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[Mesa]

The closest we could get is retiring a fort, starting an adventurer and convincing the military in the fort to join you to go on a rampage.
Speaking of which, Toady - do the non-dwarven sites count as reclaimable? So that we could just go on a raiding party to gain control of a dark fortress or the like? Also the dwarven, but non-player-controlled-BEFORE sites?

[Cruxador]

The closest we could get is retiring a fort, starting an adventurer and convincing the military in the fort to join you to go on a rampage.
Speaking of which, Toady - do the non-dwarven sites count as reclaimable? So that we could just go on a raiding party to gain control of a dark fortress or the like? Also the dwarven, but non-player-controlled-BEFORE sites?

Pretty sure the answer to the first question is "no". The last time it was asked, the latter question got what was at best a "maybe" focussing on the difficulties. Perhaps things have changed on that front, though.

[Caldfir]

I seem to recall that abandoned worldgen fortresses are supposed to be reclaimable, but only fortresses since they are guaranteed to be small enough to be playable (all the other sites can go up to 17x17 or something), with a possibility that abandoned human forts might be reclaimable in the near future as well (possibly even for this release, but no solid word on that yet). 

Worldgen dwarf fortresses are almost certainly reclaimable:

Threetoe:   I was thinking, you'll be able to reclaim your own fortresses and now the actual mountainhomes themselves that the other dwarves created.
Toady:   Yeah, there's going to be just a menu of interesting options right from the beginning of the world, if the dwarves had a hard time of it and their whole civilization was wiped out.

Other dwarven sites are definitely not reclaimable:

Toady One: I'm working on deep dwarven sites, and it should include a bit of early work on fortresses as well, since the basics of their individual living arrangments and industry should be about the same. Deep sites claim areas much larger than forts (the size of human towns in the current version -- up to 17x17 embark tiles), and a lot of this will probably be devoted to farms in the cavern layers, but I'm hoping for something reasonably different from a human village underground. These kind of sites aren't reclaimable (because they are too large), so the amount of farms won't clash with the time-compressed nature of farming in fort mode. Aside from the living, farming and workshop areas, there'll be zones for mining and storage as well. Certain of them have barons, and those'll have an additional area.

Musings on the idea of reclaiming ruined human castles: (not the quote I was looking for but I can't seem to find it anywhere)

Rainseeker:   (Indiana Jones theme)
Toady:   That's right, exactly. The proper ruins from older civilizations, and we're going to have to go through world generation and make sure that there are enough wars and famines and plagues and migrations and so on to make sure that there are nice isolated hidden ruins, then you'd be able to go into those. In dwarf mode, right now all you can do is reclaim your previous fortresses, so there are a couple of angles here. Once there are actual fortresses with maps, which would be another adventure mode thing, just being able to go visit a fortress, then opening up reclaim on those is a lot more legitimate. Right now we just can't do it because they don't even have maps, you'd be reclaiming a blank cliff face and there'd be nothing there. So once that's handled then we can start doing that. I like the idea of a historical reclaim, it's just kind of a start scenario; you shouldn't just be able to reclaim your old fortresses you should be able to go to old ones. The only downside is that maybe you'd be getting massive amounts of treasure you don't deserve, but then there should be proper guardian beasty type things and trouble.
Rainseeker:   Or else it'll already be scavenged.
Toady:   There's kind of a risk/reward thing going on there that should naturally come out of how adventure mode works, and if the place is so isolated and hidden that there's treasure there with no-one guarding it then you probably wouldn't be able to reclaim it because you don't know about it, until someone finds a map, or whatever. So that's the situation there. I think when it comes to other weird ruins, like the ruins of a human civilization, I don't know if there's ever going to be like a dwarf mode colonization or claiming of that. It's similar to how you can't just settle inside a human town with a dwarf fortress anymore. But I'm not sure, it's certainly not as off limits as that, it would be a kind of legitimate thing. You'll probably more likely find an adventurer making a bandit camp there or something, but if they can do that there's probably no reason why the dwarves can't go to an old human castle and set up a mine underneath it or whatever. That'd be kind of fun.
Rainseeker:   Yeah, especially if you went inside the castle before you started digging.
Toady:   Yeah, and you could clean it up. It'd be a fixer upper. And you could rebuild the walls, and kill the zombies and stuff.

[Mesa]

I can't wait to see how smartly stupidly the new sites are generated.
Since dwarves have a certain detrimentality when it comes to that.


17x17 sites sound like a HUGE amount of Fun to wipe out.
Or raid, whatever floats your boat.

Also, Toady - I hope that killing a stray cat or an old man in the woods with no witnesses doesn't cause the entire civ (animals included) hate us anymore?

[Osmosis Jones]

17x17 sites sound like a HUGE amount of Fun to wipe out.
Or raid, whatever floats your boat.

...well, at least until your PC melts down

[Mr S]

Then it really IS !!FUN!!

[Mesa]

17x17 sites sound like a HUGE amount of Fun to wipe out.
Or raid, whatever floats your boat.

...well, at least until your PC melts down

Naah.
THERE AIN'T BE A THING MY PC COULDN'T HANDLE!

We'll see, though.

[MDFification]

A random thought I just had. Will it be possible to hire mercenaries from caravans into your military on a temporary basis?

[Eric Blank]

I don't think that is going to be possible this release, just because Toady hasn't mentioned anything specifically about that, but I bet that'll be possible in the future in the event a caravan gets trapped in your depot during a siege; being able to coordinate benefits them in that they have the chance to make it home earlier. Then again, maybe in the future they'll just hang out in the inn instead of going insane, and force you to deal with the siege on your own while eating all your grub. Though the elves will probably still lose it...

[Trif]

A random thought I just had. Will it be possible to hire mercenaries from caravans into your military on a temporary basis?

Yes, it's planned for taverns and inns. Toady talked about it in DF Talk #12.

Toady One: [...] There's the option of perhaps having mercenaries stick around in your fortress, we thought about that a bit, you might be able to hire them and put them into squads ... you might not be able to change all their weapons, and you wouldn't have armor for them necessarily that fits, but it seems like a reasonable thing for people that don't want to focus on that; they just want to have some of those guys around. You'd probably just get the money right back from the drinking and gambling immediately. We were originally thinking about doing just adventure mode taverns and inns, and then we remembered ... there was this suggestion around 2008 or something on the forum for dwarf mode inns. I don't remember if we had talked about it at all before then, or if that was just a random suggestion that popped up back then ... So we saw taverns and inns on the dev page and we were like 'Okay, let's do dwarf mode inns too', so it's a little strange. It's certainly one of those things that popped out on the release list when we put that up, because we hadn't talked about it very much; that's the reason we're talking about it now. So basically you've got more interesting people visiting your fortress and you might be able to convince them to stick around.

[Footkerchief]

Also, Toady - I hope that killing a stray cat or an old man in the woods with no witnesses doesn't cause the entire civ (animals included) hate us anymore?

This was confirmed in the devlog:

02/26/2013 Toady One Lately I've been standing in the keep with a skill-inflated hero, stabbing the site's goblin overlord in the head with a spear, and seeing what happens. Now that the entities occasionally make decisions through their leaders and people also claim positions that are open, my project is to insert a possible period in between where an entity has a decision to resolve, doesn't have a leader step up when it thought it had one, and has a moment of discomfort. This places a rumor in their entity about the missing leader. Related rumors also show up when you tell somebody about the killing or when somebody sees you do it and makes it out of the loaded area. For the goblin military occupation, this might be a condition that gets them to leave town, especially for this release where I need to force it a bit. This time, you'll be hunted by site patrols exclusively before you get to the site leader, if you are causing trouble before you attempt the overlord. It'll be different later I suspect, but I need to settle on a few workable scenarios now while I get mechanics in.

There's also the matter of the body and finding the body, which is a bit more abstract sometimes than what happens in dwarf mode, but fortunately I've got all the dwarf mode witness/incident stuff lying around for the easy half of this. The troublesome case is when you've left a body without any witnesses in an area where there'd normally be some traffic, but nobody finds it before you split -- when an area is offloaded, and everybody's location is abstracted, it just has to wing the event of finding the body, but later on when it isn't beneficial for a body to be found you'd want to be able to have a body not be discovered for a long time if it is in an out-of-the-way location. Right now, if it doesn't let the entity know about the body, the goblins will still figure out their leader is gone, but they'd have to wait until they try to set up their next set of patrols (since the leader is involved in that decision). It would also be nice to tie the body finding event to the... bury or otherwise deal with the mess event, since people just don't live clean lives at this point.

It was also discussed in DF Talk 19:

Toady:   Yes, it's going to be a much more reasonable town to punch a horse in.
Rainseeker:   'Punch a horse in'?
Toady:   Yes, because when you punch a horse in the currently released version all the livestock will descent on you and tear you to pieces before the first person even gets there.
Rainseeker:   'The chickens! No, the chickens!'
Toady:   Yes, it becomes a horror movie immediately, the second you mess around with the animals, which might be an environmental message, but it's not really the one we wanted to send in the game. So there'll be more reasonableness all around, it'll be a lot of fun.

[Vlad]

I look forward to being able to murder people and get away with it without the ''Hive Mind'' knowing about it.

[Eric Blank]

Heh. I suspect that "Papa Roach - Getting Away With Murder" will be a popular song for peoples' first few minutes of fiddling with these mechanics.

Toady; once a body is found, and there was a witness, but they also died before they could report it to anyone else, will they still have any way to pin it on the adventurer? Or will eliminating witnesses prevent them from figuring out what happened?

Somewhat related: Will killing livestock or pets count as murder for this current release or will it be a separate crime/ignored until a separate crime can be planned out for it? For that matter, will livestock, or at least those without the CAN_LEARN/CAN_SPEAK tags, count to the game as a "reliable witness" who can report a crime and get a pike shoved through your head, or have you already handled that? Getting ratted out by a cat or somebody's horse would be silly, even if it kinda makes sense with any of the animal people living as pets in an elven site.

[WillowLuman]

Getting ratted out by a cat or somebody's horse would be silly, even if it kinda makes sense with any of the animal people living as pets in an elven site.

Or all those ducks in fort mode reporting vampires, and vampires blaming ducks XD

[Spish]

Say my fortress is the mountainhome, and the king (along with his entire family) suffers an "unfortunate accident." Will the reigning baron of the mountainhome get first dibs on succeeding him? Or will it still take those random schmuck barons into account?