silverionmox

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Re: Migrants
« Reply #3 on: March 11, 2009, 06:26:05 am »

First one has been suggested ad nauseum. Second one, probably a good idea. It would make setting up new migrants incomparably easier.
The SPULEE (Society for the Proper Use of Latin Expressions in English) has urged me to mention that it's ad nauseAm.

On topic, the second suggestion would be even better when combined with splitting up the skills in parts (material-tool-product), because that would allow more flexibility and a better way to handle skills that share an aspect (eg. producing furniture, or working with wood).
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Dwarf Fortress cured my savescumming.

praguepride

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Re: Migrants
« Reply #4 on: March 11, 2009, 11:23:06 am »

I actually googled SPULEE in hopes that it (or something like it) exists. I want to join :D

I took latin AGES ago and I remember learning all the popular phrases (and learning how often they're misused or misinterpreted) but I don't remember any of it anymore :(

Edit: Forget SPULEE! Use this:

http://www.yuni.com/library/latin.html
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Man, dwarves are such a**holes!

Even automatic genocide would be a better approach