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[Raufgar]

It isn't just human settlements that make farm sprawl, all civs do it (even the elves and goblins).  Even stopping world gen at year 50 I still have towns that make farm sprawl tiles that are 7+ tiles away from the town itself, so far that I actually have trouble seeing exactly what town they're coming from.  If there's a river anywhere near a town, basically it will be completely covered by farm tiles and cannot be embarked on except for some 3x* holes between them, and tbh who really makes a brave expedition to colonize the mysterious space between somebody's farms?

Anyhow, year 50 seems about where I would want a full 1050 year history to be, and going to 1050 years is way beyond even modern times' utilization of land.

edit: tbh even year 50 is still pretty opressively crowded, just looked over one map and an entire major river, every tile of it, was covered over by farms in those 50 years.

Culling of the unsuspecting masses is needed, I suggest mass bear spawn on all farmlands and minor villages. It worked for Rolf when he accidentally did it to Golden Valley, Wurm Online XD

Seriously though, I'd recommend an increase in hostile animal populations in retaliation to the pop push, especially near fresh water sources. This should work as a balance for all those farmers who try to scratch out a living near a bear's watering hole. The amount of the increase can be dependent on the location's biome and alignment (less for Calm places, more for Wilderness I guess, does a location's biome change over the years during gen?)

Either that or increase the vermin population, swarm of locusts are still wreaking havoc with farming centers nowadays...

[FleshForge]

I'd actually want this kind of thing to be variable and controllable with some worldgen options if I were Toady rather than just enable/disable.

It's actually a lot worse than it looks on a mature map, and it already looks bad - the elf farms look like normal forest on the mid size map (which is cool) but you see the huge farm coverage when you actually try to embark.

Another really surprising thing is how much save file space these map features require!  50 year old world = 4mb save ... 1050 year old world = 110mb!  I'm sure # of units are having a big impact there but I don't remember having a medium size map be that large in file space in the previous version.

[daoist]

 

Worldgen is taking *forever* now.

first world gen: memory use skyrocketed, system slowed to a crawl, had to kill the process.
second & third: crashed on saving.
fourth: finally worked. Thought it was going to crash out but it managed to come through.

[ouroborus]

The sprawl is just ridiculous. Untouched wilderness ends up being either uninhabited islands, very evil biomes, and extreme temperature biomes.

A relatively easy way to find out what area might be still usable is to use Legends mode, view the civilization history map, go to the final year and export that. Better than wandering around the embark map hoping to get lucky, but not as good as something like a population density map (something gray-scale like the rainfall and vegetation maps).

I'm thinking the worldgen crashes are related to the 2GB limit. Just got around to glancing at memory usage; large region eating 1.8GB.

I feel caves may need a special case for layout. In .13 they're drawn like the cities are, as a large block. You can embark on them though, but you can't really tell what you're getting or even if you've hit the actual cave.

[Mandaril]

"Medium Region"
"Population Cap After Civ Creation 15000" - I suspect reducing that number and number of civs will reduce the clutter.
I reduced that from 15000 to 2500 and number of Civilizations from 40 to 10.
Also, increasing the number of titans always seems to control excess population I increased number to 30 (and # of vulcanos to 99).

As a result I got several good locations I liked. Still some population but IMO not too much.

My point is, I think you can control the population with custom parameters. Ooh, and fun fact: I'm at war with elves as default in the world I created  \o/ And Goblins are dead, but still..

[daoist]

very weird bug. I finally got an embark location that works, and then once I started digging I got a job cancellation (fine, I figured he found the aquifer) but then all of the mined out area was filled in and my miner was in the mountain.

[AnalogX]

I also saw a battle with negative numbers of soldiers but couldn't reproduce the situation, so there are probably additional issues as well.

One word. Ghosts.

[DalGren]

The sprawl is just ridiculous. Untouched wilderness ends up being either uninhabited islands, very evil biomes, and extreme temperature biomes.

But, this is actually REALISTIC. In the real world it'd be pretty similar to the current sprawl situation.
I think this just needs a small tweak. Perhaps increasing the time it requires for sites to form, and some other things to reduce it just enough, sounds like a temporal annoyance only.

[FleshForge]

It's not even close to realistic, even if you have rapid transit as we do in the modern world, unless you're considering a world map to be a very small region.  Since you have climates ranging from glacial to scorching, it seems pretty obvious that it's half a planet - you have multiple (many!) single cities taking up ~20x20 area on a 127x127 map, or more than 2% of the surface area of the entire hemisphere - even with rapid transit in the modern world you don't have coverage that complete.

[daoist]

A thief showed up!

I can't enable any labors for her, though.

[G-Flex]

Since you have climates ranging from glacial to scorching, it seems pretty obvious that it's half a planet

Even if this is true, it doesn't mean the planet is necessarily the size of Earth.

[FleshForge]

That's not a good argument for realism, in any case

[oolon1]

Since you have climates ranging from glacial to scorching, it seems pretty obvious that it's half a planet

Even if this is true, it doesn't mean the planet is necessarily the size of Earth.

I think the issue here is that there are multiple scales being envisioned, and the civ sprawl is the first feature that measures from the inside out.  The size of the villages and their farmland is based on the 1x1 creature size, so that in adventure mode you can walk around and feel like things are mostly to scale to your adventurer.

The other way of measuring scale is from the outside in.  A medium map has oceans, major rivers, mountain ranges.  What is its footprint supposed to be?  A hundred miles?  A thousand?

I'm sure someone has done this math before, but I can't find it.  Let's just hypothesize that a 1x1 tile at the lowest level of play is a square meter.  So a 1x1 local tile is 48 meters across, and a 16x16 local tile (1x1 region tile) is 768m across...  so a medium worldgen is 129x129 of those, yes?    That's 99 km on each side.

Our perception in previous versions on embark is that we are creating a bigger world, one that is much larger than 99 km or 62 miles across.  Our whole dwarven civilization might span a 3x5 area, which would be less than five miles from one end to the other.  I don't think that's how we treat the game from the DF embark view.  We abstract the world map into being a world much larger than the game thinks it is because we see oceans, glaciers, mountain ranges, and lakes that we imagine being tens or hundreds of miles across.  Sprawl forces DF to exist in Adventure Mode's scale, and that kind of breaks it, at least from the embark screen.

Unfortunately, this is the first feature that really highlights just how difficult it's going to be to create two games in one.  Adventure Mode and Dwarf Fortress exist in two different realities, and I tend to think it will get more complicated from here to keep the two together as a unit.  Sprawl creates farms and villages that are to scale with your adventurer, but they are ugly behemoths when considering your new fortress, and they're *everywhere*.

I think sprawl is an important feature for world immersion in adventure mode, and I applaud the effort made to simulate the amount of land required to feed thousands of people (something most other games get totally wrong).  I just don't think it can coexist with fortress mode in its current state.  A decision may have to be made on which scale makes more sense for this game.  If the 99 km region/island attitude is preferred, then civilizations should do most of their work off-map.  In a fully imagined world (thousands of miles across), one that we are taking a narrow look at (a hundred miles across), we may see ten settlements instead of two hundred.  Terrain features would take up more space.  And on and on.

[FleshForge]

I don't think this would be a big bother if they were just not so thoroughly and widely applied.  In adventure mode I don't think I'd be too excited by running across 40-60 map tiles' worth of farmland either, realistic or no.

[nogibator]

>of wow, .13!
>downloading
>no cities
>no place to embark
>bugs everywhere
this is the worst update ever