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[MuonDecay]

I like option 1, despite wandering a little bit into deus ex machina territory...

However, the other two I think are entirely too convenient or leave too many unexplained loose ends. The first one is on thin ice as it is in terms of what exactly is going on to make all that zombification occur. (hm, weird... firefox suggests "mortification" and "mummification" as some of the spelling revisions of zombification)

[Cthulhu]

I don't like option 2, why would chasms'n'such just appear like that?

Options 1 and 3 could work, maybe if new engravings were generated, or special enemies, maybe it could be a chance to implement books you can read, and the items give hints as to what happened.

[Erk]

With #2 I didn't mean a new chasm appeared, I meant monsters from existing chasm biomes and lakes and such appeared. That would be a great one to have implementable in game: some kind of trigger that causes an inexorable assault out of the chasm/river/magma pipe.

The others, well: it would be tons of fun to have more ways to overrun the fort, but I think some people are kinda missing the point. It's not to make playing the fort at the time more fun, it's to link the fortress up better to adventure mode, or to reclaim, to make exploring fortresses in those modes more interesting. Like I said before, having a monster invasion would be awesome an' all, but it wouldn't be at all what I'm describing. You can't set that up for an adventurer, you just wind up with a messy fortress full of randomly dispersed monsters. You can already do that: open up the pits, let a goblin siege take over, etc.

Anyway. Having engravings or scattered scrolls and books or just engraved items spawn to describe what happened, especially for #1, would be awesome. Then even the player of the old fort would have some surprises. It'd be sort of as if the player left, and the horrible events transpired after that. Making the stories randomly generate in a coherent way might be a bit tougher, but that does seem to be toady's forte.

"An image is drawn on the wall in Dwarf blood. The image is of a dwarf and a zombie. The dwarf is striking down the zombie. An image is drawn on the wall in dwarf blood. The image is of a dwarf surrounded by zombies. The zombies are groaning. The dwarf is making a plaintive gesture."

[Faces of Mu]

I do like the idea of making suggestions around what alternative outcomes there could be for the fort other than abandon and retire. And cause-and-effect suggestions work really well.

Mebbe there is only ever one option at the end of your fort, "abandon", but the outcome is entirely dependent on the events in the fort during your time, and events in the world. That way, in most cases the fort would just retire as a new outpost of the civilisation, but Toady could program hidden fun stuff about the ways a fort could end, and if you are looking for a particular outcome you'd have to work towards it AND avoid the other outcomes to succeed.

So for example, normal fortresses when abandoned become the 'retired' fort we talk about, but if you abandon during a siege then the fort becomes perpetually sieged so that the dwarves manage to survive on the inside and the goblins get constant reinforcements, but neither actually win. If you abandon during recurring chasm attacks (say after the fourth attack), then the fort gets dominated by chasm dwellers. If it's abandoned in haunted territory, there's been a lot of dwarven deaths, AND there's a significant undead population on the map (either most of the time, or when you abandon) then the fort becomes an undead AND/OR Ghost fort (hostile or otherwise).

The idea is that under specific conditions you can produce a specific kind of dungeon scenario (and hence play out a story as TO and TT want), but you won't be guarranteed that outcome unless you've worked really hard. You also may not care about what the outcome is, but at least it will vary somewhat.

[Erk]

I do like the idea of making suggestions around what alternative outcomes there could be for the fort other than abandon and retire. And cause-and-effect suggestions work really well.

Mebbe there is only ever one option at the end of your fort, "abandon", but the outcome is entirely dependent on the events in the fort during your time, and events in the world. That way, in most cases the fort would just retire as a new outpost of the civilisation, but Toady could program hidden fun stuff about the ways a fort could end, and if you are looking for a particular outcome you'd have to work towards it AND avoid the other outcomes to succeed.

So for example, normal fortresses when abandoned become the 'retired' fort we talk about, but if you abandon during a siege then the fort becomes perpetually sieged so that the dwarves manage to survive on the inside and the goblins get constant reinforcements, but neither actually win. If you abandon during recurring chasm attacks (say after the fourth attack), then the fort gets dominated by chasm dwellers. If it's abandoned in haunted territory, there's been a lot of dwarven deaths, AND there's a significant undead population on the map (either most of the time, or when you abandon) then the fort becomes an undead AND/OR Ghost fort (hostile or otherwise).

The idea is that under specific conditions you can produce a specific kind of dungeon scenario (and hence play out a story as TO and TT want), but you won't be guarranteed that outcome unless you've worked really hard. You also may not care about what the outcome is, but at least it will vary somewhat.

Hmm, that is quite interesting. I'd like to see more control, maybe an average of the two. Like, you don't get the option to zombify your fortress unless you are in a zombie territory. Or if the game gets more into the realm of questing from the fortress, maybe you need to have some kind of Necromantic Artifact in your fortress to get the option. However, if you have that item, you get additional options beyond just Abandon; you can still Abandon if you want to. Something like that might satisfy a bit more of the desire to ahve the fortress grow into its new state...