Hi all,
Having learned avaluable and fun lesson from my last fortress (drowning machines must have off switches, also line up your pumps correctly :/ ) I decided it would be nice to have a fortress hidden away under some cool ruins.
Unfortunately humans are silly and only build on plains, elves don't even have buildings as far as I can tell, and I don't even know where kobolds live so it's down to goblin towers. However, I have discovered that goblin tower ruins are just empty goblin towers. So obviously I'm gonna have to 'make' some nice crumbly ruins. Fine by me. Still, goblin towers come pre made and I don't want to mess around with casting obsidian so it seems carving some out of an existing tower is the best route. (heh the occupants are another issue but what's a good ruin without bones?)
I've been genning worlds looking for a good spot and I have already discovered two - a tower nestled in a mountain with a ruined human town around it (awesome), and one with a cistern.......made of gold (double awesome)........full of lava (dwarvenly awesome).
Now these are nice on their own but it stands to reason that one with BOTH (plus other features) would be the holy grail of goblin towers, so I've started genning worlds looking for one, but I have some questions.
1. What determines whether or not a tower will have a cistern? I think based on something I read but can't find it's related to the presence of human slaves in the goblin civ?
2. What, if anything, determines whether or not said cistern will have water or lava in it? (obv a magma pipe would be best but I have only found 3 sites with magma pipes close to the tower in ~20 worlds - it doesn't help that the towers always spawn on the edge of map tiles for some reason - plus the cistern has the advantage of not having to have igneous rock everywhere)
3. What, if anything, determines the presence of ruins around the tower? They look just like a ruined human town but I've never seen humans near a mountain. Is it like normal ruins where they are (presumably) generated becuse of wars or something or is it just a bonus feature that is random? Would genning a world more prone to ruins make this more likely? also see no. 4
4. What influences the creation of ruins in worldgen? It seems like having a lot of civs helps, do megabeasts have an effect? Allowing the history to run longer? Geographic factors? I let it run for 5000 years or so and it seems like ruins get reclaimed eventually, plus in the final worldgen map I see tons of dark tower ruins but when I go to embark suddenly they are populated again. (not that is matters too much as I said before since tower ruins and occupied towers are functionally identical)
5. How can I maximize in worldgen settings the number of goblins on the map to reduce time spent genning worlds, (still like the other civs to survive though)