Incidentally, will semi-artifacts, e.g weapons which creatures grow attached too and achieve artifact status with, become implemented with NPC's? Clearly, the rules will need to be less iron-cast about using something else when it would be suicidal otherwise, and possibly other such things to prevent the world from being over-saturated, (edit: say such as they being artifacts in name only, but nevertheless having respect or fear for what they've done, though of course being coated with forgotten beast blood or being blessed could explain rather a lot)but damn it, i want to find long lost treasures someday. Not knowing what it was unless you had reason to would also be excellent, though there might be hints (hints which could also mean other things). On the note of long-lost treasures,
as you're in the midst of reclaim right now, how about letting us choose how much later we reclaim, instead of one year? An excellent touch would be to have whatever overtook our fortress respond accordingly, and I'm very glad this has been touched upon in a DF talk.
When will you get round to it? Also, when will we be able to find body's, weapons and armour laying about which we haven't left ourselves in the wilderness, rather then just fortresses? Of course, if others get there first it should also be taken into account.
Also, as trolls have the can learn tag, when will we see at least some of the smarter ones developed further? After all, there's more then one way of taking them being goblin "pets", or the shearing could even be a consensual which they recognize the need for, though that should be quite rare. You'd think a smarter troll would be able to out-muscle goblins in a revolt, particularly if one of them was made to do a lot of blacksmithing.
When will we see what idle dwarves do being developed? After all, i rather doubt they only make friends and grudges. Chiildren might watch Army training and do stick fighting, adults paint, make bet's and play, develop useful technological treatment, writes how to guides on getting layed, juggling and the best use of snowboarding in a siege to a be delivered by zombie with a carrot, play aggresive calvinball (with axes) on the hill dwarves, write informative books on molemarion psychology for trainers, tell stories of their exploits and swear much vengeance; in other words, developing thier fortresses culture, which should develop as it does, complete with the original in-jokes of the embarking dwarves to the grand debate to resolve the conflict between the respectively vying mercantile, medical, varying religions, veterinary, and carpentry wings at to how to best resolve the plague of fiddles released as a warning by a inept previously unknown gremlin general wanted by most every nation in the world and the best use of the recently captured philanthropist and visionary mega-beast which may or may not be part of a wider family and is sitting right next too the greatest milker their race has ever seen, and a apprentice team of lye-makers led by 4 teenage currently prank warring boy and girl cousins, consisting of a sane, bitter female moleman, a male dryad with...drug? problems, a anthropologist male kobold with a sailing lust and manga hair and finally a sorcerous girly batman who has been raised well away from anything vaguely approaching this, and all of whom are looking at the mega-beast with interest. New players are arriving as we speak.
In other words, letting dwarves spontaneously do their own thing and having their own mini (or major) project aspirations which they'll do with or without your influence would be excellent.
On a related note, I've heard that you wish to work eventually on language, and indeed there's already a thread on this, but given the complexity we wish to aim for, is there any way you could recruit some of the coding for this from the community? I may well be envisioning this completely wrong, but randomly generating situations and having the community pick the most plausible (vetted) responses to be uploaded in the next update sounds like an excellent forum game at least.
Forgive my wild enthusiasm
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