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[Timeless Bob]

How about this: different minerals behave like they're aquifers during periods of rain.  It starts raining and the high seepage minerals would start seeping water into adjacent squares, so long as they aren't filled by something.  This makes watersheds a thing, as well as needing to dig out drains when digging down.  Water at the edge of a map would automatically drain off the same way it does now.  The seepage value could be a maximum value for the mineral type, but be determined by the biome as a function of average rainfall - desert rains might fill wadis and oasis, but not much else, whereas swamps and marshes may have trees who regularly grow out of standing water.

The function of Fortifications as draining walls might become very important, but also "smoothing" walls, possibly with a plaster or other substance might make those surfaces waterproof.

[Reelya]

The point was that the lake should be there when you arrive.

My point was that if you add a model on top that only starts running when you look at something (embark) it's far too easy for that to then generate a situation that's too unbelievable. Such as you arrive in a dry valley, but once it raise the first time, permanent pools form. The pools, therefore, should have been there to start with.

This is one thing that makes it extra hard: unless the world generator is running the simulation at that level of detail to start with then it's almost impossible to predict what will happen when you turn on the detailed simulation in a local square. So, how the landscape looks when you get there should be an average view of what the weather model does to the land over time. But it would be almost impossible to pre-predict exactly what the active model will produce without just running the thing.

See chaos theory and the problems with weather modelling.