Bay 12 Games Forum

Where to begin?

For quite some time, I have rather wanted to gen a world swarming with goblins, orcs, and other minions of darkness, but the humans never let them have a chance.  There does not appear to be anything related to this in the search engine (which I've been using intermittently while typing this), so I suppose I'm the first to be annoyed enough by this.

Basically, while I don't want to diminish their individual effectiveness, I'm growing rather irritated with humans conquering well... everything.  In every world I've generated, the human nations start ~90% of the wars, with the remaining 10% being some other race attacking the poor, hapless goblins who always, always get the crap kicked out of them.  Being on the offensive is basically an auto win during world gen; the defenders numbers are inevitably inferior to the attackers, who will never stop attacking until they win.  Which they will, invariably, as eternally being on the defensive means that the victim civ will simply be attrited into oblivion eventually.  Peace treaties, in theory, might give a victim civ breathing room, but they may as well not exist, seeing as they typically last all of five minutes before the attacker thinks up a new excuse and start fighting again.

I suppose I wouldn't mind the humans always starting wars if the nation they were fighting would actually counterattack, but they never do - they always just sit there and let the humans wreck their shit.  Unless they're constrained by geography, human nations inevitably cover a disproportionate amount of the world, pushing elves, goblins, and custom races to the sidelines if not outright annihilating them; all of the above are only safe from humans if they're sufficiently isolated.  They also seem to constrain dwarven expansion simply by devouring the population cap.  I've tried giving the others just as much reason to attack the humans as the humans have to attack them, but they never do; indeed the only people I've had attack humans (and then only very rarely) are other humans.  I've also tried giving the human kingdoms relatively small population caps compared to everyone else, but this appears to be equally useless - they still destroy everyone and everything that so much as mildly annoys them.

It goes without saying that I find this rather annoying.  Anyone have any ideas (or links if I've missed prior threads) how to keep world gen wars from being dominated by a single race?

I have just discovered the second cousin of all annoying bugs.

Of course, this comes with the caveat that it would not have occurred had I not been screwing around like a looney with the raw files.

Now, the particulars: as is often the case with me, I began screwing around in the raws, looking to spice the vanilla game up a little.  To this end a created a new species on a whim; a race of flying hawk men type critters.  Actually, I'd initially intended them to be harpies, but apparently an all female race cannot actually expand on the civ map for some reason.  

Anyway, my general wont when it comes to DF is to build up a magnificent fortress, fill it to the brim with goodies, and then, through blatant mismanagement, run it into the ground so I can loot the hell out of it later in Adventure mode.  Wanting to do so with one of my flying types, I selected a location as one of the bird-man civilizations and off I went.  Only to discover, horror of horrors, that trying to do anything (at least above ground) leads to an endless string of "(Miner) cancels dig stone: dangerous terrain," etc., etc.

It took me a minute or two to figure out the problem; apparently having nothing beneath your feet counts as dangerous terrain whether you can fly or not, and any critter that can fly will fly just for the hell of it.  Hmmm... wonder if hostile flying units are so beset upon?  Ah well, not sure if I wanna do anything about it, though.

Being able to fly in adventure mode is just so handy.