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[runlvlzero]

^ Title says it all... How do you get more better dwarf civs?

I have played around ALLOT with world gen. I can get some pretty cool worlds and some nice embarks...

But here's the thing... I usually only ever have a few dwarf civs left after about 200-500 years. Usually only one left on the embark finder map by 1000 yrs (normally I gen 500) this gives me at least 2 dwarf civs, normally...

I have tried making some more mountains/mountainous terrain but this doesn't seem to help. Its almost as if the human and elven civs are so strong in my worlds they push out the dwarves... If I really crank up the mountains I get 1 more civ with one major site on the map (if I'm lucky).

I really would like to see some bigger more robust dwarf civs that rival the human and elven ones and see like 5 or 6 playable ones in adventure mode... maybe even to the point of almost wiping out the rest...

The only other option I can think of is make the "competitor" biomes incredibly small... and edit the raws to make dwarves uber.

Oh yah and probably the most important thing... I have been running with 50 civs, -1 total population and 620 sites on large regions, not sure if I should try something smaller like 40 civs, a much smaller population cap and lots of sites? But honestly I would like my dwarves to still have a robustly huge population cap (they just need plenty more space or something) with humans and elves still around to trade with...

[Girlinhat]

"Shorter History" comes to mind.  I play with Fortress Defense, and I usually hobble my history because the war elephants and hellfire imps tend to exterminate EVERYTHING.  Shorter history means less death and more intact civs.

Aside from that, Dwarves just aren't liked, apparently.  Their smaller size (although comparable to elves and goblins) makes for weaker bodies, especially because the raws define every creature identically.  A Dwarf and an elephant only vary by size and tusks, the layer thickness of fat and muscle is all identical.  Thus, whatever is larger has an advantage.  They're also frequently outnumbered, as elves and humans settle everywhere pretty much, but dwarves get picky.  They fail to expand, while the others just explode.  Try limiting the areas for other civs, particularly forests and plains, or mod the raws a bit to tweak elves and humans to prefer sites a little less, or tweak dwarves to like other sites a little more.  Or go a bit more hax route, and change dwarves during worldgen.  Edit raws to make them twice as large as normal, gen a world, then edit raws back to regular size.  Thus, they're fierce during worldgen, and then they're back to normal.  This may or may not have unusual changes to actual gameplay, however...

[Darvi]

Edit raws to make them twice as large as normal

"Aren't Dwarves supposed to be short?"
"Old prejudice"

[FGK dwarf]

You can try making more mountainous worlds, so the dwarves have more sites to colonise. Currently I'm using
[ELEVATION_FREQUENCY:1:1:1:1:1:2]
which slightly weights the elevation towards high mountains. After 250 years I got 2 dwarf civs of several hundred individuals. They're still dwarfed (hehe!) by the elves and humans, but at least they're still alive.

[Psieye]

I suppose you could try cloning the dwarf entity so there are many more dwarf civs to start off.

[Darvi]

Doesn't having double entries in the raws cause weird bugs?

[Flying Dice]

I gen my worlds to 100 years, and I always have at least 5 dwarf civs of decent or better strength. The various advantages of the different races (particularly elven immortality) are much less pronounced early in worldgen.

[Psieye]

Doesn't having double entries in the raws cause weird bugs?

Only if you exactly duplicate them. You'll need slight changes to keep them separate entries.

[kotekzot]

In my current medium island world, there was a grand total of 177 dwarves after 250 years. I decided to play around with it because I found a nice embark. Eventually I gave them [NO_EAT][NO_DRINK] and their population jumped to 30k. Try it.

You may also want to do that for kobolds to make sure they don't starve by year 4.

[Girlinhat]

Yeah, dwarves seem to have trouble with food.  I blame this on the fact that practically every dwarf in Legends ends up fighting.  There's no farmers left, they're all enlisted!

[kotekzot]

Speaking of fighting, "my" dwarves did quite a bit of it. Battles looked roughly like this:
Attacker: elf civ - winner
Defender: dwarf civ - loser
Attacker force: 300 elves, 285 killed, 50 giraffes, 50 killed, 20 giant pandas, 20 killed, 5 dwarves, 5 killed
Defender force: 2 dwarves, 0 killed

I honestly cannot fathom how DF determines the winner.

[Girlinhat]

This is what amazes me.  As much as dwarves get wiped out during worldgen, they rarely get killed!  Battles like that are common!

Also, who the hell takes giraffes into a war?  Seriously?

[kotekzot]

Actually, giraffes seem like dwarves natural enemies. They're strong enough and long enough to just kick the dwarves into their tiny little heads.

[runlvlzero]

Yeah cloning the dwarves and making a few extra castes seems like a great idea (I think genesis mod does something like this and their worlds are allot more rough, there's like 12 individual dwarven races..)

on another note shall we say "Let the clone wars begin!" lol..

[Girlinhat]

Take the dwarf entity file, copy it, and at the header change it to DWARF2.  This means you'll have two identical civs of dwarves, and double the starting number of dwarves in worldgen.  It also has the peculiar effect, that you can get two dwarven caravans at a time, because they're two separate entity files, but only one liaison.  If you copy goblins, you get multi-sieges.