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[Uzu Bash]

I embarked on the only mountain range no dwarves have ever settled in, and got an originating civ that was destroyed over 900 years ago on the diametrically opposite side of the map. They're the only civ appearing in my list, even though I'm on the immediate border with two human empires. For two years in a row, no trade liason has appeared with the dwarven caravan, and no other races have sent anyone. My civ should at least be familiar with the elves they're technically still at war with, though they're also the in furthest diagonal corner from me.

How long does it take for a neighboring nation to notice and open trade? I'm still under 50 population, but over 250k generated wealth. Not even the kobolds across the prairie have visited me. Will those elves hold a big enough grudge to cross the hypotenuse to carry on a nearly millennial feud?

[PatrikLundell]

Firstly, the Civ list only populates on contact, so it being empty is actually to be expected.
I believe mountains cause a bit of a problem to travel, but I don't know how much.
Did the elves (and humans, for that matter) appear in the pre embark neighbor list? I suspect the elves are too far away to reach you, unless you're on a pocket map, and even that is a stretch.
If your civ is dead I think you're not getting a trade liaison.
I think the default parameters for trade are 2 throughout, which means 50 pop, but I don't know what the wealth or trade figures are translated into.

As per the above, I don't think the elves will find your cowardly hidey hole, since you've run too far from them.

[Deboche]

If you don't have a civ anymore, retire your fortress. The next one you make will get a caravan, I think.

[Uzu Bash]

This is a max size region, and all civs are connected by land.  These mountains are centered within this land-mass, so they don't cut off anything. I didn't bother checking neighbors because I was already familiar with the area; I've covered this entire 1/4th of the map on foot in adventurer mode. The nearest elven, goblin, and dwarven are ~2 months walking distance. Vampires and necromancers are much closer, and a gateway to hell lies in the other direction.

Meanwhile, the civ that picked me (I didn't pick it!) and the nations that destroyed it are probably over a year's walk away due to multiple winding land bridges accessing it. There's still a queen and baron/esses of the major fortresses, now destroyed, so I guess they kept their lineage going just so they could lord it over the dirt farmers actually doing something to revive the nation.

[PatrikLundell]

I've never tried adventure mode, and so, cannot translate your description into fortress terms. There is a maximum distance for contact with other civs that I think is 12 tiles in pre embark terms, which should be almost nothing on a max size map.
If you embark in the middle of a mountain range, pre embark shows you having no other neighbors than dwarves, presumably because others are too bad at traversing mountains, so you can be cut off even if it's the only mountain range by embarking too deep into it.
On pre embark you select which dwarven civ to play (tab to get to that screen), although it obviously has to default to one, so I'd say you unknowingly picked the default (it's taken me a fair while to understand this part). If there is only one civ in the list, you obviously don't have a choice apart from generating another map.
If there is a sense to it, the queen should be listed as a farmer, or some such job description.

[Uzu Bash]

I'm not sure where you got the impression that I embarked in the middle of a mountain range, but afaik that's not even possible; you have to border at least one other biome. And as I said in my OP I'm on the border with 2 human nations. There's a village about 3 tiles away from me, even. I don't believe there is a maximum distance for trade contacts; I've started embarks in isolated corners of the map and still got visits.

I didn't think my civ selection mattered because the point was to embark where dwarves hadn't settled before. I certainly didn't expect the default civ to be a dead one when there are 7 thriving dwarven nations to choose from, and in fact one is sprawled right across where mine used to exist. You couldn't even reach my fortress from my civ's origin without coming across at least one other, no matter which route you traveled.

[PatrikLundell]

I didn't state you embarked in the middle of the range, just that doing so would have consequences that could match your experience.

If the nearest human settlement is 3 tiles away, that ought to be close enough. I think you could save your game, copy the save, abandon the fortress, and then try a reembark (just looking at the sites, not actually going through the embarkation) looking at the neighbor screen to find out which you should expect (kobolds are never listed, unfortunately), drop out, and restore your save. I guess you might have trouble selecting your exact embark site, but in that case you could look at the neighbors in all the tiles around it.

I'm not sure there is any intelligence to the civ choice. I suspect they are listed in the order generated in the world, and there certainly isn't any relation between the embark location and the civ, since the default civ is "selected" first and you then manually select the embark anywhere on the map. Also, selecting a dead or dying civ results in a warning on embark, allowing you to pull back and reselect the civ.

[Uzu Bash]

I didn't get any warning about selecting a dead civ, went straight to embark options. And then I got warnings about items from the pre-set shopping list not being available. Now that I look at the civ list the one selected by default is a living civ, and so is the one at the top of the list, and so is the one at the bottom of the list -- in fact, the only dead 1 out of the 8 listed is the one I got. I wish I'd looked at the list; the only civ criteria that would've interested me is a cool name, and "The Amazing Constructs" is too good to pass up.

The only neighbors for the site is dwarves and humans. But I don't think that's strictly confining -- I've embarked in corners where there were no neighbors and still got the four seasonal visits, plus holidays with the gobbos. If that's changed this version, does that also mean I won't be able to send out attack parties against more distant races? Or is that even implemented yet?

[PatrikLundell]

I get a warning every time I select a dead or dying civ, but a queen would sort of indicate that it does indeed exist.
The neighbor rules were changed fairly recently, so I think they actually are confining. As far as I know, you can only get caravans in spring/summer/fall from elves/humans/dwarves. The winter belongs to the goblins (or they sort of use all seasons, I think), but you can't trade with them without modding. Leaving the embark is not implemented yet, and I think it is fairly (or very) far off, but still in the cards according to a recent discussion.

[Uzu Bash]

I've never traded for goblinite before; I don't see why I should start now. But if that's not coming, I may as well abandon, because there's no native source of iron here.

I don't think any civilization is technically dead anymore. I've seen a couple shadow empires with members even though they have no sites. Between 89 and 1050, there was absolutely no activity from my civilization, then at the end of history gen, the queen and everyone else was created, including the outpost liaison who didn't show up. Barons were created for cities that were destroyed or taken over; one still has a dragon in residence, another has a forgotten beast. There's no info on where any of them actually settled or what site they founded, but I haven't seen them around Boatsvipers.