Phase Two Testing Underway.While the game properly acknowledges the results of dwarves dying out in World Gen (as seen in succession games like The Last Dwarves In the World and engineering an old-age extinction for the dwarves), it appears that adventure mode extinction is not respected by fortress mode.
Despite all dwarves (all
everything intelligent, that is) being dead before embarking to the fortress site--a caravan arrived in Autumn. A dwarven caravan.
I scummed, abandoned, and went to adventure mode to hunt down and meet up with these merchants, to learn anything about them. None of them had any details to offer on their family, their location, anything--no information whatsoever--and none of them appeared in legends mode (although their wagons, which scuttled as the adventurer approached,
did) after interrogation by the adventurer. There were still "missing" entries in the historical figures log who weren't there after the rampage and somehow were added during fortress play.
Going back with an adventurer and killing the merchants did add them to legends mode. Killing them all did not make up the difference in "missing" entries.
There was no Outpost Liaison. It's a bit disappointing that the game recognizes when you slaughter one particular extremely necessary noble in Adventure Mode (so they'll never show up again) but misses the big picture. (Though I'm confident this will change in future versions: Army Arc pretty much has to check this, right?)
I suspect strongly that migrants will also pop once the fortress wealth is high enough; we shall see. We shall also see if I can not only make contact with goblin civilization but also provoke their attack. If elves also show up in spring, I'll consider the matter just about settled; all that would remain is to see if the "missing" four entries happen to be residents of the HFS.
However, even with these disheartening results, the Phase 2 Testing is not over, not by a long shot. If these beings unknown to World Gen show up from the edge of the world map, then we'll just have to try again--with a pocket dimension
island.
Can you do another experiment? Branch off, and start several forts and abandon them. See if it changes the age, into age of dwarf or something.
As I figured, the answer is yes--embarking at all once there are dwarves left alive in the world (say, embark, abandon without suicide, and embark/reclaim) produces the Age of the Dwarf.
Also, given that you have no Civ to embark from, does your civilisations screen list anything? Is the 'Strike the Earth!' intro page changed? (You have arrived after a long journey... but there is no mountainhomes!)
Sadly, the answers are yes, and no, respectively.
Curiously, and for this reason I will continue testing on this world before proceeding to a pocket island, its actually possible that the game acknowledged the extinction of the elves and humans but not the dwarves--before the omnicidal rampage, it was possible to play as an elf, human, or dwarf without having to "Play Now!"--afterward, it was only possible to play as a dwarf or Play Now! as a human.