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[Cypress]

I am doing something I have never done before
I've had at least...six forts, and never let the population grow above eight (I want to keep with just seven, but even when I set the game to a pop cap of 0 it still gives me a single migrant.) And I've done some pretty fun megaprojects with just eight dwarfs.
But now, for my newest fort, I am opening the floodgates. Pop cap of 250. I want the full experience, sieges, nobles, 'accidents', artifacts and dragons.
I even have the starting seven dwarves segregated, so when everything invariably goes to hell, my seven will watch with detached amusement, probably sipping mint juleps as tantrum spirals tear through the rest of the population.
If I ever get there. Because taking on migrants is like juggling. I can't figure out what to do with the buggers, and I haven't quite figured out how to get all of these disperate ducks in a row. Hell, with the exception of my starting 7, the rest of the dwarves...well, I don't know who they are at all.
Anyone have hints for managing large groups of dorf? Ways they keep all their minions lined up and in order?

EDIT: the fortress in question: http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-7847-craftedabbey

[hexedmagica]

Dwarf Therapist is a great tool to manage dwarves and their labours. That may, or may not help you.

[Cypress]

Dwarf Therapist is a great tool to manage dwarves and their labours. That may, or may not help you.

Can't hurt. I'll take a look at it

[Retro]

As for the "I can't figure out what to do with the buggers" bit - personally, when I work on megaprojects, I have a setup something like this:

- 1-3 dedicated miners, depending on how much digging you're doing. Even if you're doing none, it's worth having at least one on call.
- One or two dedicated carpenters, ditto masons. Generally I use whoever goes legendary from moods.
- A handful of farmers, mostly dedicated (some have refuse hauling and so on.
- A dedicated cook and dedicated brewer.
- A small mechanics/architects team for all your powerpumping needs
- Etc for whatever jobs you need someone for 24/7

Everyone after that is basically slapped into Carpentry and Masonry with Hauling (though seperating haulers from builders is fine too) and they do the working. The carpentry and masonry workshops should be set up to not allow this giant pack of toilers. Your dedicated guys will prefer to use their workshops unless they're busy. All migrants, unless especially useful, just get shoved into this bracket.

As for what people do with migrants in non-megaproject forts? I have no idea. I guess that's how some militaries get so big? Or you could set up an arena with a wild beast and sacrifice migrants to it.

[Cypress]

As for the "I can't figure out what to do with the buggers" bit - personally, when I work on megaprojects, I have a setup something like this:

- 1-3 dedicated miners, depending on how much digging you're doing. Even if you're doing none, it's worth having at least one on call.
- One or two dedicated carpenters, ditto masons. Generally I use whoever goes legendary from moods.
- A handful of farmers, mostly dedicated (some have refuse hauling and so on.
- A dedicated cook and dedicated brewer.
- A small mechanics/architects team for all your powerpumping needs
- Etc for whatever jobs you need someone for 24/7

Everyone after that is basically slapped into Carpentry and Masonry with Hauling (though seperating haulers from builders is fine too) and they do the working. The carpentry and masonry workshops should be set up to not allow this giant pack of toilers. Your dedicated guys will prefer to use their workshops unless they're busy. All migrants, unless especially useful, just get shoved into this bracket.

As for what people do with migrants in non-megaproject forts? I have no idea. I guess that's how some militaries get so big? Or you could set up an arena with a wild beast and sacrifice migrants to it.

Well...as megaprojects go, I was kinda envisioning making a vast above ground dwarven city, centered around the abbey. Then I realized that this was crazy, and just went for the 'this city wasn't set up by city planners' look that you get in Jamestown. Now...now I'm not sure what to do. This will require further thought. And as for the arena, the most vicious animal on the map was a fox that wandered into the migrant's camp and was promptly torn apart.
It was the saddest fox ever.

[alway]

In the time when you are trying to figure out what to do with them, build a bunch of pumps and let them train on them. Then they will have nice stats for hauling or anything else that needs doing. I personally end up using quite a few for a combination of hauling and masonry for megaproject construction.

[The Architect]

I don't know if you have heard of the lag problems with Dwarf Fortress, but anything approaching 200 dwarves will probably be completely unplayable. I suggest you set the cap to 130 if you want the full experience without 2-3 frames per second. Your dwarves will continue to reproduce after immigration anyway, bringing your total somewhere around 150-180.

[Cypress]

I don't know if you have heard of the lag problems with Dwarf Fortress, but anything approaching 200 dwarves will probably be completely unplayable. I suggest you set the cap to 130 if you want the full experience without 2-3 frames per second. Your dwarves will continue to reproduce after immigration anyway, bringing your total somewhere around 150-180.

I have not, since usually I don't get more than 10. But I'll keep that in mind, and change the pop. cap accordingly

[SkyRender]

Building a massive above-ground city for your Dwarves is quite possible, and even kind of fun.  Take, for example, my old desert fort.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I admit, I aped heavily on the human civilizations and their apartment complexes here.

This one doesn't quite get the whole "focused around a central location" feel to it so much as a "significant buildings are built around the city's edges" feel, but still.

[The Architect]

Glad to be helpful.

Above-ground cities are tons of fun, but if you are going to have sieges on then I suggest archer towers with a rampart around the edges of the area your dwarves will inhabit/cross. The patrol feature is great with a two-tile wide path behind fortifications at 3 z-levels or so. The longer, more difficult but more effective solution is to channel/wall the edge in such a way that you create only one path into your map and city, which you can trap effectively. Otherwise not being able to set "dwarves stay inside" is going to be hell during sieges. Setting traffic zones is also a big must if you want to keep a forest to harvest.

[Beanchubbs]

I had a pretty successful above ground fort for a while. Defenses are really the only problems there, and shells/bones disappear every season above ground. They're kind of dificult to set up the first time, but not too hard to keep going.

On-topic: What I do with migrants is draft the ones I won't use into the military. Everyone else I just let them do their jobs, or if I'm building a megaproject, turn on masonry/carpentry/mining etc.. to the ones who aren't doing anything to keep the fortress alive. If none of these things work for you, just sacrifice them to armok/put them in an arena.

[Cypress]

If none of these things work for you, just sacrifice them to armok/put them in an arena.

I can't sacrfice them! I'm making a temple to Saint Urist, not Armok!
And on a more practical note, my sacrifice tower is inside the abbey, and I don't let migrants in there.

[Magil]

I don't know if you have heard of the lag problems with Dwarf Fortress, but anything approaching 200 dwarves will probably be completely unplayable. I suggest you set the cap to 130 if you want the full experience without 2-3 frames per second. Your dwarves will continue to reproduce after immigration anyway, bringing your total somewhere around 150-180.

That depends on your computer, really. I have... ~270 dwarves in my current fortress, and around 300 animals, and the FPS can still peak out around 20-30, lowering to around 10-15 when I order the exploratory mining expanded and they have to weave through my narrow mining tunnels, or when a few hundred new jobs are created to celebrate Goblin Christmas or whatever.

I should note that this fortress had a population cap of 200... but, well, I've been playing it a long time, and many, MANY children have been born, matured, and become productive new members of dwarven society. This has been the only death in the past few years...

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

So, on advice for dealing with massive fortresses... I don't really do anything special. Pretty much everyone has hauling on, but I disable hauling on dwarves that need to do specific tasks, and I primarily use Dwarf Therapist not to assign labors, but rather to monitor the progression of a dwarf's skills in the five invisible levels above "Legendary" (no way I was going to let a Legendary+1 Gem Cutter encrust my adamantine goblets with star rubies, only Legendary+5 will do!). Build lots of workshops, and use workshop profiling. Make huge stockpiles, make use of Z-levels to stack them on top of each other, don't make your average joe dwarf's bedroom too big if you utilize individual housing... a 2x3 or 2x3 bedroom is fine.

As for assigning dwarves to specific tasks... for those who work with basically infinite resources, like masons, stonecrafters, threshers, cooks, brewers, and clothsworkers (assuming you are growing the right plants), you can have a LOT of these and it won't hurt anything. Depending on your map, this may also include glassmakers if you have access to sand and magma. Training up engravers by smoothing out large sections of the fortress is good; I tend to not let them make actual engravings at all until they reach legendary skill through smoothing.

Miners do not skill up fast late in the game unless you do a LOT of mining, so I suggest training up a small mining force of 2-4 and going with that. Jewelers, metalsmiths, and for the most part carpenters and woodcrafters will have fewer materials available to skill up on, so I recommend keeping a smaller elite force dedicated to these jobs (then again, I aim to live at peace with the elves. If you would rather openly massacre the elves, you can probably go nuts with wood-based jobs). You can get by with only 1-2 legendary armorers, weaponsmiths, metalcrafters, and blacksmiths. It will be tiring to train them up the hard way unless you have magma and your map is very metal-rich, and even then you may not want to waste that much metal. Goblins only provide iron so fast. I have 4 magma forges myself, one is dedicated to creating armor, one weapons, one to blacksmithing, and one to metalcrafting, with only the appropriate legendaries allow to work them (workshop profiling).

Extremely niche tasks like lye making and potash making, if you do them at all, can be thrown on another dwarf and do not really require specialization. Remember, if you absolutely can't find a task for a dwarf, there's always the military or the guard.

[The Architect]

One thing to keep in mind is that if you don't intend on allowing masses of dwarves to be idle and ready to pick up any hauling job, you do not want all hauling labors turned on to most or all dwarves.

The DF job manager queus hauling jobs based on how many dwarves have a labor active. So let's say you have 40 dwarves with food hauling and refuse hauling. Further, let's say you have 80 food hauling jobs to be done and a massive number of stone dumping jobs to be done. DF will keep 40 food hauling jobs and 40 stone dumping jobs in the queue at all times, and the result is a huge backlog of hauling exasperated by inefficiency as your dwarves cross the fortress alternating between your labors, along with likely rotting of important food like giant eagle and sunshine roasts. The problem is much worse if you have several hauling labors enabled.

The most effective method is to keep your peasants doing all or most tasks all of the time, and to keep only job-related hauling enabled on your specialized dwarves. However: if you never have more jobs to be done than active dwarves in the first place, you won't have any of these problems. Not everyone likes to keep every dwarf busy at all times.

As far as lag: it does indeed depend on your computer, but more than that it depends on your embark site and playing style. Embarking in a temperate forest with a volcano I hit 15-20 FPS at around 1200000 objects and 180 dwarves, kept so slow by clowns (ambushers take huge processing space, and clowns become active ambushers until you kill them once you've discovered their pit) and the large interactive environment. If I were to embark somewhere such as a glacier with no clowns and no mountain, I'd probably be able to handle upwards of 200 dwarves with no problems until their production created too many objects to track.

It all depends on what you consider playable, too. Since you've always played with a population of 8 you have most likely never played with less than 50 FPS, and you'll probably go nuts once things start to crawl.

[pushy]

"Goram" migrants? Are they shit-hot goalkeeping schizophrenics?