Devnotes:
Various possiblities that guide or govern fortress activity: frontier settlement, religious site, prison colony . . .
Yeah, I saw that, I'm just pointing out the difference between "possible" and "actually
planned."
I always imagine it more along the lines of being a bunch of convicts deposited in a hostile environment (monster island?) trying to build a new home and survive.
More like Australia than Alcatraz, then? That could work, although it rather blurs the difference between a so-called "prison colony" and a perfectly
normal, vanilla DF embark. If the only difference is a bit of flavor text with the liaison, I'm not going to be terribly impressed.
Nor do i like the idea of being arbitrarily limited in what or how I'm allowed to play. Dwarf Fortress is about that, y'know? "Be whoever the hell you want, Do whatever the hell you want" kind of deal. Dwarf fortress really is exactly what you make of it, if you want it to be a power fantasy and play an evil overlord, you should be allowed to . . .
A very valid point, but with something of an inherent conflict with the concept of procedurally-generated civilizations. What if you discover the
perfect embark site, and find out only
after you arrive there that your civ (the only civ able to embark in this magical place) requires you to denigrate and oppress gnomes/gorlaks/dwarves with cinnamon skin/etc.? Not really an insurmountable difficulty, just add the ability to explore all facets of a civ's culture as part of the Embark window, but that could still easily sour that "perfect" embark for you.
Objection #2: Tying prejudice directly to a Violence slider means players will be unable to control whether they want conflict from
within or
without their own society. Personally, I don't want to start a game not knowing if I'm going to be fighting goblins, or
myself (or perhaps both).
Objection #3: The saga of a certain Meatgod has already demonstrated ample proof that Toady absolutely does
not want players to be able to do just
whatever the hell they want. Sure, Toady doesn't control mods, but I wouldn't expect him to deliberately build framework for mods that he knows he's not going to like.