While he dreams dwarfly dreams I think there should be discussion about genning the world.. Every time I ever considered a community fort the first big snag I'd hit is genning a world.. :|
I personally play..
*the smallest island map with reduced 'max population after worldgen' (I set this to 90, which is where my crappy laptop starts to show lag during fort mode, and it usually helps me experience less lag at sites in adventurer mode, as well as keeps the Legends a bit more trimmed..)
*10,000 embark points (undwarfly), as a default setting. I usually only buy what the default amount of points provides, but it is nice to have those extra points available just in case.. I mostly just do this so I don't have to mess with parameters afterward..
*I bump up the "Desired Evil/Good Squares in Large Region" option to about 5 each so substantial areas of each alignment show up more often.. I have noticed Evil usually claims the whole ocean or an entire mountain, while Good can claim an entire island map (and this leads to the entire island being a single biome + mountain)
*I set caves to visible and also set the openness so caves are very wide and open (and nearly flat in a lot of cases, which can lead to huge areas being underwater..)
*Sometimes I weaken the erosion levels just to get a different-looking map..
*I always turn off bogeymen..
.. but that's largely unrelated to a community fort, as most people use bigger landmasses.. I personally enjoy the compact island/region maps the most, and have always dreamed of creating a fort on every open tile for the ultimate adventure-mode map :>
So, on-topic worldgen stuff!
1. Bogeymen on or off? This only concerns the potential adventurers your community fort may draw in with its awesomeness..
2. Caves visible? (to me this one doesn't matter much, got into the habit of using it for adventure-only civilization-less maps during my adventurer craze)
3. Cavern type (flat/open or serpentine)
4. Should any fps-friendly changes be made (lower site population) or any history-clarifying options be used (cull unimportant figures, reduced civilization count, lowered 'max site cap')?
5. Should it be mandatory that there be a living/active site for all civs (elf/gob/kob/dwarf) + a necromancer tower? (all these would need to be in close proximity of each other for them all to visit a fort, another reason I like the smaller map size, and history usually can't run a full 30 years without at least one civ getting obliterated)
6. Once this perfect map is genned, where do you embark?! :> Should the embark size be framerate friendly? Just whether or not to use a totally Good or Evil site is a tough choice.. Gen a world with Good/Evil bordering each other and then get good, evil and natural biomes all in one embark
Can't forget the potential of jungles, deserts, marshes and tundras, also.. (I hate mountain embarks and refuse to list them, bahahaha!)
7. No aquifer? Freshwater or saltwater? Oceanside embark or no?!
8. Freezing winters or non-freezing winters? Embark by a river or no?
9. Should I breathe into a paper bag if the room is spinni
Okay, #9 wasn't serious, but still! This is why I never attempted a community map.. Seems like there is no right answer, and I wonder if there is a best (or dwarfiest) answer, and even if there was a best (or dorfyest) answer it'd differ so much from person to person that the answer would turn into an opinion