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[slink]

I ran across a couple of things I found interesting.  I thought I'd share them.

I generated a new copy of a world that I had been playing with a fortress I had gotten tired of.  I made some changes in the raws of some added creatures/civs and added a few new plants.  I used the same seed for the world itself, but left the name and history seed random in the hopes of getting a fresh game to play.  It worked, except that apparently place names are dictated by the general seed and not by the name seed because the place names were identical with my first version even though the name seeds were different.

I settled down to read the world history, and noted that some of the civilizations had no rulers.  I have often wondered why that happens, and wondered if it was because I was having it cull unimportant historical figures.  I regenerated the world with the same three seeds but with culling turned off.  That isn't the cause of having no rulers for some civilizations, but DF has some odd ideas about what is unimportant.

The first ruler of the first Dwarven civilization, under culling, was said to have outlived 4 of his 9 children.  Without culling, this is revealed to be untrue.  He died before any of them died.

One of his culled children was a daughter whose son went on to become Liaison for their civilization, and in fact is the Liaison you will have if you settle from that place.  In the culled version, this Liaison is listed as having a mother whose identity was lost in time.  In the unculled version, he is the grandson of the first ruler of his civilization.  That seems a rather important distinction to me, and not something a Dwarf would easily misplace.

I found it interesting that all the civilizations are founded by 10 couples.  This works because a married female Dwarf can produce at least one baby every year for over one hundred years, and each of those becomes adult at the age of 12.  It's no wonder I feel overwhelmed by 200 immigrants once they start to breed.   

[SkyRender]

Culling priorities seem to be based on what a specific unit has accomplished.  If you culled based on their connections even at one degree of separation, there wouldn't be many culled historical figures.  Expand it out to about 3 degrees of separation, and nobody would get culled.

[slink]

I was surprised because I expected the culled people to be those who had no descendents, or whose descendents had no effect on history.

Lifespan must be considered an accomplishment, because the only thing the Liaison's father had going for him was living longer.  He doesn't have a kill list like some of them do.

Bluenessmirrored: married Boreboot, became a farmer, began worshipping a bronze colossus, had a child, began worshipping a titan, killed by a cyclops (age 45)

Boreboot: married Bluenessmirrored, became a guard, began worshipping a hydra, fathered a child, died of old age (age 164 years)

I suppose culling creates a feeling of mystery and greater antiquity, but I enjoy seeing the exact relationships.  It's nice that I can. 

[Grendus]

I believe culling is done for speed reasons. If you try to get a large world for a long time, it would be nearly impossible to simulate all the dwarves, elves, humans, goblins, megabeasts, etc that would populate it if you didn't cull the boring ones. In pocket, small, and even normal sized worlds, this isn't an issue, especially if you end world gen after only a few hundred years.

[slink]

Culling makes the save directory smaller because of the missing history entries, but it probably generates the world at the same speed because it culls after the Dwarves have been born, reproduced, and died. 

My guess is that the culling is supposed to leave an air of mystery about exactly how many Dwarves were present from the beginning, so that the 200 immigrants in your fortress have a place to have come from without depeleting the parent civilization.  That is not even mentioning the innumerable nobles who might be required if your fortress has a high rate of "accidents".   

EDIT: It also seems to limit the total number of children to 10, which makes sense in conserving disk space.  I wish we could put a limit on the number of children any one individual can have, as opposed to a total limit which gives the reproductive advantage to the earliest ones.   

[Vicid]

I just made a map with 3 dwarf civs. I usually go with the biggest or best named civ.
Thats When I noticed that two of the civs had sites covering 1/3 of the map while the other on appeared to be struggling to hold onto one mountain home!
The first two civs were cut off from the rest of the world by a massive mt range leaving the third to face the orcish horde and gabbos alone T_T

[slink]

Oh, wow, reading this history is so much fun.   

I have mods in for Frost Giants, Orcs, Bugbears, and Hobgoblins.  Mine aren't exactly like the ones posted for download, but they derive from those.  I decided to regen a world I played before, without added civs, with the new civs.  I also decided to run the gen for 500 years before checking the megabeasts because I wanted lots of interaction between the civs.

I started looking at the Dwarven civs, both for surviving ones and also for ones that have a good continuity in the royal line.  I've played around with settling a couple of Dwarven ruins (using Embark Anywhere) but regardless I like to start from a civ that has a healthy royal line including either an unmarried monarch or one who isn't widowed/widowered.  In other words, I want the potential for a royal baby factory in my fortress.

Anyway, one of my Dwarven civs in this world has a discontinuity in the royal succession that I was unable to understand because there were still four children alive when the previous ruler died.  I started digging in Legends, and what I found was that all four children had been kidnapped by Frost Giants.  The youngest, a daughter, actually escaped once and was reunited with her parents, but was kidnapped a second time by the same Frost Giant.  At that point she gave up and settled into the Frost Giant culture who had kidnapped her.

In looking more closely, I found that three of those four kidnapped children had married other Dwarves and had children within their captor's civilization.  I switched over to the world sites and pops list, and starting looking for Dwarves living in other cultures.  I found that, over 500 years, some settlements had been nearly replaced by their kidnapped races.  For instance, one Orc-founded and Orc-ruled Dark Fortress consists of 41 Dwarves, 33 Humans, 9 Orcs, and 6 prisoners of the first two races.  The history of the fortress is filled with kidnappings, counter-kidnappings, and murders, first mostly committed by Orcs, and finally committed mostly by Humans and Dwarves.

Other sites have evidentally been conquered, and some have histories of being passed back and forth between Dwarves, Bugbears, and Hobgoblins.

All this enjoyment and I haven't even settled a site.   

[smjjames]

I thought the goblins were suppoused to have what are effectively military coups in that they fight for dominance and oust the previous leader. However, in this huge goblin civ in one of the worlds I'm currently playing, the goblins in fact have a line of succession similar to dwarves. The ancestor (I only genned 300 years, but there were several deaths due to near constant warring on the elves, resulting in some of the leaders ending up bieng eaten.) started after the resident demon got killed and their descendants made an unbroken line for centuries. I think this particular line is kind of notable since all of the rulers except for the current one weren't particularily interesting or warlord-like, one of them was even in the priesthood before taking up rulership when his father or whatever got eaten. While a few of them did score a few kills, the current one sounds like a real warmonger because he was the only one who started out as a warrior and took part in many campaigns, with a total of twenty something kills. He could possibly pass for a young Orc warlord. Too bad he is the last of his line since his wife and children are dead.

I also spotted a human leader of a goblin civ who had been abducted no less than 3 times and lost an arm at some point.

[Time Kitten]

Cull unimportant figures is kinda overpowered at the moment.

I once found a farmer with eight children.  And none of them remembered the name of the wife/mother.

[Halceon]

Heh, i set out with an elf adventurer, killed an elven diplomat his 2 human peasants (hippy love slaves?) and a goblin comerade. Personal histories show everything as it should be. The global history only shows me having killed the goblin. 

[silhouette]

The humans are important

[darkflagrance]

Even without culling figures turned on, the history is occasionally glitchy.

For example, it's pretty common to read the entry of a historical figure, and see a death date but no cause of death, and later see someone else credited with that figure's death.