Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Funtimes]

As part of research for my continuing series of over the top, over planned fortresses  , I'm looking for information on the most populous fortresses you've ever run. I've seen a couple on the map archive of 250 odd, some talking about being even higher.  So, I am challenging myself to outdo them, or melt my CPU in the process. I've previously peaked at about 150 and never had a stable population over ~120 for any length of time, but I want to go all out for added Fun.

So, the important questions:
What's the biggest number of Dorfs you've had at your mercy?
How many of them were able to do something useful?
At what point do they invoke a horrible lagmonster?
What planning changes do you bring in to handle so many of the little gits? 
What about if you devote all the extras to military, or equivalent? Preventing them idling.

I'm expecting the last point to be the biggest problem, idle dorfs make friends, in this case potentially hundeds. I have a morbid desire to see three hundred dorfs tantrum. 

[Shrugging Khan]

200 is my highest, always wanted to try more, but always knew that that'd just be lagmongering. FPS was around 30, with a very flat fortress. Most of them (4 out of 5) were usually busy, lots of metalworking, butchery (and tanning and cooking), mining, engraving, gem cutting, hauling of course...and large plantations. Also about four full military squads.

Idling isn't so bad, really. It means all jobs are getting done, and you have free hands to assign. When you have lots of idlers, check their qualifications and ramp up the volume in those industries. If they're untrained in anything, check what industries of yours are shortest on labour and just make them train in those. And if you really fail at such management tactics, you can always just toss them into the military.

Generally speaking, you want to have at least basic commodities for all of them, and a sufficiently oversized food industry. Excess stocks can be sold in return for rare items or military equipment. Violent threats shouldn't be a problem, since your military WILL be of sufficient size. All you have to fear is resource misdistribution or tantrum spirals - so as said, try to manage your industries properly, and make sure your dwarves have everything they need to be happy.

If you find fortress layouts to be difficult to make for high populations, just make several forts in a single site. Maybe one for each biome if your embark is large, or spread them over the various z-levels otherwise.

Should you have FPS troubles (predictably), the thread on pathfinding will probably help you: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=56041.0
If you trust my reading skills, it can be summed up as such: Make as many direct pathways between the various parts of your fortress, make proper traffic designations, forbid everything that's not reachable, and designate proper burrows if you should go for a multi-fortress approach.



Now go forth and do SCIENCE, so I don't have to!

[Aspgren]

I reached 270 but then there was a massive tantrum spiral and only very few survived. The fortress didn't recover.

[slink]

My largest population so far has been 322, of whom 171 are children.  FPS in 31.08 SDL is about 20, which I consider to be good for that many Dwarves.  I stopped playing it because I wanted to try a completely different fortress layout, 31.10 came out, and I found a new embark site, in a thread here, that I really liked a lot.  Obviously with 151 adults not everyone was kept busy.  I have since dropped my population limit to 75 and put my child limit back down to 100 (the default) from my increased limit of 200.  My current fortress has 125 Dwarves, 48 of whom are children.  The 77 surviving adults all have job assignments, even if they don't all work at their jobs constantly.  This includes 8 military.

Edit re "surviving adults" above: I lost two, one that I drowned and one that a troll killed.  The one I drowned was a mayor with a very serious adamantine fetish, and the one that was killed was one of my medical staff who was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

[Shrugging Khan]

How come I always have to think of as a middle-aged lady petting her cat and eating biscuits with her tea? is it the sig? The ava? The almost caring disposition towards your dwarves? 

[The Yellow Peril]

I currently have a fortress at 187. I've wanted to get to 200 for a long time now, but I either get bored of the fortress or annoyed too much by the framerate. It's not too bad when just my dwarves are on the map, but when a seige turns up too (and they turn up every season when you have that kind of population), everything just grinds to a halt.

There are at least 100 idlers at any one time. I don't really have any industries up and running other then the "dispose of caged goblins" industry, which takes up most of my time and effort.

Anything over about 80 starts to make the lag really noticable. As I said before, having 187 dwarves + another 80 or so goblins is extremely bad, perhaps 12 FPS at most.

You definitely need 3-wide corridors everywhere. Perferably have your farms, stockpiles, workshops and dumping chute all close to the central staircase. I've done this, and my only real problems with traffic are in the food stockpile, which always has about 20 dwarves drinking in it at any one time.

I would try to draft a lot into the military, but with it as bugged as it is right now, is there much point?

[slink]

How come I always have to think of as a middle-aged lady petting her cat and eating biscuits with her tea? is it the sig? The ava? The almost caring disposition towards your dwarves? 

Two cats.   

[Twobeard]

Ive got a couple of fortresses stably above the 150 mark. One is a at the pop breeder limit, at somewhere around 240. ( i would check but i cant be bothered waiting for the file to open right now) That fort is on its way to being a generational, my mayor of 10 years has 14 children, some now fully grown. Have massive fps death on that one but that may have somethign to do with the 30 or so forgotten beasts locked in my basement. This fortress is so secure its disgusting. I think i might open the basement on it soon just to find a way to kill my legendary baddasses.

I often have a huge amount of idlers, as i cant be assed to micromanage all of the. Alot end up in the military. Some end up engravers on constant smooth tasks, others end up building rediculously large stone edifices.

In 40d i had a fortress of similar size if not age, and kept locking mothers and children into their rooms to starve them to death. It was working too, with no one tantrumming, but then i lost the fortress to a goblin induced tantrum spiral. It was hilarious. my fortress dropped from 240 dwarves to 60 or less in 10 minutes. It was terrrifyingly wonderful.

[DarthCloakedDwarf]

I would try to draft a lot into the military, but with it as bugged as it is right now, is there much point?

Marksdwarves.

[monk12]

How come I always have to think of as a middle-aged lady petting her cat and eating biscuits with her tea? is it the sig? The ava? The almost caring disposition towards your dwarves? 

Two cats.   

Well, given the sig, are they two cats or are they two instances of the same cat?

[Funtimes]

And so the poorly named Fortress of Lots of Kids is founded by the amazingly (and randomly) named Chamber of Burns.

Long may they live up to their name and their soothing creams be plentiful.

I added a couple of zeros to all the population caps, so they shouldn't even be considered. Children can outnumber adults 1000 to one and popcap reads 2000. I will probably reassess these once I can get 300+ through the gates.

[Twobeard]

That is going to be murder on your FPS man.

[Mysteriousbluepuppet]

And so the poorly named Fortress of Lots of Kids is founded by the amazingly (and randomly) named Chamber of Burns.

Long may they live up to their name and their soothing creams be plentiful.

I added a couple of zeros to all the population caps, so they shouldn't even be considered. Children can outnumber adults 1000 to one and popcap reads 2000. I will probably reassess these once I can get 300+ through the gates.

Why do you hate your FPS so much man ?

[Funtimes]

Why do you hate your FPS so much man ?

I just have to see if it can be done. Why else?   

[jester]

Id just got with lots of screwpumps to keep the rabble working.  Works for my 100 dwarf fortresses, should work for 300