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[Sus]

I'd like to see the reduction of number of immigrants by a factor of 5. As it is, too many cheesemakers come too fast.

Heck, that's easy.
"Alright, would every novice cheesemaker please move to the burrow under the drawbridge over younder? Thank you."
*Pull the Lever*
--> immigrants reduced.

[Superior_Tomato]

I'd like to see the reduction of number of immigrants by a factor of 5. As it is, too many cheesemakers come too fast.

Heck, that's easy.
"Alright, would every novice cheesemaker please move to the burrow under the drawbridge over younder? Thank you."
*Pull the Lever*
--> immigrants reduced.

Not quite.

Urist McMillitiaLeader:"My nephew! Aaaaaaaaaaggggggggghhh!!!" (Que tantrum spiral).

[Sus]

I'd like to see the reduction of number of immigrants by a factor of 5. As it is, too many cheesemakers come too fast.

Heck, that's easy.
"Alright, would every novice cheesemaker please move to the burrow under the drawbridge over younder? Thank you."
*Pull the Lever*
--> immigrants reduced.

Not quite.

Urist McMillitiaLeader:"My nephew! Aaaaaaaaaaggggggggghhh!!!" (Que tantrum spiral).

Nothng a few -«☼olivine table☼»-s wouldn't fix. Of course, there is the annoyance of slabbing the atom-smashed bums immigrants...

On a more serious note, though, it might be prudent to cap the size of any single immigration wave to, say, 15 dorfs (or a configurable value akin to population cap).

[ravaught]

I tend to agree with Nohaku on this one, at least to a certain extent. Having a never ending supply of dwarfs makes your choices regarding them meaningless. I can see a few different ways of dealing with the situation, but there are underlying issues with each.

init file configuration

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Making it a configurable entity in the init file WOULD give players the ability to fine tune it, but, it would ultimately break the game balance because the incoming dwarfs would not scale to the resources/requirements available. This could be gotten around by making the number a factor instead of a straight cap. For example, if the possible numbers were 0-9, 0 being no immigrants, 5 being normal immigrants, and 9 being 200%, then it would take whatever is the base number of immigrants per amount of wealth and scale them accordingly. 

Immigration Officer

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Create a role in the game that becomes available once your population reaches a certain amount or as a noble position with certain requirements, that allows the player to make executive decisions. Then, new immigrants will submit an application for immigration, which the player can then choose to approve or deny. Those that get approved will arrive either 1 year, or 1 migration wave later. Those not selected remain in the queue. Those denied are removed from the queue and will not reapply to  your fort. If it were made as a noble position, having particular traits could affect the quality of immigrants coming in, bringing immigrants better suited to your fort. To add the finishing touches to this role, players would be able to assign priority rankings to the available unit types to give them some measure of direct influence over the type of dwarfs that your Noble tries to attract. To tie this back in with the nobles skills, a noble with a high organization skill would get more of the unit types that are a high priority, while a noble with a high flattery skill would attract immigrants with higher initial skill rankings, and a noble with a high lying skill would be able to attract immigrants more effectively after your fortress has had a meltdown.

This would effectively solve three problems:

First, the player would have direct control over the number of immigrants arriving from within the game, allowing for the ability to respond to changing circumstances. Second, the player would be able to tailor the TYPE of dwarfs arriving to suit the environment/industry that they have going. Third, it would allow the player to recover from meltdowns in their forts. To make the process even better, the applicants could have a minimum happiness factor, or min/max populations that must be in the fort for them to want to migrate, giving them the chance to decline their acceptance if the fort has dropped below that point. This means that mass slaughters and tantrums could seriously hamper immigration, even if you have a backlog of applicants ready to get in.

Even better would be to make the system work both ways, where dwarfs could immigrate OUT of your fort if they chose to, giving the player some incentive to not atom smash the cheesemakers.

Refactoring the Factors

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I have mentioned several times that using wealth as a factor for immigration, attacks, and other game triggers is bad, especially with the economy no longer in place. What would be better, is to remove the direct ties to volume of wealth, and institute a couple of factors. The wealth factor would be changed to a value that is based on overall wealth, distributed wealth as measured by property, and the overall number of dwarfs. Having 20 dwarfs but vast amounts of wealth would give you a higher wealth factor than having 200 dwarfs and the same amount of wealth.

Another would be crowding. Since dwarfs already have personality traits that define how well they work with others, another factor could be made based on the number of dwarfs compared to the size of the area, amount of work available, and the number of dwarfs that have their own private living/dining accomodations. Shy dwarfs would not want to live in a dormitory, eat in the meeting room, or share their workshop after all.

Another factor would be overall fortress moral. This would be tabulated off of all the positive/negative thoughts of the dwarfs that live in the fort. This would have the benefit of allowing the system to isolate specific desires in immigrants. For dwarfs that love slate, seeing a high happiness value for thoughts about slate would encourage them to immigrate, while seeing a lower number would discourage them.

The last factor would be industry, of course. Having a booming industry of a particular type would encourage dwarfs with that work type to immigrate in. This factor would be calculated after every caravan, and would be read as a total volume of trade in a given area. For example, if you trade 30k dwarfbucks worth of metal armor, you would see an increase in armour smithing/furnace operating types looking for a job in a booming market. To make it better, you could even have an upper limit to that, beyond which point the dwarfs would think that the job market was over saturated and be less willing to immigrate to a fortress where their skills were not need because they were already wilding available. Additionally, having immigrants placed in the job

To make it better, weight the opinions of newer immigrants more heavily than older residents, and only update the stats after a caravans or diplomats visit. This would simulate having news of your fortress being spread around the world. Big events could be triggers too. Massive slaughters might discourage civilian immigrants but create a surge in military types out to seek fame and glory. Maybe even fudge the numbers so that the upper and lower end of the spectrum gets exagerated in the calculations. Then, when the immigrants arrive that would take a larger hit to happiness for those values that didn't meet up with their expected value. This would simulate the "grass is always greener" effect and the subsequent dissappointment when they find out it's not.

The ultimate system would be a combination of all three things, which would work together to create an environment where the player actually had a reason to give a damn about what their dwarfs though of their fortress.

[NW_Kohaku]

If you were going by an init thing, you could simply set the "Vanilla default" mode to be that "current migration /40"  number, and then have a init modifier that multiplies migration waves by X percent.  Hence, you could just say "I want 4000% migration wave size" to get the insane levels of migration we have now.

It's just like with the minerals, though. 

The game was never meant to give you every single mineral in the game in every single embark in the first place, but as soon as there were people whose first time playing 0.31.x with its obscene overflow of minerals, they cry bloody murder over the game being "so hard" when you might have to go without having more ore than layer stone.  Steel equipment merely taking two to three times as much steel is making the game "so hard".  Now, when you can't automatically just candy-coat your entire military, there are complaints. 

Not to sound like I went uphill both ways in the snow or anything, but I not only remember playing when there were no guaranteed deposits of candy, but even now, I just don't mine the stuff, because it cheapens the game to have materials so much better than my opponents do. 

I have never mined adamantine for any purpose other than opening the HFS. 

Everyone complains about how the game is too easy, and how they have to keep upgrading the siegers to make there be a threat, but when you talk about taking away some of the completely unfair advantages dwarves have, to put it back in line with how the game was supposed to be balanced, people only want it easy mode.


As for Ravaught's "Refactoring the factors", this is mostly a set of good ideas, although I would argue with a few of them...

First, perhaps it might be a good idea to try to infer a sort of "unused industrial capacity" from players by measuring how many jobs are queued and how many workshops are built, compared to the number of dwarves, and assume that a high ratio would mean that there are "available jobs for immigrants", which act as a migration magnet.  Idlers, by contrast, should repel immigration.

This would probably work better than the relative wealth factor that would, itself, require serious economic overhauls to take place.

Fortress morale is another good idea - it makes sense to want to avoid a place where everyone is miserable and it reeks of miasma.

The game already actually does the opposite of what you are proposing on the industry front, however.  That is, if you have 0 fisherdwarves (because you atom-smash them all), then the game will say "Oh no! The player's all out of fisherdwarves! Quick, send another 12 in the next wave!"

This is a big reason why so many people want that ability to just directly tell liasons what sort of jobs you are looking for - because not everyone uses every sort of job, and the game thinks cheesemakers are somehow more vital than armorsmiths, or that you somehow have a use for fisherdwarves in the middle of the desert.

[ravaught]

Everyone complains about how the game is too easy, and how they have to keep upgrading the siegers to make there be a threat, but when you talk about taking away some of the completely unfair advantages dwarves have, to put it back in line with how the game was supposed to be balanced, people only want it easy mode.

This is a symptom of the degredation of console game difficulty levels over the last 20 years. Once the arcades phased out, designers were afraid that if they continued to make the games obscenely difficult that people wouldn't buy/play them. With the arcades, the high difficulty was their cash cow. What neither they nor the players knew then or seem to grasp now that it is known is that being frustrated is the first requirement to becomng completely engrossed in a game. You get a hit of dopamine every time you conquor something that frustrates your brain, so a game that offers higher levels of challenge gives you greater rewards. It is literally a drug addiction. That's why the arcades made so much money. They took that away from gaming now, and people aren't used to it. 

First, perhaps it might be a good idea to try to infer a sort of "unused industrial capacity" from players by measuring how many jobs are queued and how many workshops are built, compared to the number of dwarves, and assume that a high ratio would mean that there are "available jobs for immigrants", which act as a migration magnet.  Idlers, by contrast, should repel immigration.

That would work just as well. Incidentally, I would also add that if you are using that as a factor, its weight should be diminished by the overall fortress wealth. I.E. Having high idleness and high wealth is indicative of a fortress living in the lap of luxory with little effort on the part of the average dwarf. The proverbial land of milk and honey. Perhaps even have a lazy tag for some dwarfs, so that in that circumstance you tend to attract lazy dwarfs, the moochers of society. That in turn could feed a tantrum spiral later as hard working dwarfs become disillusioned with their ne'er-do-well kin drinking up all their ale. It would also provide a form of negative feedback to keep players motivated to continue expansion. Keep your dwarves gainfully employed or the leeches will descend upon you and screw up all you worked for.

[Torchy]

I also really dislike it that it now takes multiple bars of metal to make a single piece of armour.

It always took multiple bars to make those armor pieces (Breastplates, Greaves, and I believe Mail Shirts?) before, as in, back in 40d and days before. Armor becoming 1bar/piece regardless of what piece it was happened as a glitch, I believe a side-effect of Toady's reworking the material amounts systems to accommodate partial usages of thread/cloth in hospitals and the like (see: the famous "cancels job, needs 18000 iron bar" bug messages that cropped up after 2010 launched). If you don't believe me, recall that metal furniture was 1 bar a piece as well for that whole time period. It was intended to be three, was three before, and is three again now. You know, the maps have gotten a LOT bigger since 40d - many many more Z levels, on the order of dozens. I had 40d maps that didn't go 25 levels down to the bottom of the map. Bigger maps mean more stone mean more ore mean more metal. If anything, it would've made sense to increase the metal requirements for forging armor when 2010 launched (from a game balance perspective, not a material-volumes perspective) because the game was balanced for the multiple-bar values in a day when there was a lot less metal available on average to the player.

Remember, there is a worldgen option for mineral scarcity. Set that to 100 or whatever the lowest scarcity rate is and I promise you, promise you, if your stone layer type contains a certain type of metal at all you'll be up to your ears in it. The best part is, that variable can be set to whatever you like, so you car find just the right balance of metal availability for you on the sorts of maps you like to play.

Isn't that a better solution than asking Toady to carebear the hardcoded properties of forging?

[Nandorianen]

If I may sum up complaints about migrants in general, migration feature seems to be considered broken in few distinct areas.
1. It disrespects population cap set in .ini. Since this cap, if I am not mistaken, is made specifically for migrants and not for children, it would make sense that it would work for migrants. But it doesn't.
2. Quantity. They are coming too early, too many total, too many at once, etc.
3. Quality. They are coming with useless/unrelated skills. Their skills are too high.
4. Age. They are also too old to be adventuring, but bring dwarves too young to be adventuring with them (children) to balance it out and make it even more ridiculous.

Since there are dozens of this threads already and all this problems have been discussed countless times, may I suggest that we just put a request like "Migrants moddability: limits, skills, age" up for voting? There are few migrant-related requests already out there, but they describe only part of the problem, so maybe more complete list will get more votes and get Toady's attention.
I'm pretty sure that making these values moddable in .ini to some extent is a very basic piece of work. I think we can live with something like crude hard caps (max X migrants per wave, max skill-level X, max age X) for now before Toady can address this with more care and make it dwarfy and procedurally-generated, don't you think?

Please excuse me for my english if anything wrong, I am not a native speaker. And, possibly, for not knowing some of the customs here.

[kaijyuu]

Agreed for starting dwarf number.



As for immigrant control... I think that should be done in-game. Get rid of the option in the init entirely, and have your bookkeeper keep track of the number of dwarves, turning migrants away if there's too many.


It doesn't make sense that they stop showing up, killing migrants to get rid of them doesn't really make sense either, so having a way to turn them away and leave the map peacefully sounds like the ideal solution. Of course, sadistic players could still atom smash them.

[Aerval]

Agreed for starting dwarf number.

I thought dfusion is up again, so no reason for that.

[Baijiu]

I'm okay with getting less dwarves because managing big immigrant waves in a healthy fortress is pretty difficult right now. My only wish is for a way to request different immigrants  so I don't have to manually change every spinner/weaver/bone crafter to have more useful job permissions.

Perhaps allow you to request immigrants from the outpost liaison screen, or say "sorry, no room" and not get any migrants?

[NW_Kohaku]

Again, it's a gameplay flaw that there are so many idiots willing to walk lemming-style into your filthy hole in the ground when that hole in the ground has already shown such a propensity to kill idiots. 

It's a matter of not making the game "too hard" for some people, it's a matter of making it so that, instead of getting migrants whether you want to or not, that you have to try to get migrants before you actually get some.  You should have to work for the migrants you get, and that way, they'll be a reward, not a nuisance, when they come.

If you only get migrants when you do something like posting bounties or giving lavish gifts to the mountain homes or something, you can still make this thing an in-game mechanic that actually controls migration in a much more reasonable manner.

[kaijyuu]

I remember someone suggesting a liaison noble position that you could send to the mountainhome and/or other civilizations, and it'd work great for asking for migrants.


And on that note, why not be able to ask for elf/human migrants? 'Course most wouldn't be crazy enough to live with you, but I doubt everyone in dwarf fortress land is racist.

[NW_Kohaku]

I remember someone suggesting a liaison noble position that you could send to the mountainhome and/or other civilizations, and it'd work great for asking for migrants.


And on that note, why not be able to ask for elf/human migrants? 'Course most wouldn't be crazy enough to live with you, but I doubt everyone in dwarf fortress land is racist.

Considering as your dwarf civ can often have humans and elves living in the mountainhomes, and how we are supposedly going to get taverns that let random species of other civs just walk on through your fort, it's going to have to happen eventually.  Toady just hasn't taken the time to try to make the game play with more than one species yet.

And there already are some threads on the matter.

[dmatter]

While I would enjoy the challenge that NW_Kohaku has suggested. I think that perhaps when Toady does the starting conditions that perhaps we can have a challenge mode. Then again, who knows, maybe once Toady gets to the army arch you'll be going through so many dwarves you'll go into a tantrum spiral yourself. I mean, all those cleverly placed traps and the siege dug straight into your dining hall and killed half your dwarves and went down the next couple of stairs and killed another quarter of your dwarves while they were sleeping  .