If dwarf civs have a claim on an artifact, will we see them go to war over it in the next update? Or will they continue the trend of not invading and send spies and thieves instead?
Or raiders I guess, if that feature is rolled out to npc civs.
Toady's already mentioned in pretty much in the early statements about this in the dev diary/biography. I've divided up the paragraphs so its easier to digest.
07/22/2016 Toady One
This week was work on underlying mechanics in support of artifact claims. The main interesting addition was a sort of family placeholder mechanic to make heirlooms work. The initial couples all get associated family structures, and then those links are passed along to the children and so forth. Of course, this opens up all kinds of world-determining issues, depending on how marriage interacts with family membership and which child has which inheritance rights over heirlooms etc etc etc, and so forth. This isn't the release to get into it (the family/status/property/law release will make a better attempt). For now, it runs an "importance" check on the family groups during a marriage -- if there is no winner, then it just flips a coin.
Artifacts will pass down family lines to keep them in play longer and to set up interesting conflicts. Even without conflicts programmed yet, we've had some interesting situations. One medium world I ran for 125 years had a dwarven hero named Fath that killed the hydra Osplu Juicepukes. After the fight, she named her steel shield Gladdashed and it became a family heirloom attached to the Kosoth Giltmirrors family group (Kosoth was an original dwarf, and by the end of world gen, that line had 228 living members -- Fath was a grandchild).
During a later koala demon invasion, a goblin named Ngokang Spideryweaver killed Fath and claimed the shield -- even though the invasion failed, Ngokang survived and took the shield back to the goblin capital of Ghoulsullied. A few years later, Ngokang was murdered and Gladdashed lost in the goblin pits, but Ngokang's family still had a claim on it (it's unclear whether goblins will often have strong family mechanics when we remove the placeholder, since it's not a typical value setting for them, but it's fine for now). Ngokang's family group was also identified with an original creature -- Bax Burialscourges, a goblin dancer that was still alive and a member of the Whispers of Evil performance troupe. That goblin family had 49 living members. Presumably, as we continue, it's possible that these 228 dwarves and 49 goblins would come into conflict over Gladdashed in various ways as the artifact is found, stolen, claimed, lost again, etc., especially since it's likely with that many dwarves that several of them would have hands on the levers of power that determine whether their whole civilization goes to war and so on.
So yes, dwarves can go to war over personal/civilisation level disputes, but only if the civilisation leader (or persons with [MILITARY_GOALS] responsibilities like found on the dwarven monarch, are affected enough to want it back or take action) is able to.
1.Can villages/hamlets grow into towns?
2. If yes, what makes that happen?
3.Can a group that is not part of a CIV become part of one or create their own?
4.Can an adventurer become a lord of a CIV by claiming the rulers town as his?
Villages currently can transition into towns by building a marketplace and changing the type to that of the village. Normally how hamlets & villages interact is that the village is the larger "market" where the hamlets connect onto, when a hamlet is built, such as the starting settlement of the human civilisation is built that isn't already a village is made it will transform.
Groups that are not part of civs are a tricky question because there are currently no non-civs, even underground tribes are civs as to the question there is how non civ groups will be represented. Already a population of animalmen appropriate to the biome (elves attract migrations of animal-men from the wild) inside civs at the beginning of worldgen and adventurers drawn from animalmen can sign up for citizenship in your fortress. We probably wont see natural non-civ tribes or any interaction with these groups until the law & property arc based off FoTF replies.
Question 4 will probably turn up in the Law & Property arc. As current rules exist in claiming sites only by inheritance, actually saying (
this site belongs to me because my late uncle owned it) without actually either being truthful or automatically assigned to the dwarf is something the law & property arc could cover, as well as owning multiple sites indirectly in a manner similar to how adventurers can claim a site after fighting the local lord and earn the title.