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[Deathworks]

Hi!

It should be noted, though, that not all immigrants are broken. I just got my first wave of five immigrants and none of them were broken - they are all working hard at expanding my fortress.

And some of them have military training and thus have brought along some valuable equipment.

Even if some immigrants are broken, it may be useful to remember that immigrants are usually not a rare commodity in this game. I kind of remember people talking a lot about how they mass murder their immigrants or how they draft them as pure cannon fodder.

Actually, I find it rather interesting how much people get riled about all changes. Be it the changes with the ramps a while ago or now the sprawling settlements - the drama seems a bit exaggerated.

As I mentioned before, I have created 2 worlds, both of them looking good and the second one being the one I am currently playing and it really lives up to my hopes:
A lot of interesting history that ends up in my engravings and even an interesting political situation. It is the first world in ages where I have a race that is at war with the dwarves - the elven civ in the area where I have started my fortress is at war not with just one dwarven civ but actually with three of the six dwarven civs in that world! And according to the engravings, they are not really good friends with the humans either.

Sure, settlements take up a bit more space on the map, but if you put a little effort into it, you should be able to find what you are looking for.

I think people are exaggerating about the unplayability of the new version (again).

Deathworks

[ouroborus]

I think people are exaggerating about the unplayability of the new version (again).

I wouldn't say its unplayable, just particularly difficult trying to find a decent site.

[Sunday]

Playing with Wine on a Mac.

Maybe I just got lucky, but I found a site as good as or better than any of the ones I've found in .12, with very little searching. It seems like aquifers might be a little rarer. If that's the case (and again, I might just have gotten lucky), then while much land might be blocked off by farms, a lot of other land is made available due to lack of aquifer.

[Andeerz]

Deathworks, I totally agree with you so hard right now.

[alexxeno]

I was wondering if anyone more experienced in world gen would be willing to share a few tips with us acolytes so we have more map space to work with? What param's would we be changing?

Thank you in advance.

[Deathworks]

Hi!

I have given the world gen data for the world I am currently using here.

In general, one of the problems is that there are too many civs in the default setting. If you want all civs to be there, around 20 civs is the number you want, not 40 or whatever the defaults are.

Also, eliminate all the minimum numbers for unusable terrain - you don't need thousands of ocean tiles and they only take away from the usable tiles. If you ask for partial or complete oceans, you get enough ocean automatically. Unless you change the minimum/maximum values, you should get all types of terrain, so unless you really want a certain terrain like deserts, for instance, you should remove the minimums for all unusable terrain.

Also, I don't recommend minimum values for hills and grassland/plains - that's the terrain humans inhabit, and they spread really well because of that. Instead, you should consider increasing the minimum values for forests and mountains (elves and goblins) which should help balance things a little bit.

I have also tried increasing the variance for savagery a little bit (at least in previous versions, civs would not settle in savage areas), however I don't have any verifiable results. But theoretically, that should hamper the spread of settlements.

Other than that, I recommend looking at the world gen data I have provided for further hints.

Deathworks

[jei]

around fresh water sources

Yes but not on top of them!

The buildings need not be in the water of course, but at least I love cities built "on top" of river mouths.
They are very nice sites to play fortress in as you get both neighbors, river fauna and sealife there.

Most modern megacities are literally built "on top of" major river mouths and have expanded along riverways. Rivers and especially river deltas provide plenty of food in great variety and transportation to benefit said cities. Also Icelandic cities benefit of volcanic activity in the form of free heating, useful for farming, including tropical fruits and such.

I for one also hope to someday find a biome in DF that would have a mixture of areas both tropical and arctic with volcanic activity maybe effecting the patch of tropical life there. - A forgotten tropical valley in a barren arctic wasteland with dinosaurs maybe? - It would provide a large variety of fauna and be very interesting site to play in. The worldgen could be scripted to provide at least one such site!

I only play fortress mode, preferably always until I colonize hell or hit FPS death, and interesting sites are what keeps the game interesting to me. So please, cities on top of water, heck, cities under the sea floor too for me, please!

Forgot to mention: cities in caves would be cool too! Snakemen cultures and magmamen towns!
We already have the Zombie fortress underground. Dagonish-fishmen could have a town too under sea ground!
The building styles could vary a bit more though.

Here is a picture of a human city built atop a river mouth in the world map, it has a very nice wooden bridge to cross the river with too!


So don't abandon cities built atop rivers! They're extremely nice places to live in, when humans take their the toll of ambushers too. And none of their buildings reside IN the said major river.

[monk12]

Nice notes, Deathworks.

My 2 cents is that if you have a short world gen (I've run 49 and 99 so far with good results) then the sprawl is fairly well limited to the major rivers. If you really want that primo ancient city site on the mouth of the Nile, then stop world gen at like year 3. If, like me, you embark in the middle of nowhere/terrifying places/glaciers/volcanos/deserts then you'll be fine.

[Psieye]

In general, one of the problems is that there are too many civs in the default setting. If you want all civs to be there, around 20 civs is the number you want, not 40 or whatever the defaults are.

Also, eliminate all the minimum numbers for unusable terrain - you don't need thousands of ocean tiles and they only take away from the usable tiles. If you ask for partial or complete oceans, you get enough ocean automatically. Unless you change the minimum/maximum values, you should get all types of terrain, so unless you really want a certain terrain like deserts, for instance, you should remove the minimums for all unusable terrain.

Also, I don't recommend minimum values for hills and grassland/plains - that's the terrain humans inhabit, and they spread really well because of that. Instead, you should consider increasing the minimum values for forests and mountains (elves and goblins) which should help balance things a little bit.

I have also tried increasing the variance for savagery a little bit (at least in previous versions, civs would not settle in savage areas), however I don't have any verifiable results. But theoretically, that should hamper the spread of settlements.

Other than that, I recommend looking at the world gen data I have provided for further hints.

My 2 cents is that if you have a short world gen (I've run 49 and 99 so far with good results) then the sprawl is fairly well limited to the major rivers. If you really want that primo ancient city site on the mouth of the Nile, then stop world gen at like year 3. If, like me, you embark in the middle of nowhere/terrifying places/glaciers/volcanos/deserts then you'll be fine.

These two posts cover most of the worldgen wisdom needed to not have issues with .13's sprawl interference. If you have no interest in getting decorations of random historic events in your fortress, you may as well just end worldgen at year 2 or 3. Make multiple forts in the same world if you want more history than that - then all the history will be of stuff you did not what the RNG gives you. Also consider just picking a smaller region to play in: less memory size, less loading time, faster worldgen. Provided you end worldgen before civs kill each other, you can easily fit all the races into a smaller world. If you don't want to play with aquifers, get rid of them entirely. Go to the raws and delete all the [AQUIFER] tags in the inorganics. While you're at it, you can tweak cavern settings too: e.g. only have 1 cavern layer so you can get to the magma sea faster (you want at least 1 if you want underground farming at all).


By the way, adamantine being unmineable is fixable by us. Toady accidentally set one value in the raws for adamantine ore to the same as Slade which is hard coded to be unmineable. Just change the number and you can mine it again.

[FleshForge]

Most modern megacities are literally built "on top of" major river mouths and have expanded along riverways. Rivers and especially river deltas provide plenty of food in great variety and transportation to benefit said cities. Also Icelandic cities benefit of volcanic activity in the form of free heating, useful for farming, including tropical fruits and such.

That's all cool and stuff, but I know of no pre-industrial culture that built massive platforms that spanned the entire length and breadth of great rivers like the Amazon or the Nile and covered them completely so that the entire run of the river was 100% hidden from the sun.  I don't think any post-industrial culture has managed this either.  I'm pretty sure even today with rapid bulk transport we don't manage to farm on more than a few percent (less than ten percent I'm certain, probably less than three) of the land area of our own planet.  My education may be faulty though.

I can't understand why anyone is particularly pleased with the way this sprawl stuff is working right now, it is horribly HORRIBLY unrealistic and simply blocks a great number of potential embark sites, as well as places mass amounts of blank flat space in adventure mode.  There is simply nothing good about what happens to the map with farm sprawl if allowed to run for 1050 years!

[cameron]

just looking from the detailed export the sprawl doesn't cover much more the 10 % or so of a map(even less if you have lots of mountains or glaciers) it just seems that way if you get into a farmland area (on a major river or something) in embark because the box around the sprawl covers additional land.

I also have never seen cities completely cover a river or even build a working bridge, mostly they seem to start on both sides but don't meet up and they are on different z levels, but that might have been fixed.

[jei]

Toady be a hero and tell us what the memory vectors are so we can use dwarf therapist

Better yet, give him the dorf therapist source code so he can use it in DF.

[jei]

Most modern megacities are literally built "on top of" major river mouths and have expanded along riverways. Rivers and especially river deltas provide plenty of food in great variety and transportation to benefit said cities. Also Icelandic cities benefit of volcanic activity in the form of free heating, useful for farming, including tropical fruits and such.

That's all cool and stuff, but I know of no pre-industrial culture that built massive platforms that spanned the entire length and breadth of great rivers like the Amazon or the Nile and covered them completely so that the entire run of the river was 100% hidden from the sun.  I don't think any post-industrial culture has managed this either.  I'm pretty sure even today with rapid bulk transport we don't manage to farm on more than a few percent (less than ten percent I'm certain, probably less than three) of the land area of our own planet.  My education may be faulty though.

I can't understand why anyone is particularly pleased with the way this sprawl stuff is working right now, it is horribly HORRIBLY unrealistic and simply blocks a great number of potential embark sites, as well as places mass amounts of blank flat space in adventure mode.  There is simply nothing good about what happens to the map with farm sprawl if allowed to run for 1050 years!

Mixing reality and fantasy together and arguing about the end-result's realism being lacking never leads to much anywhere. This is a game, the point is having fun.
If something stops you from having fun, it should be fixed.

[FleshForge]

Mixing reality and fantasy together and arguing about the end-result's realism being lacking never leads to much anywhere. This is a game, the point is having fun.
If something stops you from having fun, it should be fixed.

Okay, what is fun about having huge numbers of embark points made unreachable?  That's what I've been saying, this is neither realistic NOR fun.  Would having the world be 80% mountain be fun?  80% ocean?

[FleshForge]

just looking from the detailed export the sprawl doesn't cover much more the 10 % or so of a map(even less if you have lots of mountains or glaciers) it just seems that way if you get into a farmland area (on a major river or something) in embark because the box around the sprawl covers additional land.

I also have never seen cities completely cover a river or even build a working bridge, mostly they seem to start on both sides but don't meet up and they are on different z levels, but that might have been fixed.

The box around the sprawl cannot be embarked on, so "what is in it" really doesn't matter - you can't embark on it.  It could be a giant box of cookies or uranium or plasma from the heart of the sun or empty space, it doesn't matter.

I think your estimate of less than 10% is way off, I've seen many examples of single cities and their farms accounting for 2-3% of the entire map's tiles.  ONE CITY!  You realize it's not just the human cities that make farm tiles, it's all cultures, just the elf/dwarf/goblin farm tiles don't show up on the mid map.