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[CLF3FTW]

The announcement above just popped up. It was the same thing as the title, but ended in a period instead of a question mark. It zoomed to the location and caused a message box to come up, so I assume that it was important. However, I couldn't find anything about it. I am playing the most recent version of the Lazy Newb Pack, with no other mods. There is a very large (~120 including beak dogs and trolls) goblin siege going on right now, but no dwarves have died. Do you guys have any idea about what is going on?

[GhostDwemer]

Someone off site kicked the bucket without heirs and the RNG picked a dwarf on your site to fill the empty slot.

[Melting Sky]

Someone off site kicked the bucket without heirs and the RNG picked a dwarf on your site to fill the empty slot.

It is also possible that the chosen one was in fact a legitimate heir who immigrated to the fortress in the past.

[Thisfox]

Well, it is the Group of Confusion. I would expect them to confuse you.

It is a simple inheritance. They became a Noble the "Surprise!" way. Check your {n} to make sure of what they might need now that they're more important than the average dorf. I've had a nearby fort die out in war once, and gained a half dozen surprise nobles over the course of a year. Ever since, I've tried to keep a stack of spare dining/throne/bed rooms without owners, just to be sure that I won't run out again.

[PatrikLundell]

Well, it is the Group of Confusion. I would expect them to confuse you.

It is a simple inheritance. They became a Noble the "Surprise!" way. Check your {n} to make sure of what they might need now that they're more important than the average dorf. I've had a nearby fort die out in war once, and gained a half dozen surprise nobles over the course of a year. Ever since, I've tried to keep a stack of spare dining/throne/bed rooms without owners, just to be sure that I won't run out again.

Another way to keep the nobility scourge at bay is to play a truly dead civs. You'll eventually get a mayor (who can "select" a replacement who's not a mandate spewer), but that's it.

[CLF3FTW]

Another way to keep the nobility scourge at bay is to play a truly dead civs. You'll eventually get a mayor (who can "select" a replacement who's not a mandate spewer), but that's it.

Is there any way to reliably figure out if a civ is actually dead or only "dying"?

[PatrikLundell]

Another way to keep the nobility scourge at bay is to play a truly dead civs. You'll eventually get a mayor (who can "select" a replacement who's not a mandate spewer), but that's it.

Is there any way to reliably figure out if a civ is actually dead or only "dying"?

No. The only sure sign is that civ screen is empty after embark, i.e. there isn't a dwarven civ listed on it.

I've had some success with DFHack fiddling to push those that should be dead over the brink, though, and I've written a bug report concerning this. There's a population associated with the civ, and after the last site is wiped out there's often a population left. This population fluctuates for a number of decades and then seem to freeze. As far as I understand, they should either settle somewhere (in a camp or cave, for instance, which sometimes happen with dying civs), or die off to attacks by a hostile world or drift off to be assimilated by other civs. If this number is set to 0 using DFHackery before you accept the world it has frequently resulted in properly dead civs. At least twice I've found a monarch remaining, and once I didn't find any reason for the failure to die. Note that setting this number to 0 after accepting the world doesn't seem to work.

[mikekchar]

I was wondering about this just recently.  IIRC, the historical map in legends mode will continue to display the claimed territory of a civilisation as long as there is at least one dwarf in the civ that's still alive.  As soon as all the dwarfs die, then their civ will disappear from the historical map.  The only downside to this approach is that the map is a 10 year resolution, so if the civ died within the last few years you might not notice it on the screen.

The other thing you can potentially do is to export the map gen/info from legends mode.  This will produce a couple of useful files.  Among them is the regionname_world_sites_and_pop.txt file.  It lists all the sites and their populations (as well as which civ owns each site).  If you search for the civ in question and  it isn't in that file, then the civ is at least "almost dead".  You can then search for any ruined site that they used to own and check to see if it has a population.  If none of them do, then the civ should be dead.

[PatrikLundell]

I was wondering about this just recently.  IIRC, the historical map in legends mode will continue to display the claimed territory of a civilisation as long as there is at least one dwarf in the civ that's still alive.  As soon as all the dwarfs die, then their civ will disappear from the historical map.  The only downside to this approach is that the map is a 10 year resolution, so if the civ died within the last few years you might not notice it on the screen.

The other thing you can potentially do is to export the map gen/info from legends mode.  This will produce a couple of useful files.  Among them is the regionname_world_sites_and_pop.txt file.  It lists all the sites and their populations (as well as which civ owns each site).  If you search for the civ in question and  it isn't in that file, then the civ is at least "almost dead".  You can then search for any ruined site that they used to own and check to see if it has a population.  If none of them do, then the civ should be dead.

I agree the civ should be dead if it doesn't have any sites left, nor any historical persons alive, at least after a cool down period of something like 5-10 years where any survivors would be allowed to try to settle somewhere. In my world gens the dorfs get their mountainhome destroyed early on, so there's almost always only a single "real" site. Caves and camps aren't visible on the world map, though. I also had one case where the dorf pop was 0 for a hundred years or so, but Legends Viewer showed they actually had 100 or so elves, which is legitimate (provided those elves actually have a site to live at).
It can be noted that Legends Viewer shows a pop that seems to match the sum of the pop in the various sites, rather than the entity_populations entry value.