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[catten]

DF maps have really cool large-scale geological features (things on the scale of an embark tile or larger), but there's actually very little going on at smaller scales. Ground tends to be either perfectly flat, or else sloped uniformly---if perhaps steeply---toward the nearest mountain.

Things that would be really nice to have:

• Hills that are big enough to build on but small enough to be completely contained within a single embark tile... perfect for hill-top fortresses.
  
• Badlands and many deserts should have water-scoured terrain: small canyons, gullies, hillocks, and tons of annoying bumps and dips that make building generally difficult.
  
• Sand dunes and rolling hills.
  
• Lakes (salt or fresh) and islands in lakes/oceans and rivers
  
• Lava fields around volcanoes (both live and extinct)
  
• Meandering rivers in flat areas
  

There are probably any number of other interesting geological features that would be really fun to have, but you get the idea. Point is to have significant variation in elevation at scales in the 1-50 tile range, with a level of "cragginess" appropriate to the biome/geology of the area.

[Orestes]

• Lakes (salt or fresh) and islands in lakes/oceans and rivers
  

Really liked that idea.

[smjjames]

Meandering rivers already kind of exist.

Pretty sure all of those are planned.

Having true canyons with sheer cliff faces would also be cool. plus seaside cliffs.

[GavJ]

"World Gen should be vastly more customizable and convenient:"
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=138005.0

Most notably, partway down the OP, regarding "Make the resolution of the worldpainter tool be able to go down to a single EMBARK square" for what should be a pretty easy way to practically go about allowing control over this the way we want with probably not much coding.

Basically, world gen right now seems to use a grid at the granularity of roughly region tiles. It's probably only a couple lines of code to allow it to be at embark tile resolution in terms of the random generator. As an option (it will slow down world gen in exchange by a factor of a lot, so not by default. But if we want to wait 45 minutes for an epic world, let us!).

And then somewhat more complicated than that to build in UI options to control it with something like the worldpainter (which would then also extend to PerfectWorld and 3rd party utilities), but still can't be that bad. Sort of just another zoom lens on the custom world painter, and changing a few labels and I/O things like the mesh size stuff.

[dwarf_reform]

Being able to visually preview a map pre-embark would be pretty friendly, as well..

[GavJ]

Being able to visually preview a map pre-embark would be pretty friendly, as well..

It doesn't exist until you embark. So you'd have to sit there and wait about as long as you do when you embark for it to generate it in order to preview it, for every preview.

So I don't think it would be as nice as you suspect, but yes, it would be somewhat more convenient, since at least you wouldn't have to force quit DF and go through the menus again after previewing like now.

[smeeprocket]

Being able to visually preview a map pre-embark would be pretty friendly, as well..

this. I would wait.

[smjjames]

Being able to visually preview a map pre-embark would be pretty friendly, as well..

It doesn't exist until you embark. So you'd have to sit there and wait about as long as you do when you embark for it to generate it in order to preview it, for every preview.

So I don't think it would be as nice as you suspect, but yes, it would be somewhat more convenient, since at least you wouldn't have to force quit DF and go through the menus again after previewing like now.

Well, it doesn't have to do that every time you move the cursor on the map. When you find a spot that looks good, you can just press a key and it'll do the preview.

What I like to do, in order to preview it, is to make a copy save (or two) and look at the area of the site or sites on the copy.

[Sergarr]

I support this suggestion wholeheartedly.