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[nomad_delta]

So apparently Legends Mode has always had a "Historical Maps" function that I'd never noticed before until this new version.  I'd mostly stayed away from Legends mode, finding it to be mostly huge lists of thousands of individual events and sites and such that were impossible to navigate in any meaningful way.

The "Historical Maps" option in Legends, though, displays the world map and lets you cycle through it in 10 year increments in time from the beginning of history to the present.  In particular it displays a color/symbol overlay for the spread of the different civilizations on the map, including goblin civilizations originating from their towers:



In this map you can see that goblin civilization "The Tufted Malice" is off by itself in the west at Year 10, which I have crudely circled in red.

If I cycle the history forward to year 200 you can see that the goblins have expanded to cover a lot more territory, but that the human civilization "The Union of Glazing" has also expanded and is overlapping their territory.  On the actual screen the displays blinks back and forth between the goblin symbol and the human civ symbol so you can see the overlap, hard to capture in a screenshot:



so here's what I'm thinking -- for people that are finding even in the new version that they're not getting the goblin sieges they want -- maybe try going to Legends mode first and watching the Historical Map to see where the goblins are operating, and try to embark within their "sphere of influence" according to the map.

Thoughts?

Also: does anyone familiar with Legends mode know whether there's any easy way to check the status of a particular goblin civilization to find out how they're doing, how strong they area, how many members/armies they have?  From my example, maybe "The Tufted Malice" has actually been completely slaughtered by the human invasion in their territory and they only have like 10 goblins left.  Is there some way to check for that in Legends so we can try to embark not only near a goblin civilization, but near one that is strong with lots of soldiers to fuel invasions?

--nomad_delta

[Shvoedaddy]

Sounds like it's time for you to crack open the legends viewer utility. I never embark without first consulting that thing.

[nomad_delta]

Sounds like it's time for you to crack open the legends viewer utility. I never embark without first consulting that thing.

Oh dang, thanks for the tip -- checking Legends Viewer out right now -- apparently "The Tufted Malice" goblin civ is doing quite well -- no idea whether the populations listed are all currently alive as of year 250, or if it's showing every member that has ever lived in the past, but still:

Populations
43522 Goblins
23600 Trolls
23600 Beak Dogs
201 Humans
172 Goblin Outcasts
53 Human Outcasts
41 Human Prisoners
1 Emerald Fiends
1 Wren Men
1 Pangolin Men
1 Dingo Men
1 Great Horned Owl Men

[Shvoedaddy]

I think as far as site pop its displaying the living population. Though I could be wrong. I seem to recall there is also a "living" entity populations list. But yea, legends viewer is up there with dfhack/therapist in importance for me, huge shout out to whoever maintains that.

[nomad_delta]

Also apparently in my little test world I generated the Dwarves are getting their asses kicked -- Legend Viewer tells me there are only 27 dwarves left alive in the world.  The two Dwarven civlization Fortresses that existed at the beginning were both destroyed by Forgotten Beasts in the years 2 and 7, respectively.  This is a tough world in which to be a dwarf.  I guess the 7 I embarked with were just homeless wanderers from the destroyed civilization?

[SaD-82]

Even if you rolled dead dwarven civs, you will always get hardcoded migrant waves to build your civ again.

On a side note:
Don't dismiss Legends Mode/Viewer because of the amount of information.
I started many times to play Adventure Mode or Fortress Mode... only to get distracted by all these nice little stories told in Legends.
Sad stories.
Fun stories.
Awkward stories.
Sometimes I browse Legends and when I look at my watch, hours have gone by.

[TheFlame52]

Ditto on interesting stories. Read Yonali Smithwings in my sig.

Also, I found out that one of the dwarves at Bastiongate had his wife and only son killed by an ettin. He later watched it horribly stabbed to death by my champion from Bastiongate's battlements. Justice was served almost a hundred years later.

[Zuglarkun]

I stick to a few "guidelines" when generating worlds myself to ensure that I always get a healthy amount of goblins, elves and humans as neighbors (I don't use legends viewer, though I probably should). So I treat these as "indicators" of a healthy civilization, though its probably easier to just check from legends viewer and extrapolate the data from there. A combination of both techniques is probably the most reliable as sifting through legends for population numbers is particularly cumbersome and unreliable.

These pertain more for world gen instead of legends. But they are still applicable as they use the same site symbols.

- Pay attention to the world map after stopping world gen and before exiting the world gen page. You want to highlight the various symbols of sites and check whether they are occupied by the races you want. What you want is elven forest retreat instead of just forest retreat, and stuff like that. The "elven" shows that the site is occupied though it does not tell the population. Sometimes, sites get conquered so a dwarf fortress shows up as "the goblin fortress of so and so" even though the site symbol shows a dwarf fortress. Conquered sites that are abandoned show up as ruins instead. It helps if you're familiar with the symbols so you can tell at a glance instead of highlighting them manually, that way you can just abort world gen instead of saving the map and checking legends mode, it saves you some time. I find the map legend on the wiki very useful in that regard.

- You can also tell at a glance from the world gen map whether the goblin sites are in range or not, its 30 tiles for goblins and 10 tiles for towers. Also, tight clusters of sites that are not empty might indicate a strong population presence.

- Make sure those races are still reproducing babies, I tab down to the bottom of the units list in legends mode to check. Not a big requirement for goblins since they can steal babies but its probably better if they are also producing more of their own kind.

- If you've got time to burn and want to really to be precise about it, you can look at the world gen map while the years count down and stop every now and then to check the sites. I've gotten to the stage where I'm familiar with the map symbols so I can tell when the sites are all abandoned (the map symbols change to reflect this) then I'll stop world gen before it even reaches the end year and roll up a new map.

- There are other things you can do to boost population numbers for races even before world gen. For example, mountains are necessary for mountainhomes and hills are necessary for dwarven hillocks. Boosting those numbers will increase the number of sites available for dwarves to occupy during world gen. Likewise, increasing evil biomes in the world can boost the number of sites goblins can occupy, the same thing goes for elves with forests and humans with grasslands and plains.

- The default regions and islands when you design a new world with advanced parameters are usually quite balanced but you can tweak them to your liking to boost population. Likewise, increasing the number of civilizations can increase the spread of that race across the map instead of all of them being concentrated in one particular region of the map. It also acts as a buffer for megabeast attacks that wreck entire civilizations during first few years of worldgen before they can establish sites and defend themselves.