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[Jeoshua]

My idea of the BIGGEST thing DF needs is a tighter tying together of the three "game modes" as I see them:

Fortress
Adventure
Worldgen.

"How is worldgen a game type?" you say?  Easilly, it controls the entire world in an abstracted way.  It has it's rules, it's own displays, etc.  It's not very interactive, but it's a game mode.

Now, consider this.  What would happen if, when in Adventure mode, Worldgen continued running at a much slowed rate.  People moved from place to place, megabeasts attacked, wars were fought.  It wouldn't take too much processing power to have the world right outside of where the player exists keep being generated.  It takes maybe 30 seconds per game year to calculate the events for a 256x256 large world with a population exceeding 3 million people, on my computer.  To calculate the events of a single day would take almost no time at all, and when you consider that game day usually takes about 5 minutes to play in game?  30 seconds / 365 days / 5 minutes = negligible calculation time.

And the world would be so much more lively!  It would lead to the future possibilities of being able to SEE the wars (which currently you could not really see), watch sites being placed.  Right now you could probably only leave a place, then come back after a year to see it has changed... which would actually be freaking amazing.  Just keep the same seed and roll the dice again.

===

Second tie in between the modes: Fortress Adventurers.  Put your site on hold to take an adventurer out.  A random able bodied Dwarf from your fortress would be selected and set out to pasture.  Your fortress would basically be paused besides some basic automations, you could buy/sell/steal whatever you need for your adventure from what's already at your Fortress (that your Adventurer spawns at), and could set out!  Or not!  Go down into the caverns from your 50z high staircase... Recruit your whole army as followers and set out to take out those megabeasts that KEEP coming from that cave you embarked 3 tiles away from.  Etc etc.  Then, when your adventurer dies or you retire him, you can start the fortress back up again.

===

Third tie in, but this is only really about one game mode.  Drop out of worldgen and change settings, then start it back up again.  Change the site cap, population cap.  Place more civilizations.  Place more megabeasts.  Basically put the player in control of the world generation process and make it into a TRUE game mode.  Declare, as God Almighty, and a site be placed... here.  Make it a tower.  Etc etc.  Think about it for a good solid minute and think about how f-n awesome that would be.

[NW_Kohaku]

You know that most of this is already planned, and on the devpages, right?

Changing populations, food use and other world gen stuff moved to actual play

Fortress retirement has been touched upon frequently:

Spoiler: quotes (click to show/hide)

I'd rather handle this properly when I get to it instead of spending time on a half measure that won't necessarily be related to the completed feature.  The adventure mode dwarf fortresses aren't completed and retired player fortresses should work with the same mechanics as these, so I have to do adv mode dwarf fortresses first.  Since I'm going to do those using the mechanics in place from dwarf mode, it might be easier to see the path forward to reversing these procedures when that's done.

DF Talk 16, Sep 2011:

Toady:   That's right. So, yeah ... we can definitely improve on that. I guess that leads into ... The dwarf mode legacy is quite similar, because you're creating a new site and that's being left behind, and you're also creating a bunch of dwarves, and when you abandon a site all of those dwarves move somewhere, and they're all being left on site. You're trading goods around the world ... and creating artifacts; those especially are one of the main legacies that a dwarf fortress leaves behind. And then the analogue to ... I mean we've talked about it kind of a lot, but the analogue to retirement in adventure mode would be retiring your fortress, and I think we've gone over that a few times so we can skip it, but it is a very important thing, especially because you'd be able to be, say, the new capital of the whole dwarven kingdom ... when the monarch arrives, if you retired then that would be a huge geopolitical shift there, right, where whatever the old mountainhome was is now some little hamlet or something, or some ghost town, or just a large city without a king that used to have one, and you've got a new one ... So there's that ...
Rainseeker:   Right, so we're thinking that we can retire fortresses and still have them be entities and still have them be technically active, the game considers them not ghost towns anymore?
Toady:   Yeah, the part that we've probably spent the most time discussing is why there are technical hurdles to this, or whatever, so that's the part we'll bypass. But yeah, you'd be able to leave that active mark on your world and you can kind of spread out and cause migration or spread of the dwarven civilization over a few games and then it would actually stick, it wouldn't just be a litter of abandoned fortresses with a few monsters living in them or new places for goblins to live. But I guess that could be part of your legacy; when we get to the army arc decisions of, you know, why did the goblins attack your town? Right now it's because they triggered some kind of 'attack the town' event and then they don't stay there, but if they were attacking your town for a reason, moving over the map and then arriving at your town, then they presumably had some reason to attack your town and it might include staying there, and then you'd have caused that kind of political change to the landscape, where the goblins now have a new fortress that's quite powerful. So hopefully ... I mean some of these changes are coming in the shorter term, and some of them are farther off, but hopefully we'll start seeing some of this stuff ... like I was saying the kind of successiony thing will be the first non-negative changing we see in either of the modes, and that's not too far off now. Yeah, so I guess ... were there any other things about the legacy you guys wanted to talk about?

Dec 2011:

With these new upgrades to the city systems, how close are we to having a 'Retire' option, where instead of abandoning the fort, you give it to the gameworld to control, allowing you to, say, start a new fort and trade with the old one?

Probably not until after we have actual dwarf towns being generated, and then some.

Yeah, since the new city system moves us closer to re-enabling dwarf towns, we are at least descending in our orbit around this one.

It's only the last part that's not already outright declared a part of the development plans. 

That said, I don't think we need an outright "divine intervention" mode in the game, as that kind of ruins the whole "simulation" part of it.

That said, there have been several "Kingdom Mode" types of suggestions:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=64249.0
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76667.0
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=24453.0

[Babylon]

world gen continuing during adventure or fortress mode would be really nice, being able to drop back into worldgen after abandoning a fortress or retiring an adventurer would also be nice.

[ravaught]

Not sure if any of you remember the old game ActRaiser, but it had a system that would allow you to go from god mode to player mode. Of course, I could see it working as a 4 tier zoom style feature.

Tier I - Most abstract, controlling landmasses and such. Maybe causing natural disasters or forming up the world somehow(Populace)
Tier II - Kingdom mode would allow you to negotiate trade agreements and such that would impact your entire kingdom(Civ/SimCity/Rome/Ceasar)
Tier III - Fortress Mode, as is
Tier IV - Adventure mode.

I could see it, and it could work, but it won't happen. There is WAY too much development time involved in that for one person to ever hope to accomplish in any realistic time frame. I think what Toady already has planned is the most realistic vision for a one many dev team.

[Jeoshua]

You are all going WAY beyond what I had intended.  I merely wished one could stop generation, tweak already existing limiting parameters, and then start calculation again.

"Hmm, it's been 100 years since a new settlement was formed.  I should have set the caps higher.  Oh well, time to exit out, change the numbers, use the same seed, and wait 20 more minutes for it to get back to this level"

!!OR!!

"Hmm, it's been 100 years since a new settlement was formed."
<ESC>
(E)dit
Change a few parameters
<ESC>
(C)ontinue

The tower thing was just an aside, really.

[Escapism]

It would be pretty awesome if you could merge fortress and adventurer mode somehow, and it would also fit with DF:s "theme" of generalizing as much as possible. You can already do that in arena mode, to a certain extent. What I mean is that you could both, as Jeoshua said, go on an adventure and assume control of a single dwarf from your fortress, but you could also do the opposite and use an adventurer to gather up followers with whom you could form a settlement. This would also provide an excellent way of handling raiding parties and such. Simply assign a leader and the dwarves you want to use in your campaign, and then assume control of the leader in adventure mode. Of course, this would require handling a lot of other problems, such as how your fortress would behave while you don't control it, allowing more advanced interactions with your followers and having military clashes compose of more than simply zerging the enemy.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Planned. Try expanding on some specific stuff, after reading the...whichever page it is that lists development goals.