'Retiring' forts is a crazy popular suggestion. Just below gunpowder and steampunk in it's perennial nature.
Yes. Similar suggestions have been made before, in other threads.
What I'd like to see is a "Successive Embark", or the option to continue the existence of a Fortress after the player tires of it or reaches a certain FPS death/breakpoint. What I mean is that instead of abandoning the Fortress or intentionally killing it off in a blaze of glory, the player can instead choose to select from among their current dwarves and resources to build a new embark party to strike the earth elsewhere, leaving the old Fortress more or less intact. I'd like to eventually be able to play a generated world from year 0 to year 500+ through successive fortress embarks and successive adventure embarks.
This could be a lot more interesting because the player could choose to bring along their prized breed of super-sized llamas, war-grizzly bears and/or hunter-giant lions to continue breeding them on their next site.
That's what I'd love to see. However, I'd be satisfied with merely another option besides Abandon that would leave the current dwarves as occupants there, leave the animals alive and which would not scatter all the items about. If we could get that much, then I suspect someone might be able to create a utility to do the embark-from-existing-dwarves-and-resources thing. (The new DFMode tool in the
DFHack package hints at this, as it allows one to control a fortress dwarf while switching to Adventure Mode.)
I always wondered why the only choice given to players is to "Abandon", with no option to transfer control to the computer and embark someplace else without utterly ruining the old fort. The current system evokes such a completely distopian view - that failure is
inevitable and the
only option. I mean, if
all dwarven outposts and colonies ended in failure so easily, dwarves would have gone extinct long before year 1 on world gen. And when one considers how few dwarf children grow to adulthood and how many immigrates die... Yeah, that does not add up.
PS: It would be cool if our fortress was the last of all dwarfkind and, through repeated embarks and founding of more and more successful mountain homes, we managed to get our dwarves flourishing again. That'd make the player's first fortress the stuff of legends that all descendants would portray in engravings, works of art, stories, etc.