Consciousness and harm it causes to a breeding.
My fellow gentledorfs, today I'd like to present you my report on such an important matter as dwarven breeding. Forgive me if it all was said before, but, I presume, this information isn't what is known to the bone to community and thus bears repeating.
Where do we begin, in order to get a children, two individuals must get married, thats a rule. Getting two unfamiliar dwarves to pair is long and inconvenient process. Luckily for them, pregnancies aren't the only one source of population in a fortress, being accompanied by constant flow of migrants. Besides, when they do get up to it, dwarven women start churning out babies like rock mugs. However, for races relying on wast numbers, or those with disproportional gender distribution this is a serious impediment to flourishing and thus must be overcome.
Let's start our search from what happens in intelligent beings heads that prevents them from doing everything possible for kind preservation, what makes them different from darwin responsible animals.
Experiment 1. Dog civilization.
Simply replaced dwarves in their entity with dogs.
Results: No jobs can be assigned, they breed just fine.
Experiment 2. Adding CAN_SPEAK and CAN_LEARN tags.
Now they need to eat and drink (due to the first tag, just pointing out that the wiki is true
about that, also I'd like to add that you can't change jobs, draft or noble a creature incapable of
communication.). Still no jobs could be assigned.
Experiment 3. Taking out pet related tags.
Results are promising. Jobs in, breeding out.
Now it is obvious that getting civilized has something to do with loosing of bucking freedom. Lets blame it onto women emancipation, for a starter.
Experiment 4. Back to stables.
Placing pet related tags to a female caste and intelligence ones to male.
This is a triumph.
summary:
They breed.
Men: standard citizen behavior including feeding requirements.
Women: behave as pet would. It's worth noting that they're shown on embark screen and you can mark them for adoption or butchering.
First try.
Almost even gender distribution. First puppies are born during summer. At the units screen dogs are sorted by gender: males including puppies first (apparently, because others are considered animals, just an interesting fact). Females don't have the names, except starting non bought ones. Two males have lovers listed. Puppies don't have fathers.
It's hard to say whether it is one impregnation per male.
By the winter meat supplies are depleted and almost everyone is killed as a result of loyalty cascade caused by an awkward use of runesmith, only two aforementioned lovers and their couples surviving. Later, one female succumbs to infection, then one of males, being legendary wrestler and biter already, goes bersek kills other but receives enough damage to be subdued by his own love named Urist, which chills out in a company of ghostly puppies for a two years before the universe reverts to singularity state. (aka shift+delete)
Second attempt.
Tweaked male/female ratio to be 1/3. Right after embark it was 1/10 or so. Nevertheless all
(or almost all)gave birth. The loved one gave another birth after I've killed the loving one with
runesmith.(Needs more detailed investigation). The population reached 84 before food run out.
I like to think they all went to heaven.
Experiment 5. Feministic revolution.
Now women run world.
Predicable fail.
1 year run, no births whatsoever, females got some friends (other females only). While this is reasonable course of actions considering shortage of resources, somethings tells me that reason wasn't what caused this behavior.
Experiment 6, Woman, know your place.
They're pets but are allowed to speak and go to school. Pack has grown over 80 before promptly starving out.
Success. Just as planned.
Actually, that's how tigermen work. (Now it's obvious, after all we got through)
Everyone breeds, have names and is valid target for nobling. Though, in my impression, breeding was faster in fourth experiment and now you could butcher them at will.
As a summary, the results are pretty self-explaining, if womens 'only after we get married' thing leads to depopulation of your creatures, you know what to do. Via cunning use of this method one can create hives, concubines and slaves, though the last one might need extensive use of Therapist. Or someone could use this feature to bring a catmod to a new degree of awesome.
Also, this means that every tag could be caste specific and is worth testing. Who knows, maybe by using REGIONAL_FORCE and assorted religion tags we could create a worshiped castes, like ethereal tau.
If there is anyone willing to verify or elaborate my experiments or to update wiki articles on related notes, you are welcome here.
Well, thank you for attention, now I bid your farewell till our next meeting.
upd:
Here's how these tags work:
[pet] - makes creature show up on animals z-list, allows premarital impregnation and trading creatures.
Creature without [can_learn] and [can_speak] tags is simply friendly unit contributing only to breeding. You can assign rooms to any creature of the main race, creatures will develop relationships to any members of their race even not speaking ones.
[can_learn] - allows drafting and nobling provided you have someone who [can_speak] in your civ.
[can_speak] - enables labor menu. You can't view nobles mandates if he cannot speak.