I feel it's long been speculated that something like this would be worthwhile, but I am yet to see anyone do it well. The goal of this project is to produce a detailed setting from the legends files in Dwarf Fortress. There are a long list of obstacles to doing this, and I might as well begin at first big obstacle. Legends is actually pretty dull. For the first 100 years, civilizations expand to their maximum ever size. Then, over then next 100 years, about 2 conquests happen. After that, nothing happens and the world enters permanent stasis. It needs to be modded to be more conductive to warfare, shifting borders, slow but steady expansion and interesting figures.
The primary objective is to get the game to a point where world generation can run for 3,000 years without entering stasis, for all 4 races to be of roughly equal power and not just curbstomp eachother out of existance, for all races to expand slowly and only really reach their maximum size after 2,000 years, for races to be able to expand across the entire map except for the interiors of mountain regions and for conquests of locations to be far more frequent and for larger populations/settlements. For wars between civilizations to continue occurring throughout generation.
Secondary objectives are: Splitting Elves into High Elves that live in cities, and Wood Elves that live in forests. Making megabeasts survive world generation for longer. Expanding the nobility systems. Allow all races to be vampire or necromancer or whatever historical figures. Add a second human race that is suited to living in snowy climates.
I have already experimented with a bunch of changes. I modified the Small Island world generator to run for up to 10,000 years (but didn't actually leave it that long, it's just so I can keep it running as long as I need), have 40 civilizations, no population limit and no site limit. I also modified Dwarfs, Goblins, Elves and Humans to [BIOME_SUPPORT:ANY_LAND:1] so that they will expand anywhere and are more willing to conquer cities of other races. I multiplied entity pop limits and site pop limits by 10.
The results are as follows:
In 325 years there were 165 conquests of settlements. Most of these were entities attacking civilizations changes (I presume this is civil war style). The last cross-civilization conquest was in 145, so I shall use this as the basis for when a world enters stasis. After 183 almost all wars declared were between entities and civilizations, instead of civilizations and civilizations. Cities seem to be soft-capped at 10,000 population per race in the city, because there were a bunch slightly over 10,000 and none higher than 11000. Civilizations stopped expanding after 140, and left about 15% of the world in the Northwest corner uninhabited for some reason. Four civilizations were wiped out, the last one being wiped out in 323 due to being conquered by unknown (judging by the pop list, it looks like all the inhabitants just died; all that remains is animals). The most warlike zone was the southwest island, where in one war 70 pillages took place and over 12000 people were killed.
There were a total of 342 wars, 1905 battles, 165 conquests and 1045 sites. Humans are the dominant race at 158,551 population. There are a total of 146,824 battle deaths.
These results are far superior to the default world gen, which seems to give me about 10 conquests when run with the same map. However, it's still not that great since it reaches stasis within 150 years. I am looking for other people willing to contribute research and progress in this complicated balancing act that is making legends interesting.
Lastly, the trade map of the world, which I personally find to be the best way to look at it outside of legends viewer.
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Topic: The Legends Project (Read 6300 times)