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[Granite26]

One of the frequent complaints about new world gen is that the gobbos are at peace, too many races have died out, or the elves have eaten everybody.

At the end of the day though, world gen is playing through history.  Once Megabeast survival is up (whether through intended means or people modding them), there's really no reason to stop at 1050 rather than 936 or 512.

Why not expand the world gen parameters to allow players to define an interesting point in history, and have it look for it?

I.E.  Start looking 50 -> Finish Looking 1050 OR 20% Megabeasts left or Any civ at 1 site remaining.
Stop on: Goblins at war with dwarves (at least one instance)
AND elves at war with humans
AND elves not at war with dwarves
AND humans not at war with dwarves.

Basically use it to look for an interesting point in history.

This idea shamelessly stolen from the below quote

[Granite26]

I agree... once the history is generated properly, all the megabeasts die and the world is a confusing mess of captives, snatched babies, prisoners, zerg elves, and peaceful goblins.

There should be a few options at worldgen to simple things up - like making race x fight race y no matter what, or spawn random megabeasts whenever the numbers get too low.

A better answer to keeping them alive during worldgen is to change in some way how they survive. If they're getting beat up into oblivion before they even get a chance, something is wrong in their makeup - it should be resolved. Respawning them when population gets too low is not an answer. It won't fix the basic puzzle - why're they dying out when we want them to survive? It could be that they're not fun or challenging or smart in their present state, so simply making more of them when pop gets low just won't make it any better - the basic problem still exists.

The kind of answer you're bringing to the table is 20th century. In the 21st game worlds will be non-linear and they'll be grown.. like babies.

Perhaps there could be some kind of "analyzer". It would cycle through countless worlds, looking for particular setups. It would change various things to see what happens in the world - all in the program. Having found one exhibiting a particular setup, it would add it to a list. This might be something Toady would do or someone else with enough time. After compiling a long list, they could post it for other players. They'd load these world settings and create it.. tada! Then they'd start building their fortress. Otherwise, Toady has to do this step by step.. a very grueling and error-prone job. And the major benefit of this would be countless worlds with countless setups - not dependent on humans - just the processing power of a computer.

An easier to code example where I could be the analyzer.. i could enable a setting like this:
"Stop world generation when goblins are at war with me."

That one might stop generation when war was declared or suspended. You can do this now manually by looking through the historical events, but it's kind of time consuming.

Or this:
"Stop world generation when goblin population is below X."

Etc..

Ofcourse, when toady finishes army arc and some of his other goals, we could literally force a war... as right now wars don't change after worldgen (far as I understand it). In fact, a lot of things don't change after world gen. The goal is to allow for them to change.