Baby Child Cap

[TheUnknownGeneral]

So I understand the second half is a percentage of the current number of adults in your fortress, but what does that mean? If I keep the first half 100, but change the second half to say 50% does that mean I could have a combined total of 100 babies and children so long as the adult population is higher than 50%?

[Fel]

The percentage is the percentage under which babies+children must be compared to the total population to be able to have more babies (so if there are at least 50% babies+children in your fort, no new babies would be born until that changes).
The other number is how many there can be at the same time before getting new babies gets disabled.

Note that it only affects the birth of new babies being conceived (starting the pregnancy), already pregnant dwarves will still give birth and migrants can also bring more children.

You can definitely end up with a lot more than the cap in specific situations (lots of pregnancies and possibly children in migrants waves while getting few adults) and migrants can keep coming with plenty of children but at least it prevents a baby boom to grow your population too quickly with dwarves that can't work until they are 18.

[TheUnknownGeneral]

Originally posted by Fel:

The percentage is the percentage under which babies+children must be compared to the total population to be able to have more babies (so if there are at least 50% babies+children in your fort, no new babies would be born until that changes).
The other number is how many there can be at the same time before getting new babies gets disabled.

Note that it only affects the birth of new babies being conceived (starting the pregnancy), already pregnant dwarves will still give birth and migrants can also bring more children.

You can definitely end up with a lot more than the cap in specific situations (lots of pregnancies and possibly children in migrants waves while getting few adults) and migrants can keep coming with plenty of children but at least it prevents a baby boom to grow your population too quickly with dwarves that can't work until they are 18.

Gotcha so you only need to change one of them to work? So I can either keep the first half so a combined total of 100 babies and children exist regardless the % of adults or change the second half so a combined total of 100 babies and children can exist but babies stop being born depending on the adult population? For FUN I want to limit my fort pop to 75 and rely on my dwarves setting families in order to grow my population.

[Fel]

It depends on if you intend to grow the population until it is very high or not (even if it's through babies growing up instead of migrants).

Usually just having the percentage on something manageable is good enough, the flat amount only matters for very large forts.
With your example of 100 and 50%, the "100" only starts to matter when the total population is above 200, which is already a relatively large population and likely to be a point where you want to start thinking about the hard cap anyway (to preserve the game's speed to some extent).

[TheUnknownGeneral]

From what I saw from Blind's video on recommended settings, it seems the hard cap and baby + children cap are related. So if I have the hard cap at 500 (just an example) and the first half at the default, of the 500, a combined total of 100 can be babies or children. So if I wanted more babies + children relative to the adult population, I'd change the second half so more babies + children can exist. So if I have it to 70% of the total 500, 350 are adults and 150 are either babies or children? Does that sound right to you? My last and only 2nd successful fortress, got to the default cap, and surprisingly ran fine even at 4x4 embark on a small world. I'm thinking of doing a medium world at either 2x2 or 3x3 embark.

[Fel]

I'm not certain I follow what you mean throughout the whole thing to be able to confirm or deny, so I'll try to reword it to see if we are saying the same thing or not.

100 and 70% on a population of 500 would mean 100 babies+children being the cap, because it caps as long as one of the two is reached.
For lower populations, the percentage is usually reached first, for larger populations it's the amount.

[TheUnknownGeneral]

Originally posted by Fel:

I'm not certain I follow what you mean throughout the whole thing to be able to confirm or deny, so I'll try to reword it to see if we are saying the same thing or not.

100 and 70% on a population of 500 would mean 100 babies+children being the cap, because it caps as long as one of the two is reached.
For lower populations, the percentage is usually reached first, for larger populations it's the amount.

Ok that makes more sense. Thank you for your help.