Before I start rattling off my various suggestions, I'd like to highlight a few points from the development page I found particularly exciting:
- Entity populations surrounding your fortress in appropriate environments, both above and below ground
- Ability to move dwarves in and out of surroundings
- Relationship with surrounding dwarves
- Ability to trade/demand food in depot or similar place with surrounding dwarves
In my opinion, these are some of the most interesting ideas on the list, because they will give a grand objective to each new fortress; becoming an absolute nucleus of dwarven society. With this goal in mind, here are some of my ideas on how dwarf mode could come to support it.
When you start a new fortress, especially in 40d, you may notice that your migrants tend to be completely useless. Let's Plays in particular have picked up on this, with a common speculation being that the absolute dregs of society have thrown themselves at your fortress, like some sort of cultural waste bin. This idea, fanciful and dorfy as it is, isn't too far from realism.
Let's face facts here; getting in on the ground floor of a new settlement is a potentially profitable but very risky proposition. Throughout history, those who partook of it have been those with nothing to lose; the broke, the convicted, and the batshit insane. When the settlement in question is run by a bunch of bipolar midgets who can't tie who their own shoes, this tendency is bound to be exacerbated. This little bit of dwarfonomics brings me to my first real suggestion; when your fortress wealth is low, you should get useless migrants. It makes sense, and it's Fun with a capital "F".
While the new arrivals at your fortress may be initially unseemly, this trend will cease once your site loses it's "get rich quick" appeal. As your fortress begins exporting goods, you'll start to see farms popping up in the map tiles around it. With these settlements sucking up the influx of peasant farmers and their related professions, those coming to your fortress will now be dwarves of higher status; miners, masons, metalsmiths -- people you might actually
want in your fortress.
Those of you who've played around with DF's farming might notice a problem with this model. Namely, there's no need for farming settlements if a 200-dwarf fortress can feed itself from a tiny garden. In order to give these farms a reason to exist, we'll have to make farming harder. This does mean taking up more space, but it also means taking up more dwarves. At the start of the game, having one half of the population working the fields is probably reasonable, and will make your first satellite farm a big relief.
Once your fortress is a major producer, nobility will start trickling in. This is not a bad thing, because if the economics get modeled right, nobles will be a massive money injection. With the arrival of nobility, your fortress enters into it's third era, as a sizable number of highly skilled migrants come down the pike, hoping to make it big in your now sparkling city. But wealth and talent aren't the only things the nobles bring with them. They will also make your fortress a place of great political importance. As the pettier threats to your survival are steadily erased, your view must expand to deal with the unwanted attention your wealth has created.
Sadly, the empire building possibilities of fortress mode have been discussed at length, and I don't believe I have anything of interest to contribute on the subject. So for now, I'll just leave this little ramble as it stands, and let you lot voice your thoughts on it.
EDIT: Egads. I thought I proofread this.
