Yes I've tried that (and typically sort of do still). There are a number of problems with your wishes (not as such, but DF's ability to fulfill them):
- If your civ isn't completely dead by DF's broken accounting you'll still get caravans and regular migrant waves. You'll also be almost guaranteed to be saddled with a monarch early, typically well within the first year.
- Truly dead civs can't raid at all, nor get any dependent sites due to bugs.
- Getting a truly dead civ is tricky, both because of DF's rather broken accounting resulting in most of them being considered "struggling", and because dead civs are culled from the list of civs you can chose at embark, so all have to be dead for any dead ones to show up (which means you'd either have to get them back onto the list, which can be done with a DFHack script, or you'd have to set the number of dwarven civs to 1 and try 20 or so times when it logically is dead to find one that's dead according to DF.
- DF's accounting of minerals does NOT take alloys into consideration. This means dwarves will always have both steel and bronze, even if the metals they're based on are not present, and, similarly, gobbos will have bronze.
Elves do not bring any metal (apart from "grown" metal items, and there are rumors about divine metal strings (all the odd ones I've seen have been various kinds of odd silk). Humies bring metal, however, and they'd bring bronze even if they don't have the components for it. Personally I use the house rule of not buying any metal from caravans except non weapons grade ones as replacements for the mood metal brought at embark (failing strange moods because you don't have any metal is no fun). With the number of villains and questers I've killed byproduct Visitite is getting up to significant volumes, but ones you've processed your first real siege (i.e. not the 10 gobbo probe one), you typically have at least modest amounts.
I generate my worlds with a mineral scarcity of 80000 (a bit more than "very scarce") resulting in most embarks having no metals, or only non weapon/armor grade ones. Goblinite is a reliable source of metal, though, assuming your embark is selected with that in mind. I also try to get a healthy civ to avoid getting a monarch, although that usually doesn't work out...
Edit: While a 3*3 embark is guaranteed to get at least one candy spire (and a 2*2 aligned one has exactly one), the volumes tend to be limited and it tends to take a fair while to get to the stage where you're able to extract it.
Sand is always present in (sand!) deserts. For other biomes DFHack's embark-tools provides a sand indicator. Glass is extremely useful since it allows you to produce cages and menacing spikes even when turtling from a siege. However, getting enough bags is always a struggle for me (they're all gobbled up by seeds, due to my obsessive surface plant farming).
I always embark on an aquifer due to the availability of safe unlimited amounts of water. The new light aquifers are easier to deal with (but will make things like obsidian farms trickier to manage, due to the limited flow).
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Topic: Mineral scarcity and sieges (Read 1415 times)