So, if you abandon during the age of death, then reclaim, will you get migrants from the new civilization?
As far as I can tell, no. Neither migrants nor traders. My observations in the Age of Death are that the civilization doesn't seem to re-activate, even if you add new dwarves to its census rolls through embark/abandon/reclaim.
For instance, if you embark during an Age of Emptiness, while the game acknowledges that all civilized beings have died, the civilizations still show up on cue on your "c: Civilizations" screen and then pop accordingly when the time is right (migration, trade, etc). The Age of Death is different--nothing shows up on your "c: Civilizations" screen ever again. And nothing associated with those civilizations ever pops again--no thieves, traders, ambushes or sieges.
Phase 5: Game Does Become ScarceAs I had been advised, the game tracks animal populations at world gen--and the changes in play are respected.
A world was generated with
only the following critters still in the raws:
Wagon, the contents of creature_fanciful, Wolf, Dwarf, Human, Elf, Goblin, Kobold, Dragon, Demon, Spirit of Fire, Frog Demon, Tentacle Demon, Purring Maggot, Cave Lobster.
If you remove purring maggots from the raws, the game locks up at embark, although it gens just fine. Reason uncertain. Cave Lobsters themselves aren't necessary, but apparently if you remove the last creature with the tag [HASSHELL], the game locks up at embark--you can, for instance, include turtles and exclude cave lobsters.
A world-painted pocket island was generated--oceans on all sides, and with judicious control of rainfall, the number of world squares of forest was limited to 13--with the wolf cluster numbers turned down to 1:1, the wolf population set to 1:1, and the [MALE] tag added in an attempt to get them to stop breeding. To provide the proper Age of Death atmosphere, I also gave a max-age to the [MEGABEAST] and [ENDING] monsters, so that even if no dwarf got a lucky crit on them in this island's history, they'd still die before worldgen ran out. (That works, by the way: their max-ages are respected, although the number you plug in isn't the number that fires, since creatures alive in year 1 have some arbitrarily earlier effective birthdate.)
An export of data in legends mode indicated that there were indeed only 13 wolves in the world. And a crapload of purring maggots, but I'd no intention to go hunting for vermin in adventure mode. And other than that, absolutely nothing else left alive.
The [MALE] tag doesn't seem to do what we think it does, or it doesn't do it for wildlife when calculating populations in the background, or its effects are overrode if there are still tags for [CHILD] in the entry (parthenogenesis, perhaps?). I'm only saying this because I started with 13 wolves, killed 14 (with a DF Companion super-powered human wrestler), starved and went to legends, and got a new total of 2 wolves left alive.
A new adventurer was sent to try and kill the last two--the first wolf actually got the drop on one, killing her, mainly because one too many instances of DF were open and DF Companion wasn't super-powering the right adventurer. But I went with it; and checked legends--there was now one wolf left in the forest, and one wolf in a cave, who now had a name. Last adventurer set out, killed both. Then the adventurer walked around the circle of forest for a year of in-game time.
No more wolves ever appeared. Legends specifically records 0 wolves in the Outdoor Animal Populations. Now, that doesn't mean random encounters stopped--as the wolf population dipped, an increasing number of false alarms happened, meaning fast-travel stopped, 'T' was blocked for a few turns because "You Must Survive the Ambush", but there was nothing. Nothing in sight, and DF Companion read nothing in memory. Once the wolf population dipped to single digits there were about three of these false alarms for every actual encounter with a wolf. Once the wolf population reached zero, these false alarms still came up as often as normal encounters might...but no wolves ever appeared in a year of walking around the same thirteen world map squares.
(These false alarms are probably an unimportant bug of some kind, and a little annoying, but I like to think of them as the last being alive, wandering the world in ever-mounting terror and madness,
freaking the fuck out whenever he thinks he hears something...but it's just the wind, right? Right?)
- Phase 1: Completed, success: it is possible to kill every civilized being in adventure mode and bring the world to an Age of Emptiness.
- Phase 2a: Completed, failure: Age of Emptiness is not respected in Fortress Mode. Civilizations which are still alive will spawn new things at the normal times. Adventure mode can kill everything in a civilization but cannot kill the civilization itself.
- Phase 2b: Not completed: one possibility is that the spawns observed in 2a come from off-map--as in, off world-map. If the world is an island, this might make a difference. Considered doubtful at this time, but will test.
- Phase 3: Not completed: animal populations in Phase 5 have been observed as staying dead, despite the long passage of time in Adventure Mode. Perhaps, if civilizations are still alive (Age of Emptiness, not Age of Death), they will spawn things in Adventure Mode if sufficient time passes. Will test.
- Phase 4: Completed, success: if an Age of Death is achieved during world gen, it will be completely respected during play. Dead civilizations stay dead.
- Phase 5: Completed, apparent success: animal populations can be reduced to zero in adventure mode, and during adventure mode this will stick, and the results are observed in legends.