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[Catastrophic lolcats]

What is this parameter's name?

Year to Begin Checking Megabeast Percentage: X, Default is 300. Once this year is hit it will start to cull the Megabeasts down to the percentage listed in the next line.
Percenatage Beasts Dead for Stoppage: X, Default is 80. So usually only about 20% should survive the cull after the year set before. These guys still and will die from natural causes.

Because of these two settings there will be hardly any Megabeasts left by the time the 1k year rolls around. If you really want a ton of Megabeast you can also turn the caves up so the Megabeast/kobolds/nightcreatures shouldn't fight over lairs as much.

[NW_Kohaku]

What is this parameter's name?

Year to Begin Checking Megabeast Percentage: X, Default is 300. Once this year is hit it will start to cull the Megabeasts down to the percentage listed in the next line.
Percenatage Beasts Dead for Stoppage: X, Default is 80. So usually only about 20% should survive the cull after the year set before. These guys still and will die from natural causes.

Because of these two settings there will be hardly any Megabeasts left by the time the 1k year rolls around. If you really want a ton of Megabeast you can also turn the caves up so the Megabeast/kobolds/nightcreatures shouldn't fight over lairs as much.

That's not how that works. 

It doesn't kill off megabeasts, it stops worldgen if too many megabeasts have been killed (so that if you set it to 80%, then it will ensure at least 20% of megabeasts will still be around to rampage on your fort).  What's killing megabeasts are the adventurers.

[Catastrophic lolcats]

That does sound right. I haven't really messed around with the world gen for a long time. I was sure there was a setting that culled off Megabeasts though. Guess you can still bump up the numbers/caves and get the same result.

[Aquillion]

By default, the game stops worldgen once 80% of megabeasts have been culled.  This is supposed to happen; 80% dead is intentional and the default for most worlds, in order to create an interesting history.

If you want more, just lower that percent -- worldgen will stop sooner, with more beasts alive.

[Supersnes]

Would it be out of the realm of possibility to kill/overthrow a god by various means, usurping them and gaining their divine powers.  This could allow the player to bring forth disasters, curses, and plagues upon the unbelievers!  Megabeasts for ALL!  The player, now a underling of Armok, would then have to bring more believers to worship them and compel kingdom to world wide events such as holy wars, famines, revolutions, inquisitions, missionary movements, and colonization.  Overtime as the player gains recognition, they can challenge the supremacy of other gods and possibly attain the highest seat of power or be cast to the earth as a fallen one.  With the increase in worship the player should also scale in new abilities/abilities have greater are of effect and power.  Also shouldn't gods also have relics associated with them so that even if they disappear there is always a chance for them to return?

[tsen]

Sidenote, would anyone else be willing to accept longer world generation times in exchange for a system that has multiple levels of combat simulation based on the importance of historical figures?

[Radiant_Phoenix]

Sidenote, would anyone else be willing to accept longer world generation times in exchange for a system that has multiple levels of combat simulation based on the importance of historical figures?

I would rather it made the simulation more detailed initially and then scaled down the detail the more times similar conflicts happened, using data from the earlier (more detailed) conflicts to refine the approximation.

[tsen]

I see how that would work, but it would seem to rely largely on gathering specific data which could be used as a generalization. The major problem there is that if say, a world gen dragon happens to be blind and missing the claws on its front legs, but we use combat metadata from a fully healthy dragon in the simplified combat calculation... Could get messily inaccurate.

Since it progresses from the specific to the general we'd need some way to read the specific data from it and apply that more accurate data to the simplified calculations. I suppose it could be pre-cached, but that would end up taking forever to re-generate when you tinkered with the RAWs. Not that that is a bad thing, since most people don't do a lot of RAW tinkering to begin with. (Sure you might download a mod, but that could come with its own pre-cached interactions I suppose)

The primary reason I felt simple -> complex might be better is that historical figures will eventually have possessions (I assume) and that way those items could be more easily generated, whether trophies, spoils of war, incidental stuff, or named weapons, artifacts, etc.

[NW_Kohaku]

I honestly don't lose any sleep over losing all my megabeasts - dragons are boring and old by now, anyway.  They're only interesting for their dragon egg farms at this point.  It's the FBs, which definitely don't all die off, that are more serious threats. 

We do need combat abstractions, however, and a more abstracted worldgen in general, as Toady intends to relatively soon involve the entire population of the region in worldgen.  That means a jump from calculating 5,000 historical figures at a time to 500,000 historical figures at a time, so worldgen is going to take roughly a hundred times longer without more optimization and abstraction.

[Watsst]

If you dont want them dieing and want more, then definitely use the advanced world generation. The thing to change though is not the % dead but the number of Megabeast Caves, which is actually how many megabeasts there are. Change it up to something like 1000. I found it cures the problem of having them all dead early on, and is nice and colourful. As for finding AWG difficult, pick the size of the place you want, edit it with e, and only change that number and the end year to something smaller than the generic 1050 years, probably 300 to 500 depending on the map size. Otherwise it'll freeze.

I honestly don't lose any sleep over losing all my megabeasts - dragons are boring and old by now, anyway.  They're only interesting for their dragon egg farms at this point.  It's the FBs, which definitely don't all die off, that are more serious threats. 

Pfff maybe for you longgg time players, I've been playing for about a year now pretty solid and never seen a hydra, roc or dragon.... I only get minotaurs and goblins again and again.... there all there in the history! I WANT A DRAGON FARM. Maybe my fortress's arent old enough (longest one 7 years, 1 minotaur, many FB).

EDIT: As for whether they need a Immunity to death or anything like that I disagree, as I think its currently pretty good. If you think about it an average world gen makes about 100 Megabeasts that dont/rarely procreate, then over history there is ten's of thousands of other creatures. It's practically a given they'll die out. Maybe if they breed more, or there was a minimum to numbers, but that really would make every world gen the same

[D_E]

I've recently been saddened by this, too.  I like to mod DF and it's a pain that all my carefully created megabeasts are dead within 40 years of world gen.

We need abstractions, but abstractions are a delicate thing.  It's clear that the world gen combat engine has only the roughest idea of how tough creatures are in combat.

[Aquillion]

Honestly, not really.  Bronze Colossi are the only megabeasts that are really tough in combat -- any other megabeast can get a crippling injury from a single unlucky attack, after which its death is just a matter of time.  (Dragons are dangerous at long range due to their fire breath but are chumps up close.)  And even BCs have trouble fighting multiple experienced, well-armed and armored axe-wielders.  Remember:  DF combat is extremely lethal and many types of injuries never heal.  If you're constantly fighting experienced, well-equipped adventurers or raiding entire towns full of armed guards (as megabeasts do), you'll eventually get worn down or unlucky and die.

I don't think the megabeast survival rates are that far off-base.

[D_E]

Well, that brings two things to mind, and from opposite ends of the spectrum, at that!

The first kinda a philosophical point: while it's realistic that megabeasts have to be really tough to make it through world-gen, in my (limited) experience playing adventure mode strong megabeasts like that aren't very fun to fight, and it would be nice to have a "don't kill this off" tag for things we want to stick around through world-gen.



The second is that the world-gen algorithm really isn't very accurate.  I've had modded creatures that are completely invulnerable die in their first world-gen encounter, or treated as tough-but-beatable opponents (indicating something's off about how it processes materials or body plans or something).

Also, four (out of nine) of those megabeasts died at the hands of small creatures, probably from wood-weapon wielding cultures.  I'm pretty sure that should be impossible.  Vanilla elves win fights with megabeasts, too.

...
I realize that those are both modding-specific complaints.

[Radiant_Phoenix]

I have a modded race that kept having trouble surviving worldgen -- no matter how much tougher I made them, they kept getting worn down in wars. Even though killing a single unconscious (berserk) soldier in fortress mode was a herculean task, worldgen just laughed at it.