So I've run across a significant issue with 40.0x and wanted to ensure people knew what was going on, if they're trying to generate worlds that worked in 34.11 and are having problems.
There's a couple of situations that are occurring so often, they appear to be consistent, and are causing some new behavior.
1) The first NPC dwarven site/embark/mountainhome always falls to a forgotten beast.
2) Hillocks will not form unless the biome has trees and/or above ground crops. (not even in mountains!)
3) Kings/Queens are assigned immediately (or shortly thereafter) when embarking from a "dead" civilization.
4) Goblins are completely taking over some fortresses, leading to another situation where the above #3 occurs.
All of the above situations create a bit of a conundrum. Why? Here's why..
If you want to create a world where Dwarves survive, it becomes quite challenging, unless you increase the "Site Cap After Civ Creation" parameter in Advanced Worldgen. However, this has no effect if the biome isn't human or elf friendly. So, it's difficult (impossible?) to create worlds with just dwarves and goblins, where one of the above 4 situations isn't present.
If you want hillocks, you create the situation where humans and elves will likely be present, as they will start civs in those biomes if you have "Number of Civilizations" above 2. Leaving it at 2 forces situation #1 to occur, and you're left embarking from a dead civ, leading to situation #3.
Potential solutions:
-Allow players to adjust the biomes within which Hillocks will form. As the word "Hillock" or "hillock" does not currently appear in any 40.0x file except Dwarf Fortress.exe, this would have be a Toady-driven change and/or adjusted with DFHack, I suspect.
-Expand the biome range within which Hillocks will form, specifically to include mountains at least. (301+ elevation) Ideally, it would include desert, wasteland, badlands, swamp and marsh.
-Allow dwarven civs to defend themselves from invasions from FB's. (if they don't already)
-If the above isn't the problem, then limit FB's attracted to the first NPC dwarven civ to (1) one. (this presumes they keep coming until the civ falls, which may not be true, but would explain a lot)
-Allow hillocks to form in biomes not adjacent to the mountainhome(s). Underground travel FTW!
Until something changes, NPC dwarven civs will continue to be wiped out trivially on worlds that have hillock-unfriendly biomes adjacent to the mountainhomes. This includes (at least) swamp, marsh, wasteland, badlands, desert, taiga, mountain, glacier, tundra, and possibly more.
I'm not sure if all of the above is intentional. Having hillocks only form on human/elf friendly biomes (and not mountain biomes) seems like a bug to me, but I don't want to presume that's the case.
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Topic: DF2014 (v0.40.24) Worldgen Cookbook Thread! (Read 161192 times)