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[Tsarwash]

As the game slows down exponially with population increase, and more forts die to fps death than anything else, I have started to cap my population quite low. I meant to start low and increase it when I'm ready, but now than I'm ready, I can't think of any good reason to allow the population to increase. My current fort has a population of 48. Using a danger room, most of the population has fairly good fighting and dodging abilities. I think that we have full steel armour for over twenty dudes, and a big pile of verious metals looking idle. I have a legendary dude in most of the essential skills. Plenty of food from just one farmer. The brewer has loads of time to chill out. In fact a half of my population is idle most of the time, and still that I want done happens quickly, (including cleaning.) I have all of the industries that I want set up. The only migrant skills that we are low on is the medical ones. I'm wondering if I'm the only one happy for the meantime with a low population. I can see why I would want to increase it if the circus comes to town,  but that might be years away.

[Korbac]

I play with the standard cap, although I think it's perfectly understandable if you want to play with lower limits. Along with the major benefit of higher fps, less dwarves mean each character is more unique and you aren't swamped with migrants every year that you aren't prepared for.

[Hans Lemurson]

I too have been coming to the conclusion that smaller populations might be better, since they can be more easily managed and you can maintain a higher FPS, and there's a limit to how many jobs you can reasonably provide.  The Fortress functions with a planned economy run by a single person: you.  It's going to be inefficient and will be more so the more people you have.

[bumblepuppy]

Around twenty to thirty dwarves is an ideal number for me. Sadly, the highest number I ever went to was 54, and I soon abandoned that fort. As a result, I have never gotten a noble.

[Organum]

I think I've been playing with a cap of 100 recently. I prefer having enough dwarves to get all of the work I need done while simultaneously having too few dwarves for anyone to be idle for a long period of time. Once my forts get to the 50-80 range, I end up with as many as 30 dwarves doing nothing on a pretty constant basis. When that happens I try to develop my industry (it's been clothing, but mugs/goblets seem lucrative so I might try that soon) which tends to have stagnated as soon as there was enough food and drink to go around.

[thijser]

Well it depends on embark size ext. but I usually use low level dwarfs for medical experiments when my fps drops to low.

[Absentia]

80. Anybody that shows up after 80 doesn't last too long unless they're a high master weaponsmith or some such.

[LemonFrosted]

The 60-100 dwarf range is where my forts are running best with most industries, solid defences, one or two large engineering projects, and a fort that's feeling comfortable to play with. I know the majority of my dwarves by some mnemonic and a few of them by name and accomplishment at that point. It's usually once the engineering project finishes that my worth will skyrocket and my population will shoot up to 150+. Because I can't run Dwarf Therapist this becomes an absolute mess trying to keep migrants sorted out. I've never really gotten around to building a slum burrow for them and the FPS hit is a pain in the butt. So just recently I started playing with a population cap of 90.

[Dzenaiya]

I do "no immigration" games so I rarely have more than a dozen adult dwarves by the end of the first year. I've never really gotten farther than the fifth or sixth year (cause of fortress termination: too many dogs.)

[LemonFrosted]

I think after I get tired of my current Terrifying embark I'm going to try a generational fortress with Immigrants turned off. Uncap FPS, go crazy on traps, and let the years roll by.

[Ullallulloo]

I set my cap at 300 because I want as many as I can get. I don't have too many FPS problems, but I've never really gotten above 80 dwarves. I'm stuck at 32 for a while because "No one even considered making the journey to such a cursed death-trap this season."

[Cheese]

For me, I just have to have 200. It makes my fort feel sort of complete, even if I now need 3 food stockpiles and more wood than exists on the map to store it all.

[Gearheart]

100 is a nice maximum for me.

[LordSlowpoke]

Perfect? 1.
Optimal? 45.

It's just a matter of taste. For me, it's just because I can handle only 45 before I need to fire up DT.

[Halykan]

My FPS tends to be around 50ish, but only drops to like 35ish with a population of 100-120 dwarves. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong to make my initial embark so slow if my PC can obviously handle vastly increased pathfinding relatively well, but  the end result is that I tend to play with about 100 dwarves most of the time.

I've been considering doing a generational fortress though, just for the fun of it. Unless you choose an abominable embark an experienced player almost always does well enough to get the ridiculous migrant waves that come when you're starting out. With all those workers it's trivial to specialize, and with a bit of digging and some forethought you can pretty much have every industry your embark supports running full tilt by year three.

If you limit yourself to a much smaller labor pool though, you'll still have to be making tradeoff decisions well into the middle of the game. It also makes each loss of a dwarf something to be feared, since they'll be wearing a lot of hats.