- Making friendly relations with intelligent creatures who can live on your site - ie. give livestock to the hill giants and let them inhabit part of the map, and attack goblins that come knocking. Not yet, but it's been discussed.
I've thought for a while that, below the level of outright civilization with cities and all, we ought to see more interesting sentient behavior/interaction surrounding the animal people. Something beyond "well they shoot at us with blowdarts instead of just clawing us, so we won't eat their carcasses" (although that's an interesting place to start even in the future if, say, your dwarves have to develop knowledge of and relationships with various tribes/races out there). On the other end, maybe the most advanced (via random choices of the world generator and whatever system is running to do similar things while you play through years of fort or adventure mode) would actually develop proto/mini-civilizations, but without this being consistent (maybe it'd get up to the level of hamlets filled with skunkmen who otherwise behave little different from stinky kobolds, but no further, and even then only if skunkmen happen to wind up advancing a fair bit beyond the running-around-in-the-caverns/woods-in-bands stage that they'd still typically occupy -- or would it be the other way around, that many animal tribes start as almost proto-civilizations but usually degenerate over time to the state we currently see them in?... you know, a sort of "earlier, older races that have all but disappeared" theme even within this game about legendary/mythic creatures).
Anyway... point of all that ramble, I'd like to see more
character in the animal-people -- and for that matter semi-intelligent beasts such as hill giants.
Which, I guess, means that it's not so much civilization I'm wanting from animalmen as it is
culture. This merits further discussion.