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[John Johnston]

(Due to the unfortunate demise of my home computer, I'm running DF in the background at work.  I copied my save folder across, but decided to turn down the population cap because my work machine couldn't cope.)

Anyway:

My fortress was on a population cap of 110, and had a population of about 107, with baby cap at 15/20.  
I then moved it to a population cap of 60 and baby cap of 15/20.  Two and a half game years further on, lots of babies are still being born - population is now 116 (with 18 children) and my mayor now has ten children, two of whom were born over those two years!  I could see how she would maybe have her ninth child if she was already preggers when the limit was lowered, but think something odd is going on if she has managed to become pregnant at least once after the limit has gone down.  There's at least two dwarfs in the fortress who've had two children since the cap was lowered.

Reckon this is just due to my repeatedly changing conditions in the init file, or a real bug?

[Kagus]

The baby cap does not refer to a set number, as in 15/20 meaning a maximum of 15 babies and 20 children.  It means that 15 percent of your total population can be babies, and 20 percent can be children.

So, it's neither bug nor user error.  It's working just the way it's supposed to.

[Keldor]

Also, is it possible that some of the dwarves were already pregnant when you changed the settings?

[John Johnston]

The way the init file is worded suggests (well, to me at least) that the first number is a cap just like the pop. cap, and the second is a percentage, not both.

quote:This allows you to control the number of babies+children in your fortress.  The first number is an absolute cap on the number of babies+children.  The second is a percentage of the current number of adults in your fortress (the default is the essentially meaningless 1000% here).  The lower number is used as the cap.  The cap only prevents further pregancies, so migrant children, multiple births and existing pregnancies from old saves can still push you over the cap.  Setting either number to zero will disallow pregnancies in the fortress.

I took "absolute cap" to mean "absolute cap like the pop cap", which immediately precedes it in the init file.  If both are percentages why call the first absolute and call the second percentage?  I mean, fair enough if both *are* percentages (lemme see... with 100 dwarfs that'd be 15/16 kids, 110 dwarfs would be 16/17 kids, 120 would be 18 which is about right, although the total pop is less than 120, but near enough).

It's absolutely certain that some of the dwarfs were pregnant when the cap was changed.  But they then went on to have babies and get pregnant again and have more babies, when I was under the impression they were way over the limit n both dwarfs and kids) which is what surprised me.  

[Kagus]

Ah, I thought the file said both numbers were percentages.  Guess I remembered incorrectly.

[Crafty Barnardo]

This raises the question of what the gestation period of a dwarf fetus is.  

Also, is there any way to tell if a dwarf is pregnant?

[Toady One]

The population cap doesn't matter here -- it only affects migration.

I'm not sure what's going on with the baby cap.  I wasn't counting pregnancies toward the cap, but over two years that doesn't sound like the problem, though I might not be understanding the post.  I've made it count pregnancies for next time, but I'm not sure if that will matter here.