I am not totally sure about action performing and will not argue here. I exaggerated with binary relations but you surely can say that they seem like it with this 'cold war' having absolutely no effect in game.
I said to trash civilizations part and use them only as starting point but keep their mechanics for group. I have no idea why you mock me when Toady said himself that most of the existing systems are placeholders and various reworks are possible (sometime in the future) and yes - these changes and tweaks should improve the game and aren't pointless.
The cold war state causes folks to give you dialogue and missions related to the cold war state. It also causes individuals to refuse to talk to you but not attack.
There is something that you must avoid doing if you making a game or mod to a game. You must not create substandard mechanics that you then throw out to replace with slightly better mechanics, because that way you do not make progress towards developing the game but instead get stuck doing the maximum amount of work every time for a less than a total amount of gain. The amount of work needed to replace the whole mechanic is still 100% while the new mechanic is only 10% better than the old mechanic.
It is also unclear exactly how your proposed replacement even improves the game. It replaces a setup that is realistic and makes sense, that is having a number of local governments and an overarching central government with either an uber-centralised setup by which multiple sites belong to a single undivided government or an uber-decentralised setup by which all sites are totally independant of eachother, answering to no higher authority. Not only do you propose that present game mechanics be overturned, you propose they be replaced with mechanics that are decidely less flexible, neccesitating extremes by their very nature.
You are partially right here. You forgot i said about camps which don't really need many resources to set up. They can be transformed into something else by simply using local resources. I wrote about relations between groups from different sites in another part of text (alliance) which also says about willingness to share and a chance to quickly become a single group (with 2 sites now) again.
They also do not create much in the way of resources. Camps therefore need a constant supply of supplies to sustain them while they build themselves up, supplies that must be provided to them by the host settlement on a constant basis. They also need capital, the question was never about how much capital would be provided but why anyone would give them any at all, especially when they are enemies of the government.
Say the camp needs 50 tents. Why would any sane settlement have their manager put in an order for 50 tents, wasting all that valuable cloth just to make tents so that a bunch of dwarves that want to leave and deprive the settlement of their labour can do so? A central government on the other hand would do just that, it can demand that all 10 settlements produce 5 tents and hand them over to it. It would use the resulting 50 tents to produce another settlement because that would allow it to eventually acquire 55 tents, making the central goverment more powerful.
Here we get to the rub. Having a central government that is higher than the government of the site is a prerequistive of expansion, if all we have is the site government then there will never be anything other than the site government. Replication neccesitates something like the civ-level government exist, because only a civ-level government benefits from expansion of the number of sites as they will all belong to it.
They aren't really in the game. Civilizations wage wars because of differences in their ethics and that's it. (I exclude fortress mode from this.)
No the given reason in the world-gen is actually almost a deception. Civilizations go to war because of poor relations, differences in ethics contribute to poor relations. Other things, such as long periods of peace improve relations, which is why you will often see the world 'settle down' and become less violent over time during world-gen even though ethics cannot change at the moment.
No they don't.
Groups don't send caravans. It is only a single caravan per year from 1 civilization not group. They also include everything civilization has access to not some particular groups.
The same thing for military but also they don't help you forces to defend but only to siege you. (You know that caravan guards are meant to protect caravan and not drive out invaders.)
The same for rumors.
Worse than that. It is one caravan per year from each entity type, so if you have multiple elf civilizations you will not get multiple elf caravans.
How things work outside of fortress mode however is anything but that. Groups exclusively trade with eachother, ignoring the civilizations they belong to, the setup is that major settlements trade with other major settlements (they are defined as markets in the code) and minor settlements trade with only one major settlement. Given that the caravan arc is due to happen at some point, eventually fortress mode will probably end up working on that basis, we will trade with a number of other major settlements and also with nearby minor settlements as well. The actual settlements will send caravans across the map to eachother, loaded with goods.
1. It's not cheating but getting world you want to have. Some people want perfect environment, others specific wars and sites that changed owners in their history. Quick.
2. That's why i want this to be optional and not used outside advanced worldgen.
3. I have no idea how hard it is to change. It was better to suggest it then not anyway.
4. I never saw in wiki you can allow civs to make towers. Did you mean that necromancers from any civilization can make them? You are right about the trading. That could be fixed with economy arc though.
1. For those things we have wordgen settings. What you are talking about is rerolling the dice because we do not like the result; that is cheating.
2. Fine.
3. All minor sites promote into major sites if the right conditions are met (they cannot find any nearby major settlements to trade with). That is what makes the idea you are proposing extremely unlikely to be worth the devs time. It would better that they press on in breaking the sites down into their elements and then allowing us to make custom sites using those elements than they add in mechanics so that forest retreats can potentially become towns in a 'modded' game.
4. I meant that civs create towers, not that the towers then belong to the civ or can be defined as their site. So yes I meant that necromancers from any civilization can make them, but the tower government use the items and other stuff from the civilization those necromancers came from.