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[mikekchar]

I'm about to find out, but I figure I'd ask if anyone knew ahead of time.  The logic being that if the caravan never unloads and never goes near your fortress, they have no idea what your fortress is worth.

My other idea for discouraging migrants is to stack up a pile of corpses on the route that the caravan takes in.  I *think* that ought to do it.

I'm doing an isolationist fortress and I'd like to have in-game ways of discouraging people from coming.

[PatrikLundell]

Not having caravans reduces the trade worth of the fortress, but I think migrants care more about fortress wealth than about exported wealth.
You can use the pop cap to limit migrants, but I think you know that already (and it's not in-game). Another way is to play a dead civ, but that's not really isolationist, as there's no mother civ to isolate yourself from...
The other way to discourage migrants is to have a large death toll (e.g. of migrants not let inside): that can scare them away so you get few or no migrants for some time.
I don't think caravan reporting is necessary for danger reports to spread, though.
A dirt poor fortress is probably also a way to discourage migrants, but you need to build stuff to get somewhere, and that stuff has value...

[Fleeting Frames]

If you bridge off map edges, you won't get migrants, as they'd be unable to enter the map.

I you want to get very little migrants, can use dfhack to set popcap 1 past your current pop (on repeat seasonally).

For visitors, iirc if your embark area (or was it region area?) has 2+ edges surrounded by water, they'll never come. Unless that got fixed sometime. (Though there's obviously also the init setting.)

Regarding caravan, if you want to have misrepresentation of your situation, you need to prevent them leaving the map after visiting. Installing a "kill this visitor" for liaison and water cycling for depot would do it. Though I'm not completely sure other visitors from your home civ wouldn't report on your situation, since reputation of your fort is supposed to be tracked.

[PatrikLundell]

The easy way to keep visitors out is to ensure all the facilities are citizens only. That's a lot easier than relying on wonky/buggy behavior.

And, Fleeting Frames, is there perhaps the wrong number of negations in the last sentence?

[Fleeting Frames]

Yes. Needs additional negations. (Added)

[mikekchar]

Interesting.  I'll see how it goes.  I traded with the caravan in the first autumn to get the appraisal skill up.  I didn't do any actual trading, just let them unload.  After that I removed the trade depot.  I started with a "survival challenge" build -- all peasants, one metalic ore and one anvil, so the fortress *is* dirt poor.  The second dwarven caravan just left, so I'll see if I get any more migrants.  So far it's just about right.  I have 26 dwarfs -- 2 died from my stupidity, one from a failed mood (needed wool cloth... as luck would have it, I have a breeding pair of sheep brought by migrants, but they were lambs until 1 week after the poor guy went crazy).

I probably won't set the cap.  I'll just escalate until I stop getting migrants (set up totems and corpses on the caravan path, assasinate the outpost liason(s), murder incoming migrants).  But I'm curious to see how far I'll need to go.

[PatrikLundell]

I generally embark with no metal ores, but bring one or two bars of metal for mood purposes (relying on Goblinite for more metal). I also bring sheep for wool (mood again).
However, your corpse littering will make your fortress dirty rich with all the junk the bolting caravans will drop. If you want to keep the value down you'd either need to destroy the junk or consider keeping the caravans just waiting by the map edge until they leave (you can still murder the liaison, of course).

[mikekchar]

Yes, in consideration, either turning the trade depot into a flooding chamber (I'll have to wait until I have a migrant whose name is Urist) or turning the meeting hall into a flooding chamber (to kill off migrants) seems like the best two solutions.  But since I didn't reduce the siege trigger and I also don't have any metal on this embark, I'm starting to reconsider my idea.  BTW, all of my migrants except one have been void dwarfs, so I had a quick peek at legends.  Before I embarked, the civ was pretty strong, but they are getting absolutely hammered by the gobbos.  Getting up to 80 dwarfs looks like FUN, especially since I'm right on the front lines... tempting...

[PatrikLundell]

You can easily modify the siege triggers by changing them in the raws in the save. That was one way to get around the trading bug (obviously not siege triggers, but the nearby trade triggers) where trading wealth was zero and the humies thus wouldn't deem you worthy of being traded with.

[mikekchar]

Just to verify what others have said, I still got migrants after removing the trading post: 19 of them.  At least one of them brought a pick. :-P  But I figure I'll allow migrants after all because I realised that without metal in the embark, I'm going to be suffering from moods that require it.  Already I had to melt down one of our 4 battle axes to satisfy a mood (for stupid ring, no less!)  I'm also too stubborn to edit the raws in the save :-)  Now that I'm up to nearly 50 dwarfs, we really need to work on some defences...