Bay 12 Games Forum

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  

Author Topic: The minimum number of dwarves needed to produce a generation fort  (Read 2622 times)

Maloy

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile

What is the bare minimum needed? 3?
I'm thinking like generations down the line when your bloodlines are thoroughly intermixed
« Last Edit: March 08, 2023, 03:03:33 pm by Maloy »
Logged

Salmeuk

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: The minimum number of dwarves needed to produce a generation fort
« Reply #1 on: April 19, 2022, 02:13:28 am »

would it not be derived from statistical analysis, by calculating relative chances of marriage taking into account the various attractions (same-sex, asexual, iirc?)? While you might control the breeding chances of your embark dwarves, those that were birthed in the fortress might suffer from the inability to reproduce.

I an not well versed in the subject, but isn't it true that dwarves ignore inter-breeding with familial members fairly quickly? or ignore it altogether or something odd like that?
Logged

Maloy

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: The minimum number of dwarves needed to produce a generation fort
« Reply #2 on: April 19, 2022, 06:25:32 am »

I an not well versed in the subject, but isn't it true that dwarves ignore inter-breeding with familial members fairly quickly? or ignore it altogether or something odd like that?

I'm not sure on that part and is why I was wondering. I know there's a certain minimum of families you can have where the family tree will branch out enough to still allow breeding down the line.

Sexuality wise you can either resolve that via dfhack or more easily just make sure your initial married couples have enough kids to defy the odds. I forget the specific number, but I remember reading that there's usually a realistically small proportion of homosexual and asexual dwarves to reflect real world societies thus making generational forts viable

FantasticDorf

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: The minimum number of dwarves needed to produce a generation fort
« Reply #3 on: April 19, 2022, 07:24:07 am »

I an not well versed in the subject, but isn't it true that dwarves ignore inter-breeding with familial members fairly quickly? or ignore it altogether or something odd like that?

I'm not sure on that part and is why I was wondering. I know there's a certain minimum of families you can have where the family tree will branch out enough to still allow breeding down the line.

Sexuality wise you can either resolve that via dfhack or more easily just make sure your initial married couples have enough kids to defy the odds.

Id definitley skew the orientation tags (they're influencable in raws) before attempting this, keeping in mind that actual gameplay vs worldgen couples are different in that obviously a lot more day to day dangers to life can occur in your reproductive programme in a fortress, and couples can break up/get sieged and die in conflict more often as historic beings and rather uninteresting background nonhistoric fodder. The risk without marriage conformist couples is that you can spend a lot of time for poor results just on chance that your migrants and starting 7 weren't min-maxing.

Id recommend making about 5 micro-forts, build something you're happy with in each at looking at, then DFhack timeskip calendar (a recent feature) on the embark screen 10 years ahead, by which time each dwarf couple should have atleast 3 children.
Logged

Eniteris

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: The minimum number of dwarves needed to produce a generation fort
« Reply #4 on: April 22, 2022, 06:56:10 am »

As an experimental report, I have a pure vanilla pop-cap 50 fort running for 20 years, and I've had maybe two marriages and some immigrant couples. None of the younger generation have married, and only one pair have become lovers. I'm not using honeymoon suites, but they're living a fairly relaxed life. Lots of close friends and kindred spirits, but very few lovers and marriages.

Dwarves are generated with only a 75% chance of ever marrying the opposite gender and producing children, so that's quite a bar to clear. I also don't know if the orientation/commitment degree is reflected in the personality description.

There's also a ban close family marriages; I'm not sure if anyone ever specifically calculated the distance required for marriages to occur.

DFhack can do gaydar and force marriages, and modifying the raws could also help.
Logged

Maloy

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: The minimum number of dwarves needed to produce a generation fort
« Reply #5 on: April 22, 2022, 06:03:13 pm »

As an experimental report, I have a pure vanilla pop-cap 50 fort running for 20 years, and I've had maybe two marriages and some immigrant couples. None of the younger generation have married, and only one pair have become lovers. I'm not using honeymoon suites, but they're living a fairly relaxed life. Lots of close friends and kindred spirits, but very few lovers and marriages.

Hmm I did a fort with 50 dwarves too. They had mandatory half years off from labors to hang around the tavern and temple
I actually have a ton of married couples and 40 children born from it

My interest from the topic came because I realize that even though I successfully bred a whole population for the future it's JUST big enough for fps to be a problem
Whereas what if I only had a few families?
Idk just wanted to experiment

Salmeuk

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: The minimum number of dwarves needed to produce a generation fort
« Reply #6 on: April 23, 2022, 12:47:22 am »

a lot of previous research posts suggested that the way you design your taverns and living spaces has a HUGE effect on whether or not your dwarves will interact and form couples. Of course, this was done for previous versions, but nothing much should have changed. It is likely that Maloy had a much tighter setup, forcing more interactions and allowing for those couplings to occur.

Logged

NordicNooob

  • Bay Watcher
  • *Not actually Nordic
    • View Profile
Re: The minimum number of dwarves needed to produce a generation fort
« Reply #7 on: June 20, 2022, 02:49:34 pm »

Both the technical and practical limitation of minimum dwarves should be four if you're talking about a controlled setup like your embark party. I don't think three would work with divorces since even if you had the two breeding couples from the marriage-babies-divorce-marriage-babies setup (which is obviously quite hard to do), the resulting dwarves should still be listed as siblings, which cannot marry each other. They might be listed as cousins, or maybe even half-sibling if the wiki hasn't been updated (which is quite possible), but it's not practical to try to keep a fort going with an unreliable setup that the three dwarf chain would need, so even if it's theoretically possible we can disregard it as a venue of survival.

Two compatible couples will always allow a fort of arbitrary size to be birthed and sustained, since the only relationship requirement for marriage is that they aren't a parent/grantparent and they aren't siblings.

However, if you're trying to run a fort with as few dwarves as possible and don't have control over who marries who, there's no technical "100% safe" level of population since you could just end up with an entire generation of incompatible dwarves. That said, 30-40 is a pretty safe range to have quite a few options for couples. It is worth noting that the first few generations are a bit riskier, since the ages of your married couples will be very similar at first, resulting in them all dying off in a span of a short few years and just hoping their kids might marry, as opposed to having more sustained die-offs when the ages are spread out a bit more.

Daily interaction should be irrelevant here, since you can almost always force a marriage between compatible dwarves with honeymoon suites. I also use them to ensure dwarves will get another kid cooking right after a birth. Using this method I believe I have nine couples in a fort of 40, and some of that 40 are still kids.
Logged

PatrikLundell

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: The minimum number of dwarves needed to produce a generation fort
« Reply #8 on: June 20, 2022, 05:19:52 pm »

I think the way to form a population from 3 dorfs would be to have one couple plus the third one being as young as possible who'd then marry a kid produced by the original couple. That couple's kids would be eligible for marriage to the original couple's kids, as I think uncle/aunt is just far enough to be eligible (don't try that at home: it produces horrible results down the line). Since dorfs are reproductive right up to the end and are long lived, there's a decent chance of is "working". Note that it also hinges on the comparatively recent change to permitted age differences (it used to be 10 years, but is now 50% of the age of the younger one, or 10 years whichever is larger: both have to be considered adult).
Logged

Putnam

  • Bay Watcher
  • DAT WIZARD
    • View Profile
Re: The minimum number of dwarves needed to produce a generation fort
« Reply #9 on: June 22, 2022, 04:23:04 pm »

I an not well versed in the subject, but isn't it true that dwarves ignore inter-breeding with familial members fairly quickly? or ignore it altogether or something odd like that?

I'm not sure on that part and is why I was wondering. I know there's a certain minimum of families you can have where the family tree will branch out enough to still allow breeding down the line.

Sexuality wise you can either resolve that via dfhack or more easily just make sure your initial married couples have enough kids to defy the odds.

Id definitley skew the orientation tags (they're influencable in raws) before attempting this, keeping in mind that actual gameplay vs worldgen couples are different in that obviously a lot more day to day dangers to life can occur in your reproductive programme in a fortress, and couples can break up/get sieged and die in conflict more often as historic beings and rather uninteresting background nonhistoric fodder. The risk without marriage conformist couples is that you can spend a lot of time for poor results just on chance that your migrants and starting 7 weren't min-maxing.

i wouldn't bother with orientation, since there's only a 5% chance for dwarves to have no heterosexual inklings and the game has a major bias in dwarf mode towards heterosexual relationships anyway, as determined by me hacking all of the starting 7 into "maximally poly" individuals (maxed lust/love propensity, all bisexual) and finding that the women all become lovers with every man and vice versa but only one homosexual relationship happened at all