Bay 12 Games Forum

Magic is a thing which was discussed for a long time, it is in the roadmap even. The way it can be implemented may be speculated, what I suggest is to make most of it an Elf-exclusive thing.

The reason why is that it will add both usefulness to them if you decide to be their friend, and challenge if you decide to be their enemy. Elven caravans have much less useful stuff than human/dwarven ones, and during sieges they are equipped with weak wooden armor/weaponry. Magic on their side will definetely help them to keep up with others.

If you are friends with elven civilization, they may offer to you powerful healing services - able to restore normally incurable conditions, like severed nerves and limbs, vampire/werewolf curses or insanity. Since they are nature themed, you may ask them to change the weather for some time - prolong summer or cut the winter. Ward your units against curses and undead. Bless your crops to yield more fruits, or your warriors to be more durable, and so on. In exchange for additional restrictions, fulfillment of diplomatic needs, or goods/gold.

If you are enemies - in additional usual combat magic (fireballs, magic missiles, summoning of legendary monsters and such) they may use various rites, which should be interrupted or your fort will be cursed. Start an everlasting winter with ridicuosily low temperature, curse dwarves for their wounds to fester and heal much more slowly, spoil your crops and food, make your dorfs much more suspectible to stress, tantrums and insanity, and so on.

I think this will make elves much more viable threat or friends. Of course some of the magic might be accessible to other races, in forms of enchanted artifacts or rare deep underground !!fun!!, but I think for elves it should be main gimmick and thing they use often, and for others it should be a rarity.

And it should be easily moddable to give spells to your dorfs, if you don't want it to be mostly an elven thing, and get some bearded spellcasters!

Megabeasts has always struck me as something special - not just tough mobs, but legendary rare creatures with big stories about them. What if they will be something more complex than just "a big fat enemy invading your fortress"? What if they would be proud, powerful and sapient creatures? Which would mean you will be able to converse with them.

Dragons, for example, can demand your fortress to give them gold, artifacts and your most beautiful dwarven princess. Or Bronze Colossi can demand resources from your fortress, to repair, sustain and strengthen themselves.
Disagree, and you'll face your usual boss fight. Agree and who knows, maybe during next siege you will have a big firebreathing ally vaporizing your enemies with dragonfire.

How can I do this? The all I can do in embarking menu is to customize nicknames and profession names. But how do I change the name and gender of starting dwarves?

To me, it seems kinda wrong, that in huge, HUUUGE world filled with nations, civilizations, buildings, and etc. you are able to act only on tiny-tiny fragment of it. You have a chunk, you are able to build something on that chunk, but you can't go further - neither camera would go farther than some tiles from the center, nor your dwarves will explore.

And then I came to an idea. Dwarven expedition and scout squads, which will allow you to explore the world, find towns and structures for interacting, and found new fortresses on the world. You send them to any point of the map (and hope that they will survive) via a special menu.

How's that?