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[crazedwarf]

Hi guys! As a noob I've got the game down pretty much now, but there's one thing I'm unsure about. When making a world, it seems people put importance on the history part, and that's where I'm a bit confused. Why is this an issue? For me, I use small seeds, so the only thing I know to look for history-wise (correct me if I'm wrong) is variation of civs and maybe a nice population of all of them. Sorry if this is an obvious question.. I've been reading the forums and wiki for weeks and nothing really explained it for me. Thanks.

[Mephansteras]

History can have subtle but strong effects on the game. Especially when it comes to resources available for your fortress through trade. For example, if the dwarves did poorly throughout history, you may find that your home civilization is very small, and has a limited set of resources to provide. Certain critical items like bauxite, flux, or coal could be completely unavailable outside of whatever you have at your fortress. A successful civ during world gen will have a much larger territory and therefore a wider range of goods.

Since you play on smaller maps, you can often get situations where certain races aren't available at all. Lack of goblins makes for a quiet, uneventful fort. If the humans didn't make it, you lose out on their trade caravans. Lack of elves rarely bothers most players, but can still have an impact. Especially on a treeless map.

In addition, there is always the possibility that your civ will be at war with the humans or elves, which means they'll be hostile and come siege you. It can be exciting, but it also changes the game quite a bit.

It has an even stronger effect on Adventurer mode, since it dictates what you'll see and what will be around for you to fight.

All of this is even more profound if you use mods that add in more races, since there is even more activity going on during world gen.

[crazedwarf]

Thank you for explaining that. I had an idea that was it, so I took the time to create some small worlds that had all the civs and nice populations/civs as you stated, and it's worked out well. Managed to find a couple of nicely populated small/smaller worlds that even had 3x3 places with just about everything but those nasty demons.  Thanks again.

[Warlord255]

Another thing with history that can be fun is researching old grudges and the accomplishments of civs; for example, having huge Orc (modded) empires that grew fantastically by conquering and crushing four other civs during world generation, and have been at war with a particular dwarven civ for years.

Likewise, it can be interesting to read up on historical figs of true legend - such as a fighter who slew many dragons, and had seven rematches with a titan.

Legends mode and world history in general adds a little drama to the game.

[ZeroGravitas]

There's also a great post by a guy who tamed a dragon.  The tame dragon sat in the castle peacefully.  Then one day, after the fortress had grown, the dwarf king moved to the fortress.

The dragon then up and killed the king. Turned out the king was an old enemy of the king's original group, due to some incident years early in the world's history.

You can get some other really interesting stuff in history. For example, in my current world, I made every civilization [RELIGION:ANY_APPROPRIATE_POWER] then gave all the megabeasts and civilizations various [SPHERE] tags. (And I increased megabeasts to size 200 and semimegabeasts to size 80 or so, so they don't die off very quickly at all).

So I have a few different civilizations led by various god-like megabeasts, as well as megabeasts wandering the world - there are more megabeasts than civilizations to worship them.

What's the importance of it all? It's cool.