Starting with twice as many goblin entities as others should see them outnumber everyone else.
I already have twice as many "goblin" entities as the default, as the giant entity is almost identical to the goblin one. And their population numbers are still so erratic that sometimes humans outnumber both of them together, twofold. But I guess some randomness is to be expected.
I'm probably going to introduce another one or two entities of tall vermin. Thinking cyclopes and ogres. Hopefully that's going to ensure a better ratio of hostile vs friendly populations.
[ITEM_THIEF] civs are also hostile to non-item_thief civs (including babysnatchers) so that's another way to generate 'sides'.
I thought that might be the case, but I'm also looking for a way of making them hostile that doesn't involve either of those tags, and thus avoids having "sides".
Babysnatchers are working just fine right now. I get loads (They're braver than thieves too, which is nice).
Since I got back to the game I saw literally zero snatchers, and I think one thief, across several games. And a bunch of those games lasted long enough to get sieges so I don't know what's going on. Have you looked at my trigger tokens? Maybe they're messed up somehow?
That reminds me: what tag was it that turned kobold entities invisible in the neighbors screen? [ITEM_THIEF] or something else?
Make a snatcher civ aggressive enough and they'll happily start wars with fellow babysnatchers. Try to make their ethics as opposed as possible.
So is the only way of making them aggressive, except for the thief and snatcher tags, their ethics?
One thing to note is that your worldgen options have an entry for "population cap after civ creation" or similar, IIRC. This may be lower than the value you're setting your civs to, so your efforts there are getting cancelled out.
I'll keep that in mind and increase it next time.
One thing to note is that max pop at a site determines its resilience to worldgen attacks, but also how often the civ will split off and start a new site - or at least it seems like it works that way. Too high a site pop and it'll be invincible, but never expand because it doesn't hit full capacity; too low and they'll spread like wildfire, but get crushed whenever they run into beasts or raiders.
Makes sense, so I'll probably leave that token as the default.