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[Thormgrim]

I just gen'd an interesting world, but it only has two Dwarven Civs in it an (according to legends) one of them is extinct.

What are the pros/cons of taking on a dead civ when founding your fortress?  Can you get a king/queen, for example, if there is no mountainhome?  Are there migrants/traders??

[Hetairos]

There is no monarch, no traders (except for those from non-dwarven civs) and only the two hardcoded migrant waves.

[jwest23]

The pro, though, is that you're forced to play with your dwarves as not being expendable.  Each death has serious consequences.  I've played this scenario before and thoroughly enjoyed it.

[m-logik]

Only cons, really, unless you want a hermit challenge or a fortborn only challenge. Or for rp purposes, I suppose. You'll get no migrants beyond the first two harcoded waves, no noble appointments (baron, duke, count) and no monarch. I THINK you'll still get a dwarven caravan, but you won't be able to make trade agreements with no outpost liaison.

The population problem is the real killer. You'll find it hard to muster enough dwarfpower to do big projects and keep a professional military. It's not impossible to thrive, but if you aren't a relatively skilled player you probably won't survive long enough to see your baby beards grow up.

[wierd]

in the up comming release, there will be metagaming potential to revive the dwarven race, as you will be able to retire a carefully cultivated fortress, and slowly re-establish dwarven superiority upon the land.

i've actually been looking forward to attempting this for some time now.

[Melting Sky]

I recently accidentally embarked from a dead civilization. My suggestion is you bring a lot of work animals to supplement your dwarf power. Most (all) of your military will have to be animals assuming you think its actually worth not walling off the fort from the world completely.

Im my case I had also embarked on a haunted and terrifying biome next to a necro tower with no human or elven neighbors so in the end I decided it probably wasn't worth playing it out for the simple fact that it would have been an incredibly boring fortress since the only sane way to play it would be to completely wall off the fortress to the outside including the caverns. Sure it wouldn't have been that hard to play that fort for a thousand years but it would have been very dull without outside contact. The other option which would have been to leave the front doors open for no apparent reason which would have been completely suicidal with 15 dwarves.

[ImagoDeo]

I recently accidentally embarked from a dead civilization. My suggestion is you bring a lot of work animals to supplement your dwarf power. Most (all) of your military will have to be animals assuming you think its actually worth not walling off the fort from the world completely.

Im my case I had also embarked on a haunted and terrifying biome next to a necro tower with no human or elven neighbors so in the end I decided it probably wasn't worth playing it out for the simple fact that it would have been an incredibly boring fortress since the only sane way to play it would be to completely wall off the fortress to the outside including the caverns. Sure it wouldn't have been that hard to play that fort for a thousand years but it would have been very dull without outside contact. The other option which would have been to leave the front doors open for no apparent reason which would have been completely suicidal with 15 dwarves.

You could use map edge restriction tech to still accept caravans. It's really easy to pull it off but very exploity.

[Melting Sky]

You could use map edge restriction tech to still accept caravans. It's really easy to pull it off but very exploity.

I had no neighbors to trade with. I would never be visited by any merchants no matter what I did. There literally was no reason what-so-ever to not to go the very boring route of turning the fortress into a completely self contained box sealed off from everything. I had actually even brought enough wood with me from the embark to make beds for everyone without felling a single tree so I didn't even need the over world or caverns for that. Even if there were elven or human merchants I doubt it would have been worth the casualties to have them visit safely by trying to build a wall around an entire embark with multiple types of evil weather and other nasty thing running around killing my builders. When you only have 15 dwarves you don't even have enough for each one to specialize in their own trade let alone spares for the ones who die along the way.

I think that is one of the flaws in DF that needs to be ironed out someday which is that it is way to easy to just wall off the world and have nothing in the game capable of threatening you. I think eventually when their is burrowing enemies and the like it will likely fix this issue.

[Repseki]

Can you still retire Adventurers at the sites of a dead dwarven civ (then making them able to migrate to your fort)? Or does that require the civ to still be kicking?

[GavJ]

I suggest modding dwarven child->adult age to be a little lower if you want to play a fortborn roleplaying game.

maybe 5-6 years, instead of 12.

12 is a little too much "sit around and wait for kids to grow up while you cook dinner fortress."

[Deepblade]

Dwarf Therapist can also let you enable labors on kids. Even if just so they can get some other skill other than craftsdwarf that can mood.

[HooliganintheFort]

Cons, protecting the little kids till they grow up. They will be useless till then, but you can mod them to speed growth up.

[pisskop]

I'd rather play with dying civs than dead ones.  Dying ones still get migrants, the migrant skills are sporadic, and depending on how close to extinction they are every death is serious.  Dead ones don't fit the spirit of realism, which I do try to hold to in a grand sense.


Next update I am curious to see how retiring a fort (handing it over to the NPC to run, not abandoning it) will affect dead civs.  It may just be possible to resurrect them by abandoning embarks and then getting them as migrants.

[wierd]

The ultimately interesting thing I want to see (eventually) is for worldgen to be resumable after playing a fortress, or playing an adventurer, so that the impacts of both can then ripple across the world's history.

That way, a "second creation" of dwarves on a world that has been dominated by the elves (seriously ancient worldgen, elves are immortal so they eventually win out- coupled with dwarven and human extinctions), with aggressive colonization performed by the player with retired fortresses.

Instead of thinking "Dwarves appearing out of nowhere is unrealistic" think, "Armok is angry that his chosen creations faltered, and decided to act to fix the issue". 

That's how I look at it anyway.

I would so like to see an "age of elves" suddenly get thrown back with a resurgence of dwarven kind from literally out of nowhere.

[GavJ]

Dead ones don't fit the spirit of realism, which I do try to hold to in a grand sense.

??
It's not possible for 7 dwarves to be the last of a civilization? Seems perfectly realistic.

If you don't like them popping up out of nowhere, then just:
1) Look in legends, find the moment they went extinct.
2) Rerun the world with the same seed, stopping the year immediately after.
3) Embark, and now it's only been a year, maybe only a few months, since extinction. They were very easily explainably simply in hiding from whatever the last battle was. Proceed as normal.