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[quinnr]

I got my first migration today, and I got 26 dwarfs.. very big compared to the 7 I was used to..now I have 50, so here are my questions:

How many should I expect to get and how often?
How do I keep them all happy?

[XSI]

Migrants come in groups with their size based of, among other things, wealth and recent deaths. If you want more or bigger groups, smooth and engrave walls, if you want smaller groups, kill a noble or a lot of dwarves(Nobles getting killed might even stop migration completely for a few years)

In general, expect migration waves to come with about 20-25 the first few years, and then stabilise at a lower yearly rate depending on how you're doing.

Keeping them happy is fairly simple, a legendary dining hall will be enough to prevent tantrums, add in an artifact near the door in/out, and small bedrooms for everyone and they will love you.

[Derakon]

Ways to keep dwarves happy:

 * Juice up the dining room. All dwarves go there to eat meals unless they have a dining room of their own or they're soldiers set to carry meals with them. A high-quality dining room adds a big happy thought, and if you put lots of individual things in the room for dwarves to admire, that also helps (e.g. statues of varying materials, pointless weapon traps, a cage filled with every non-guard animal in your fortress, decorated ropes, etc.).
 * Cook all your meals. If your dwarves are all eating raw plump helmet, then they aren't getting any nice thoughts from the meal and will eventually start getting annoyed because their meals are always the same. Switch over to quarry bushes and sweet pods and cook the meals; individual meal value will skyrocket, leading to more happy thoughts. Be sure not to run out of seeds (cooking plump helmets and berries will prevent you from recovering seeds from the plant), and don't cook your booze.
 * Set up a mist generator. Dwarves love mist. And it stacks. A single mist generator in the right place can basically keep dwarves smiling through the apocalypse.
 * Nice bedrooms. Setting up individual nice bedrooms is a real pain, but you can make a dormitory without too much trouble. Make a large room, decorate the hell out of it (like it was a dining room), and then put a bunch of beds in it. Designate rooms from each bed that fill the entire area. The rooms will overlap, so the quality of each bedroom is 25% what it otherwise would be, but it's not that much harder to make the room nice and you only have to do it once. This is somewhat exploity because overlapping rooms' values are not adequately penalized.

[Albedo]

If you want more or bigger groups, smooth and engrave walls...

Or improve your Created Wealth (visible on the z-status screen) in any way possible.  Cooked meals, steel armour, aluminum/platinum statues or mechanisms, and turning loose a Legendary +5* Engraver are all solid approaches.

(*Anything less is a waste of good smoothed walls, and it's easy enough to get a Stone Detailer up to L+5 by smoothing your entire fortress, and you usually don't need more than 1.  He should have no hauling or other jobs - he has his mission.)

[quinnr]

Alrighty, thanks! (Now I've just got to build my first artifact. COME ON STRANGE MOOD. On second thought, I don't want the cannibal one..that would make me sad.

[Quietust]

There are no "cannibal" moods, just the Fell mood which simply murders a nearby dwarf. Don't worry, though - the only time you'll get a fell mood is if your dwarves are unhappy, and you'll still have the possibility of getting a macabre mood.

[quinnr]

That's good...but I still don't like my dwarfs being murdered.  (I got my first mood today, it was possesed..no bonuses  )

I'm building a mist machine to keep everyone happy, is 40 power enough? or do I need to find out how to hook up 2 windmills?

[Albedo]

All depends exactly what gizmos you're going to attach to that one windmill, how many of them and how far away they are.  Read wiki, "power" - it's all there.

You know the answer already, but it also depends on how much wind is on your map -  0, 20, or 40 power/windmill - and, unfortunately, you have to build your first windmill to tell that.

But a pump only uses 10, a gear 5 and an axle 1/tile - so even 2 plus some connectors should be no prob.

[HammerHand]

I've never had my migrant waves stabilize.  When migrants appear, it is almost always in a wave of 19-25 new Dwarves.  I immediately switch my entire fortress over to producing their bedrooms - mining them out, building their beds, coffers, cabinets, and doors.  I consider it a huge hassle, and would much prefer a "slow trickle" of migrants instead of enormous, difficult arrivals.

[darkflagrance]

I believe the population is capped at 200 if unaltered, so your migrants will stop just a bit above that number.

[Grendus]

I've never had my migrant waves stabilize.  When migrants appear, it is almost always in a wave of 19-25 new Dwarves.  I immediately switch my entire fortress over to producing their bedrooms - mining them out, building their beds, coffers, cabinets, and doors.  I consider it a huge hassle, and would much prefer a "slow trickle" of migrants instead of enormous, difficult arrivals.

Be aware, if you don't have rent disabled as soon as your tax collector arrives about 90% of your workforce will be evicted immediately due to their high value rooms. Generally, haulers should just have a bed, while lower skill crafters can afford nicer rooms and champions/legendaries/nobles are immune to the economy. I learned this the hard way when I trained my metalsmiths on brass doors which I installed in my dwarves rooms to spike the architectural value of my fort. It worked, and all of my haulers had to move into my barracks until I removed the doors.

[Derakon]

The way I deal with bedrooms is to just toss everyone into a dormitory -- one large, well-furnished room filled with beds, each of which is designated for the entire room. Doesn't fix the rent problem, but it's way less of a hassle than individual rooms.

[HammerHand]

I've never had my migrant waves stabilize.  When migrants appear, it is almost always in a wave of 19-25 new Dwarves.  I immediately switch my entire fortress over to producing their bedrooms - mining them out, building their beds, coffers, cabinets, and doors.  I consider it a huge hassle, and would much prefer a "slow trickle" of migrants instead of enormous, difficult arrivals.

Be aware, if you don't have rent disabled as soon as your tax collector arrives about 90% of your workforce will be evicted immediately due to their high value rooms. Generally, haulers should just have a bed, while lower skill crafters can afford nicer rooms and champions/legendaries/nobles are immune to the economy. I learned this the hard way when I trained my metalsmiths on brass doors which I installed in my dwarves rooms to spike the architectural value of my fort. It worked, and all of my haulers had to move into my barracks until I removed the doors.

Blech!  Economy.  It doesn't add enough to the game for me.  Not at its current level, anyway.  I have enough to do without worrying about my Dwarves heading off to shop, stealing fortress goods to sell to other Dwarves, or complaining about wages and getting evicted from their rooms.  It doesn't seem to bring anything to my game except a fairly unentertaining hassle.  So I turn it off.

[bluea]

Doesn't fix the rent problem, but it's way less of a hassle than individual rooms.

It does somewhat fix the rent problem. Overlapping rooms cause a reduced room value - and thus a reduced rent.

Picture a large square room with concentric rings of beds, cabinets, coffers, tables, chairs and then a couple of statues in the middle. There's like 30 beds in the room - so I have massive overlap of rooms. It it was a -single- bedroom, it would be Royal from the smoothing + furniture.

When I designated this room as 30+ individual bedrooms, the price of a room was like 30 ducks. Occupancy of the apartment complex quickly went directly to 100%, and the entire rings of coffers and cabinets has shirts and stuff sitting in it.

[Derakon]

Room values sustain a flat 75% penalty if there is any overlap. The number of rooms overlapping does not affect this penalty, which is why the "royal dormitory" method works to provide good room value. Your 30-bed room is just as valuable as a 2-bed room in the same setup would be.