oh, im so excited. i've noticed new behavior. Instead of generating a new world, I took one that I had sitting around that I've never actually played in. I kept this one because it had multiple treeless terrifying areas in different biomes, and some with no-contact.
for this experiment though, i picked a site that was heavily forrested. if im going to make war on the humans, i might as well have some balista parts and ammo.
First: started a human adventurer in every human civ. moved each one to their local capital. met the leader. recorded the adventurers name, leaders name, civ's name, and capitols name. marked each capital on the map. DID NOT join parties bewteen any adventurers and civ leaders.
on the way, learned the name of the demon who is locked in the mountain range where my fort will be. its a good one, but i dont have it here so i cant remember it now, but i will post it later.
Second: Founded a new fort, Archship. No animals on the map, for some reason. Brought in 4 skilled miners, 4 picks, two skilled engravers, one skilled herbalist. loaded up the rest of my points on meat, brought nothing else. Carved out the foundation for the fort, all the way to the magma. just about the time I was reaching the magma and finishing smoothing the floor to mud-proof it, the humans came.
Contact made with human merchants in early spring (happened before i was expecting it, so i didnt get a good scum-point setup). on the (c)iv list, it lists the adventurer AND the civ leader that were in that capitol. They are both listed by profession, rather than "associate of..." -- i suspect this is because they were not joined in a party, but were rather just individual residents of that city.
Seized their goods and abandoned the fort while the humans were still in the trade depot. HAH!
Third: migrated adventurers and civ leaders to that same capital. I brought them in three waves. The first was an adventurer who to their local leader, and the adventurer-leader pair from two other civs. a similar group of 6 from another adventurer, and a smaller group of 4 from another. I did not have any of them join groups, nor join groups with the original leader in the target capitol.
i'm currently working on bringing in a representative dwarf from each dwarf civ.
next step will be reclaiming and trying to make contact with that same civilization again. i am hoping to have a positive result tonight. this project must suceed before the next version comes out!!