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[Sir Finkus]

I like the sprawl. For me it adds to the believability and richness of the world. I don't understand why is it a problem that the sprawl blocks embark squares - but I never understood the urge to seek "perfect locations" in the first place. I think the way DF is heading it will slowly be less and less possible to find the exact location you want. Instead you'll have to accommodate and, for example, play without flux. I call it challenge.

The notion that it's possible to embark anywhere in the world was flawed in the first place. It's hard getting used to losing it, but it was inevitable. By default, you should be able to build a fortress only in your kingdom or on the borders to extend the kingdom's influence. Anything else is weird, breaks the suspension of disbelief, and wouldn't work with the upcoming changes that will slowly put more and more emphasis on kingdoms, politics, etc. So yeah, it had to come sooner and later.

Also, I don't think it's user unfriendly in any way. Each new player will understand why it's possible to only embark in your sphere of influence. It makes sense. Or it would make sense but DF still doesn't work this way - you can embark a thousand miles away as long as the place isn't claimed yet.

The actual user unfriendly part is the absence of a clever site finder system that would seek and recommend fun locations by itself (with some good default criteria for fun location), and would be able to find more than one. Without a good site finder, any change that limits your embark options will be hated.

The way I see it, you SHOULD be able to embark anywhere, but if you embark somewhere naughty (in elven lands or something), you should have to deal with the consequences. 

Settling in your own civ's land would afford you the advantage of frequent caravans, infrequent ambushes, and even some degree of protection in the form of reinforcements.  Of course all the "good spots" would probably already be taken by other forts, and you wouldn't have anything exotic to trade at a premium. 

Perhaps with allies you can settle there for free, or maybe you have to contribute troops to defend their towns. 

If you settle in a neutral civ's land, you could have a range of options, such as paying a tribute, enduring limits on military size, or risking war.  Your own civilization should in certain cases try to "disown" you and cut off support if they are trying to make an alliance with the neutral civ and you're interfering. 

Settling in enemy land should be hard.  You'd have to endure endless attacks, and little, if any support from your parent civ.  Caravans should be afraid of making the trek to your fort, and those that brave the journey should often be raided.  You could perhaps counter this by sending out bodyguards.  The outpost liason could say one year "If you want the caravan to come next year, you'll need to send 5 of your best dwarves to defend them on their journey."  Migrants would be scarce, and probably have more adventurous personality traits and military skills.

[Untelligent]

The way I see it, you SHOULD be able to embark anywhere, but if you embark somewhere naughty (in elven lands or something), you should have to deal with the consequences.

This. I see no reason why it should be physically impossible to embark someplace like that.

The notion that it's possible to embark anywhere in the world was flawed in the first place. It's hard getting used to losing it, but it was inevitable. By default, you should be able to build a fortress only in your kingdom or on the borders to extend the kingdom's influence. Anything else is weird, breaks the suspension of disbelief, and wouldn't work with the upcoming changes that will slowly put more and more emphasis on kingdoms, politics, etc. So yeah, it had to come sooner and later.

That doesn't make any sense. Then you wouldn't be able to embark in savage or evil areas and whatnot. On another note, just because the elves don't want me to embark in their forests doesn't mean it should be physically impossible to embark there. I see no reason not to be able to embark on other people's property.

[mnjiman]

indeed. it would just mean they would get pissed off, and attack you fairly quickly. Before embarking on a area where you would get attacked and become automatically in war with the race, you should get an embark warning.

[Deathworks]

Hi!

Personally, I agree with Sir Finkus about embark everywhere but at your own risk being the ideal solution - but that would require world gen sites to be much, much more detailed and functional before it becomes interesting.

First of all, there is the question of armed resistance against your occupying forces. I mean, if your 7 dwarves march into the middle of a 60 head elven village and start cutting trees, it should become a very short fortress mode session indeed - especially if that village has been fending off invaders in the past who had been much more numerous and experienced.

Secondly, the exploiting races need to be more effective about their exploitation. For instance, if you decide to start digging under a dwarven settlement, you should find that all the gold, platinum, iron ore, and aluminimum has already been dug up by the dwarves (as time permits, of course), leaving only small clusters for you to exploit. If there is a fishable site, you can be sure that they have set up fishing there as well which may interfere with your own ambitions. Also note that dwarves and humans destroy forest tiles during world generation (well, actually just the trees), so the supply of wood should be limited when you embark within their realms with their lumber jacks competing with yours. And nearly all good surface farmland around human settlements should be claimed by the human farms except for those oddly shaped strings or small edges here and there.

So, even without getting at odds with the locals, edging out a living could become rather problematic. But these are all things that are not implemented yet, so that embark everywhere would currently be no risk and high gain for the player.

Deathworks

[evirus]

full on system crash on world gen.... plus the amount of time it takes is simply not worth it, back to .12 for me

[greycat]

It is believed that the crashes during world gen are due to the process running out of addressable memory (which is not the same as your computer not having enough memory -- it's something to do with OS internals).

The solution (if this is indeed the case) is to change the settings, instead of using a default world gen.  Don't let it run for 1050 years.  Something like 200 years works much better.

[Starver]

As for why he might be running windows 2000. If you have a computer that runs windows 2000 just fine, why spend the money to upgrade to windows xp and make it slower. I personally have a machine that is running windows 2000 server right now, it works and there little reason I can find to upgrade it to the latest version, only to have it run slower and need more hardware.

(Late reply here, probably ninjaed in turn., definitely gone OT)

Not just that.  I have a nice 2K machine working away, recording radio programmes for me (Modular DAB card, with DABBAR software) while I'm out of the house/asleep/listening to previously recorded radio programmes.

I could move to something else non-MS (MythBuntu almost certainly supports the hardware, or can be made to) but if I'm sticking with Windows, I'm sticking with the licensed W2K that's on it.  Especially as it's a machine I use standalone, it these days there'd be some form of godawful over-the-phone Windows Activation involved.  Plus the hardware is definitely too weak to properly run anything beyond XP (and would need upgrade for that).

But I do have an XP machine (a bit low on memory, but has run DF at least until .12, will try out .13 now I actually spotted this board item...) so not personally so bothered about 2K support, but definitely feel for anyone who can't deal with that problem.  (I'd still be running W98 today, if the machine I was using hadn't had a minor explosion in a motherboard chip a few years back...

Except that I'd probably have had to be running the Linux ports of DF (or WINE-running windows ones) on my Linux machine, if 98 also hadn't been compatible with the exe (or, rather, vice-versa).

[ShadeJS]

Isn't the whole point of embarking supposed to be to live in *unclaimed* territory, where no dwarf has gone before?

The frontier is usually though of as over the next hill or beyond the next river... Not on the far side of the planet. You can see the desirability of a 'far colony', but 'far' is relative. For the Vikings (a rather mobile people) that was Iceland, Greenland, and Newfoundland not Indonesia. It strikes me as reasonable that an embark should be within some semi-reasonable distance of the parent civ. I'd err on the side of more rather than less, but it should be a finite distance, IMHO.

[Rose]

so, more of your supplies are gone the further you are from your home civ?

[colorlessness]

Anyone else find that .13 isn't respecting the population cap in d_init.txt? i.e., I have POPULATION_CAP at 100 and migrants arrive whilst there are 117 (or more) dwarves in the fortress.

[Untelligent]

The frontier is usually though of as over the next hill or beyond the next river... Not on the far side of the planet. You can see the desirability of a 'far colony', but 'far' is relative. For the Vikings (a rather mobile people) that was Iceland, Greenland, and Newfoundland not Indonesia. It strikes me as reasonable that an embark should be within some semi-reasonable distance of the parent civ. I'd err on the side of more rather than less, but it should be a finite distance, IMHO.

I never really thought of the "worlds" DF generated as being actually taking up an entire hemisphere, even the Large regions.

[Eugenitor]

DF planets are smaller but still have roughly the same gravity as Earth, due to the amount of heavy metals in them.

Anything that reduces the number of places available for embark, whether in the name of realism or anything else, is a Bad Idea. In game terms it serves no purpose but to cheese people off.

[monk12]

[quote author=greycat link=topic=66142.msg1581435#msg1581435 date=1284992238

The solution (if this is indeed the case) is to change the settings, instead of using a default world gen.  Don't let it run for 1050 years.  Something like 200 years works much better.
[/quote]

Personally, I feel that the 1050 year worldgens that take place now are an often overlooked bug; Worldgen should stop after a certain number of megabeasts are dead, but with the materials rewrite and megabeast buff none of them die in worldgen. In the past, the cutoff would be at around 200-250 years, perfect for braving the new wilds, exploring new territories and prying the riches from the savage lands and their green skinned inhabitants. Now, worldgen runs to the arbitrary maximum of 1050, where everything new has been seen, the good sites taken, and the worlds population trying and failing to kill each other over and over. I'll be happier once Toady brings that back to normal- normal being my experiences in 40d.

[smariot]

DF planets are smaller but still have roughly the same gravity as Earth, due to the amount of heavy metals in them.

The core is made of super dense slade.

It is believed that the crashes during world gen are due to the process running out of addressable memory (which is not the same as your computer not having enough memory -- it's something to do with OS internals).

Yes, 32 bit programs can only address 4GB of space. 2GB is used for mapping executable code and DLLs and stuff, leaving 2GB to do useful stuff with.

It might (i.e., I haven't tried it) be possible to make 3GB available by hacking the PE header of Dwarf fortress to include the /LARGEADDRESSAWARE flag (you can do it with the binedit program that comes with visual studio), and then editing boot.ini include /3GB in the options to the windows kernel.

However, you probably shouldn't risk breaking your computer just to be able to generate more complicated worlds.

[chenjung_407ad]

Anyone else find that .13 isn't respecting the population cap in d_init.txt? i.e., I have POPULATION_CAP at 100 and migrants arrive whilst there are 117 (or more) dwarves in the fortress.

I've got the same thing happening. I like to set my population cap to 20 for the first couple of years, but I'm now 7 years in without changing my POPULATION_CAP from its initial 20 (set before I even genned the world) and I'm now up to 107 dwarves.