What thoughts do you have on making vacant non-dwarf sites reclaimable?
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.
Haven't tried to do this (and it's probably impossible in the current version), but one thing I thought I might try someday is to have an embark site that overlaps partially with a city site. A ways outside the city gate, an unassuming outcropping of rock houses a drawbridge and fortifications... which leads to a vast underground Dwarf Fortress. Meanwhile, the city hums along not-quite-oblivious to your actions. Then an army comes along to sack the city, forcing the Dwarves to seal up and miss out on caravans until the siege resolves itself (perhaps with some help from the frustrated Dwarves).
When the Army Arc, Caravan Arc, etc. are complete, do you foresee the player's fort getting involved in fights between third parties? For example, armies crossing the area that are not aiming for your fort, but might end up causing problems anyway? Caravans from besieged cities not arriving unless you send them an escort party, etc.?
I can't find the specific quote I'm thinking of, but iirc Toady have stated that armies/travellers not specifically heading for your fortress will just pass around it in most cases. The reason for this is the time difference between adventure mode/world gen and fortress mode. For example, in the time that it'd take a traveller to pass from one end of your embark to the other he could probably have done his whole journey a few times over if only he'd have gone around instead. That's not even considering if he were to "stay the night" when we get to inns, which in fortress time would probably mean staying the whole season. Any army deciding to move through your embark would be set back about a month at least by it, depending on how many of them you actually choose to load. And you'd only be able to load a fraction of them anyway. I've had armies numbering in tens of thousands in my world gens.
It's possible Toady might come up with some workaround by then I guess. Like for example giving any wanderer passing through a super speed boost afterwards or something, but it'd probably risk ending up very very weird :>
The whole Dwarf Fortress time dilation is always going to be one of these big thorns in the side of the game. It's always going to be a huge problem to deal with. It's not a problem in adventure mode at all because adventure mode is moving at the slowest time possible in the game, so it's not a problem. [But] in dwarf mode we're always going to have to figure out a way to fudge things. If the wars are raging all over the place and, you know, over the course of month someone could sweep through an entire province or something then how does that figure in with the fact that you could maybe get your squad off the screen in a month. It's just sad, it's tragic sad, bad, and it's not going to work very well without all kinds of ... Like when you're playing a fortress it's just going to have to fake a lot of stuff. Not fake it, but just make the armies move slower on the world map too or something. So history is going to have these starts and stops, if you always play one mode you wouldn't notice but if you play between fort mode and then adventure mode and fort mode and adventure mode, there's going to be these strange dynamics going on that are caused by the fort molassesing the universe. It's okay, it's just one of those things ... because you can't go the other way and say 'I want fort mode to take as long as adventure mode' because then you'll never see summer, much less winter, because it would just take way too long for that stuff to happen. Right now [in] adventure mode if you just walk, if you're walking 'click click click'; you're going seventy two times slower than in fortress mode. So you would need to dilate the game seventy two times, which means that if you're used to a fort that lasts four years then you should get used to a fort that lasts one month for that same experience. That's crazy, that's not exactly a ...