Bay 12 Games Forum
Dwarf Fortress => DF Gameplay Questions => Topic started by: Bronzebeard on May 15, 2010, 10:24:48 am
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You can regulate a fortress's population cap in the init file, no? That said, how high? Have too many dwarves been known to crash the game? How many dwarves could flock to the fortress?
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The reason there is a popcap option in the init file is that some people do not want to or can not play with many dwarves, the default cap of 200 will bring most computers to a crawl. I don't think anyone has done experiments on what the maximum number of dwarves is, mostly because it would take literally years due to the slowing from many dwarves (or their pathing).
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In older versions (0.28 or thereabouts) I've taken the population as high as 200, though the slowing was noticeable.
In current versions, I find the game to be getting near unplayably slow in the low-100s range, so I now keep the cap much lower.
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I have a quad core @ 2.50, and my present fortress (at 201) is running at about 30-50 FPS. I could go with more dwarves, though; what's the point of having a massive fortress if only 200 dwarves occupy it? I'm thinking more dwarves would be more realistic and that I could pull off about 400 -- major lag aside. If no one's attempted higher than 200, I guess I could set the cap higher and cross my fingers.
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I have a quad core @ 2.50, and my present fortress (at 201) is running at about 30-50 FPS. I could go with more dwarves, though; what's the point of having a massive fortress if only 200 dwarves occupy it? I'm thinking more dwarves would be more realistic and that I could pull off about 400 -- major lag aside. If no one's attempted higher than 200, I guess I could set the cap higher and cross my fingers.
Go for it! I find the game to be pretty much playable at 20FPS (and 40 dwarves; my computer is slow), so you should be fine with 300-400. Build the largest fortress ever, something truly worthy of being the Mountainhome.
Report back results, of course; what's the point of experiments if no one else knows the results?
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When I saw the topic title, I thought this was going to be a post about Pop-Cap games (Peggle and the like) *shudders*
The main reason I wouldn't put population higher is because I wouldn't be able to find work for all of those dwarves - there's no reason that you can't raise it if things are still running smoothly at 200. If you make your fortress efficient for pathfinding, you can probably get even more.
My advice would be to move it up in stages - if you bump it up by 20 each time, it's easier to stop when you start to lag.