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[Elagn]

I realy like this idea and have thought about it before, if never posted. I agree that new expeditions should be able to be sent from existing fortresses, but I personaly dont think they should have the 7 dwarf limit or limit on how much they can take.

If you have gone to the time and effort to make a huge fortress and gather enourmus wealth, why should the next expedition be limited to 7 dwarves and highly limited supplies. You should be able to assemble a fleet of wagons filled with lots and lots of supplies and send practicaly as many dwarves as you want out with the expedition, and plenty of animals and masterwork goods too.

Making wagons should be simple, costing 3 logs, or more if wanted, and should be constructed outside with a clear path to the map edge. It should require an architect and carpenter. Once made, it should have a large capacity for goods. To embark, they should need 2 draft animals and at least one dwarf to guide each wagon.

For settling a new fortress, other animals could be assigned to follow/be tied to the wagon, and the other dwarves could walk. The wagon and settlers should have to walk/roll to the map edge, then the calender should advance however long is reasonable for the wagon to get to the destination. This time should be dependent on how far the new location is from the old location. For the forseable future at least, the wagon should essentialy teleport to the new location, ignoring blocking features in the way for simplicity.

This new wagon system should allow for trade caravans to be sent out too, but with slightly different mechanics. It should also be able to perserve your original wagon for future use, and move it around following the rules of wagon movement with two pack animals.

[Deboche]

I agree with all that. Dwarf fortresses are a lot like bee hives which gather honey and increase the population up to a certain point and then half the bees leave to start a new hive elsewhere.

You get the feeling in DF that you have too much stuff, too many dwarves, food, clothes, animals, tools etc and it would be nice to be able to send it all away to start a new fortress.

In an ideal final version you wouldn't even need to play that new fortress and it would establish itself and grow on its own.

And maybe at some point, unhappy dwarves who don't have strong family or friendship ties to other dwarves in your fortress might choose to migrate.

[vjmdhzgr]

Making wagons should be simple, costing 3 logs, or more if wanted, and should be constructed outside with a clear path to the map edge. It should require an architect and carpenter. Once made, it should have a large capacity for goods. To embark, they should need 2 draft animals and at least one dwarf to guide each wagon.

In the game as it is now there's actually a set carrying capacity to wagons. It's difficult to get to that without setting the embark points higher in advanced world generation, but if you bring enough items on embark you end up bringing two wagons and even get a second set of animals.

I was also looking through the goals for the game in general recently, and noticed something quite relevant to this. It's from core goal 76
"Embarking in dwarf mode is one of the more sterile, gameish parts of the... game, and it can afford to be spruced up. Though a full take-your-wagons-from-here-to-there style embark is probably beyond the scope of version 1, at least giving the backstory for the journey and adding various game effects and alterations to starting conditions based on it would help with immersion."
It's said that controlling the embark itself is beyond the scope of version 1 so that's obviously not an option for the embark from an established fort we're talking about, though it is something Toady's considered.