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[ashein]

(TL;DR: if you don't want migration at all and prefer only first 2 hardcoded waves, there seems a better way to achieve this. In the end I did this to achieve the same result, but with some nifty bonuses.)

Hi,

There was one of the previous versions of DF where sometimes your average Dwarven Civilization could get eliminated during worldgen. This still allowed you to play Fortress Mode, but after a year or two you got no further migrant waves - only the first two or three randomly-generated.

In .25 it seems that no matter how hostile your new world is, dwarves can't be rooted out completely by titans, daemons and other nasty stuff that usually pays visit to towns. Elves and gobbos can be dispatched though.

The question is - is it possible to reproduce the 'dead parent civilization' situation in the current version? I'd really hate to make a crude version of that by smashing/drowning/burning-alive fellow newcoming dorfs or doing stuff to the poor dwarven liason and caravans. I can use population cap in the init files, but that doesn't deal with caravans.

Maybe it's possible to mod civilization parameters to make dwarves prone to extinction as it is with elves, but skimming through the civ raws I couldn't find any hint on how to do that.

Anyone happened to implement that challenge without resorting to violence after embark?

[Yoink]

Yeah, dwarves are extinct in a couple of my worlds. Often it happens in a smaller world, when they're surrounded by hostile civs. Also, mods which add enemy civilizations often have this happen.

[Ieb]

Pretty sure the easiest way would to go to the MAXAGE parameters of the dorfs and then setting them to low numbers. That'll result in everyone in the civ dying at say year 4 out of old age.

Although the current DF sort of does gen people out of nowhere so there MIGHT be issues regarding this method. But it leaves the civ open to megabeast attacks leading to extinction. Maybe you could try removing the farming tags? The civ then might starve to death, although I'm pretty sure then you wouldn't be able to get seeds on embark.

Gonna go test how MAXAGE affects things now.

EDIT: Okay. With MAXAGE set to 1:2, the civ was gone by year 35(last historical figure of the civ died that year). Their "area of influence" disappears at year 90 so I figure that was result of the game generating people out of nowhere, but they weren't able to breed during their brief lifespans.

So yeah, MAXAGE seems to work well. The good thing with this is that after you finish generating the world, you can set the MAXAGE back to it's normal values in the creature file for your entity(note, within the data/save folder not the raw/objects one) and they'll live normal lifespans again.

I should start a fort like this at some point. Would be refreshing to do everything by myself for once.

EDIT2: So, testing with removal of farming tags resulted in the hamlets populated by the civ to become 'empty'. HOWEVER...

Their area of influence remained to year 1050. No new historical figures appeared after year 5 which was when the last mentioned one starved to death. I think this method doesn't work that well, figure there's some anonymous survivors of the civ still clinging to life and the game won't extinct the civ due to it.

[ashein]

Tried the MAXAGE:1:2 tag, in three cases the dwarven population seems to be all dead, but the civ still has influence (till year 500 which is my end year on a map template). Embark interface shows the civ as neighbouring, upon embark the civ screen tells that the civ has no important leaders. As far as I remember, the case with past version also had the civ listed there, but I'm pretty much sure there should be no influence on world map.

Gonna try more mapgens, maybe i'm just not lucky.

[Ieb]

I recall that one way to check whether or not your homeciv is dead is if on the pre-embark there's no # or any other of those signs that depict mountainhomes, forest retreats or dark forts in the worldmap. No places under control = dead civ.

Lemme check that quick from my 2nd attempt..
Okay. The worldmap shows no towns or anything for my civ, neither does the 1st gen's worldmap. I'm PRETTY sure this means that both civs are completely dead, despite the 2nd one still having an AoI.

Adventurer mode on the 2nd one only gave me the Outsider option too so I guess the AoI is something different than an implication that there's a civ still alive. Maybe it's something like, whether or not the hamlets have been ransacked and destroyed? Does that happen in this version?

[ashein]

Well, the forest retreats can get ruined, elfs can lose all influence area, but the ruins still stand there, according to map.

Current version doesn't always depict all settlements for dwarves. The markings for mountainhomes and their ruins are now not shown, but you still can see the settlements when embarking - it's like the initial mountainhome has several other settlements on adjanced tiles, none of which are shown on mini-map. Previously it was quite obvious that the civ was extinct - there were only ruins, that greek "mu" symbol.

I'm also inclined to think that I messed my worldgen settings somewhere, so i'm trying with a fresh version of .25, but the influence area and the dwarven hero in Adventure mode still persist. I'll write back if anything reproducable will come out.

EDIT: it seems the death of all dwarves in a civ doesn't stop the caravan from coming. Tried with civ population cap set to 1 in civ. raws and with max dwarf age set to 1:2. In both variants legends report the death of all dwarves, adventure mode disallow playing as dwarf, but the influence area of the civ still remains, and playing Fortress Mode with unlimited max fps gives the beardy guy with "Greetings from Mountainhome!"

[Ieb]

Hmm. Would it work if you went to the entity file for dorfs then and setting that their max population can be only 1? Would the game respect that and only give 1 dorf per civilization that when combined with 1:2 MAXAGE would have the civ go completely extinct?

[ashein]

See the edit in my post above There seems to always be the founding group of 10 dwarves at worldgen who come from nowhere and establish the new civ. When I forced the civ population to 1 (without limiting max age), the group starved to death, when I set the age limit (without restricting the pop cap), most of the group dies, some of them manage to marry each other and carry some offsprings, but this doesn't last long and ultimately they all die. At any rate, the absense of dwarfs in a civ doesn't seem to trigger cilization extinction, as I understand it.

Next step is to generate the world with elves extinct and try to figure out why their civ dies. There are also two possibilities, with or without the infuence area after all their tree-towns go ruined, so maybe a clue can be found by comparing the info from the Legends mode.

[Ieb]

Should update a thread before making a post after being away from the comp.
Anyway.

I can't really think of anything else about this but here's a few links to threads talking the same issue. Quick skim didn't really seem to have anything new to the issue but it's still SCIENCE!

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=39447
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=78909

Now, back to MATH STUDY, OH BOY.

[Reelyanoob]

Thought i'd mention it because nobody else has brought it up:

1. Active season

[ACTIVE_SEASON:AUTUMN]

Delete this on Dwarves and there's no time to send a caravan

2. Remove pack animal usage

This would also stop a race from having caravans (elves are more resilient here than other races).

Coupled with low pop limit, this means you can have just the occasional liason if you like, so you still can get a baron or king.

[ashein]

Thanks, Reelyanoob, I'd happily try the second variant you suggested as there's a liasion involved. But i'm concerned with pop cap - I tried curbing the migration down with it before on .25, but to no avail. Someone at DF wiki also reported problems with that. On the other side, migration is tied to the wealth reports of the Mountainhome caravan, right? So no caravan => no reports => no migration at all. Gotta check that, but that'll take a little longer.

On a side note, I genned two worlds with ruined elvish forest retreats. The first one without area of influence had a retreat attacked and subsequently pillaged (that's to be expected, sure), whereas in the other world the retreat wasn't attacked at all - seems like the elves themselves just died due to rocs and other nasties, but their "cities" remained. In short, there were 3 forest retreats, two of them had associated records till year 15-17, the third one had elves till 33 or something, and after that - not a single record of activity by a pointy-eared one. Like the only thing that remained - their "cities" that no one needs to attack and pillage, so no one razes the civ completely.

[Reelyanoob]

Those first two waves of migrants are hard-coded, so the caravan definitely doesn't matter for those. Being on an island would stop this, but then you'd get no other races either.

Btw try taking this tag off Dwarves in entity_default.txt :

   [COMMON_DOMESTIC_PACK]

To disallow pack animals. BUT this may not be enough. You can tell if it worked because when you use TAB key in the embark screen there will be 'No Trade' (in Red letters) next to the name of the race. When I did it, I took the [PACK_ANIMAL] and [WAGON_PULLER] tags off every species that had them. But this affected every race (except the elves).

[ashein]

Yay, seems to be working!

What I actually did - just removed the [COMMON_DOMESTIC_PACK] tag from dwarven civilization in the raws. As was written above, on embark the civ had "no trade" marking, (not in red, in yellow). During a three-year test my dwarves had two hard migration wave and then nothing except for "the fortress attracted no migrants" message sometimes. The liason paid two visits, as well as the elven caravans. So that pretty much concludes it, I suppose, so

• You don't have migration
• You can trade, but not with other dwarves
• You are hopefully still eligible for nobility, as dwarves breed in time

I used to have the pop cap set to 1, but at the end of the second year tried to change it to 10 and still got the "attracted no migrants" afterwards. There were some 4 dwarves left because I forgot to revert to normal max age of dwarves (which doesn't help making the civ extinct, as was checked before) - no new migrants either. But i'm not sure whether it's because of the lack of dwarven caravans or because the initial one dwarf cap I had set still persists.

Thanks for the input, the end result is much better than I initally expected