This thread focuses on the 'who' and 'why' in forts, and I think it pertains to a lot of the stuff Toady is doing right now. I'm just throwing things out here.
I apologize for the wall of text :<
When you embark somewhere it's stated that your dwarves are founding an outpost, but it's never stated why. In fact, outposts in DF seem to serve very little purpose in advancing the goals of the founding civ since the outpost simply hoards all it's wealth. I'm certainly not an expert on medieval government and economics (far from it, I find it difficult to conceive a non-capitalistic society...), but wouldn't an outpost typically divert whatever riches it acquires to the founding civ? My best model of medieval economics is that the monarchy is something like an employer and the peasants are the employees, except the peasants are paid in accommodations rather than currency. A monarchy founding an outpost would be similar to a franchise opening up a new shop somewhere, or that's how I've come to understand it.
What am I getting at? Well, the role of dwarven outposts is ambiguous. I think it would be neat if forts had a more concrete place in the world. I'm not against anything other than your typical colony though - I think it would be great if you could choose what kind of settlement you're founding. What is the "mission?" What is the founding group's agenda? You should be able to define these things, even if you're just choosing from a group of presets, it could add a lot. For example, you might not want to start an outpost, maybe you want to start your own independent entity! There could be political reasons for this, if you're a military entity you should be
fighting someone, which will become all the more relevant when you can send armies out across the map. You could have a number of reasons for the military example alone, and these could even be randomly generated. You might be rebelling against your origin civilization or promoting the spread of a religion, or you could even be a lawless group of rogues with no other goal than to terrorize neighboring settlements and accumulate wealth! Whatever you choose, the game should reflect the role you choose. It's unlikely your home civ would send a liason to a rogue encampment, and they might not necessarily know of it's existence in the first place. If you don't want to have any political ties and merely want to provide for your dwarves, you could start your own civ! I don't know about you, but I think that sounds exciting.
And what about an actual hermit fort? Once dwarves are less stupid and managing a single dwarf to take care of itself becomes more feasible it could be possible to do that if you chose to do so. In such a case you would be unlikely to attract attention for quite a while, kobolds in particular might be attracted to the place initially and it probably wouldn't be until after you've accumulated some wealth that someone with an agenda might take in interest an your hoard. Adventurers and rogues from around the world could pay you a visit and attempt to plunder your riches, and after that entire entities could start sending armies to show up on your doorstep. Just imagine that.
What's really neat is that it's not entirely inconceivable that these kinds of scenarios could be made moddable - you could create your own settlement types and define how various political interactions work. I don't have the vision to conceive how such a thing might work, but if it was hypothetically added to the game the sky would be the limit. If you wanted to start a succession fort where you're managing a group of pirates, you could literally do just that. You wouldn't have to murder the liaison or pretend that the elves aren't sending caravans, the interactions would be just the same as you could reasonably expect for a group of rogues. No traders, no diplomats, the things you would be primarily concerned with are bounties, looters and other rogue-ish types. Assuming, of course, that such things are moddable. Or you could even draw the ire of other criminal groups.
So what do you think? In particular I want to know if you think such a thing could be made moddable, or if it might be more feasible as a set of hardcoded scenarios, or if it's just pie-in-the-sky. It's probably pie-in-the-sky, but I'd like opinions anyway