Will adventurers be able to (and likely to) form families in the place you retire them in? Also, can we retire human adventurers in a dwarven fortress?
They will be historical figures, so unless Toady specifically excludes them from scheduling, they should be eligible to form relationships, marry, and have children, and most likely also migrate to other towns. You can already retire in any settlement, so what happens there depends on whether Toady gets to the multiracial fortresses for this release or whether he makes them some sort of friendlies, like lagging caravan guards.
What about having your adventurer become a necromancer and then retiring him in a town? Would that work?
Thanks!
Assuming no further work on necromancers other than to make them do their thing during actual play, what would likely happen is that the adventurer realizes that he is a necromancer and is supposed to go off to raise the dead and build a tower. Whether that is what you think as working...
Will "tacticus" be a bar game, as mentioned in the old dev page?
More generally, is any of the content from the old dev page not on the new one likely to make it into the game at some time or other, or has that been completely dropped?
Yes,
the old dev page is still relevant. It is simply outdated.
I wouldn't say the development page is a full picture of the new additions we plan to do as we continue, but they give a pretty good picture. The core items, reqs, bloats and power goals of the previous pages still represent out plans for the game, and anything not on the new page is still fair game -- it's just the system itself that has been updated, because the previous system wasn't working well (not a single power goal was checked off, for example, and items often became outdated).
As far as I know, this is what actually happens during regular gameplay, and the update is planning to change that. It's something more akin to not pulling dwarves out of thin air but bringing them from the neighboring mountainhome. If they're all killed and all the other borders or fortresses are lost, then you lose.
As King Mir stated, this doesn't happen. What you might be thinking about is the fact that, as you play your fortress, the world around it is static and nothing really replenishes, and when you then enter a human town, the historical figures in it realize that they should have died of old age several years ago, and drop dead (which shouldn't extinct anything anymore with the abstract entity populations, but I haven't tested that).