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[KBarth]

For my first real foray into .40 I thought it would be fun to resurrect a dead Dwarven civilization. So after creating a few worlds I finally found a civilization that is perfect. It's last known site was destroyed two years earlier. So I have this questions: While I am playing this fortress will one of Dwarves eventually become monarch and will my fortress become the new mountain home? Will I have to retire the fortress for this to happen?

 

[NullForceOmega]

Yes, very possible (and even likely) that soon after embark one of your dwarves will declare themselves monarch (there is a small outside chance that there is a monarch in exile, but that is a very low probability.)  If this does occur you will have to move fast to meet your king/queen's demands, you do not need the nightmare of a tantrum-spiral when you don't have the population to absorb the losses.  While it would be challenging to run without turtling, I strongly advise against it, as you again, cannot afford to absorb losses.  Keep anything that can kill your dwarves on the opposite side of impenetrable defenses.

[PatrikLundell]

My experience with dead/dying civs is that one of your dorfs will declare itself monarch as the first spring arrives (i.e. after 1 year). There are claims it can happen at other times, though. Right after embark, you can check the civ screen to see if the monarch still lives.
When playing dead/dying, I generally appoint an engraver out of the summer or autumn immigration waves and starts smoothing stone to build up skill. A monarch suite can also be dug out during the winter and the engraver set to smooth it, while I churn out furniture en masse to build up skill and create masterworks items for installation in the royal suite. The royal rooms are made 11*11 in size, and when eventually engraved and provided with the required furniture of masterworks quality, will satisfy the total quality demands (actually, lower quality will do). I've never had a monarch go grumpy enough to start to punish people for not increasing the room quality fast enough, however (Actually, I've never even seen grumpy thought about inferior quality from the royalty, although I think I've once seen some other noble who had an unhappy though about the inferior quality of his premises).
The major problem royalty causes for me is the incessant string of mandated production, especially if the fetishism is for weapons (which require metal that I typically don't have on my embarks), or RNG stuff such as rings, scepters, etc. where you can't just produce them, but will have to check time and again to see if you've managed to produce enough.

Turtling or not should be based on the embark, in my view. Getting logs for beds is useful, for example, and I am always careful about caverns anyway, since I don't like losses of any kind.

[synyster31]

I've just started an almost entitrely evil map that gave me the dead/dying civ warning. I have a dwarf declare themselves monarch within 5 minutes of embark everytime (multiple ended attempts due to undead goat massacres)

[LegCheeseMaker]

Just for clarification, if I play a dead civ and I want to get more than the first two hard coded migrant waves, do I have to establish two fortressese first? I recall that you won't get a third wave if your civ only has one site.

Also, do you have to gen a world with Playable Civilization off?

[Niddhoger]

Just for clarification, if I play a dead civ and I want to get more than the first two hard coded migrant waves, do I have to establish two fortressese first? I recall that you won't get a third wave if your civ only has one site.

Also, do you have to gen a world with Playable Civilization off?

Yes, but your migrant waves will be limited to maybe just a single extra.  Beyond the last hard-coded wave, migrants are pulled from the populations of actual sites.  However, I'm not sure how low a site's population can get due to emigration.  If your site only has 17 dorfs after the last migrant wave, how low can your next site pull it? Will you only be able to push it to 10 dorfs? 7? can you actually destroy a site by pulling all of its members to a new one?   

Likely, you'll have to abuse the hard-coded immigration waves and generate a secession of forts that you retire after the second wave but before the third.  It -really- helps to assign everyone to military before you do this (and give them at least bone/leather armor, or import ores for forging).  Then, after 5 forts or so of "generating" population, you can play another fort to get regular waves to maybe 100 or so population.  Otherwise, you'll have to play generation forts where you force at least a single crop of babies to be born before moving to the next fort/play for 50 years encouraging breeding the entire time.  To properly due this, you'll have to datamine.  The game won't directly tell you who is homosexual, so you can't just find all those interested in marriage and pair up the ones within the same age range. 

Its a painfully slow and meticulous process truly repopulating a dying civ through your dorfs pants >.> I just can't make myself abuse the hardcoded migrant waves to buffer up the population. 

[PatrikLundell]

I think I'm derailing the thread slightly, but how do you actually get the buggers to breed? I consistently fail to do that, with only some of the original 7 reaching the "friend" stage, and rarely any others becoming friends. DT can be used to see sexual preferences, but that won't help unless they progress on the friend scale to actually be able to start pairing up.
I run fairly small fortresses, with pop caps of 50/80 both for FPS reasons and because I find it tedious to scroll through page after page of dorfs when looking for someone, and I tend to keep them close to 100% occupied. Needless to say, I haven't even reached a 60 pop level in my 18+ year old fortress.

[LegCheeseMaker]

how do you actually get the buggers to breed?

I don't think you can force the matter but you can encourage romance by letting them party or idle in a central location.

Likely, you'll have to abuse the hard-coded immigration waves...

In a game where inanimate massive bronze statues come to live to wreak havoc, it's not a stretch to say Armok gifts your dying civ with some dorfs made from stone Also, where do the initial seven dorfs come from, anyway?

[PatrikLundell]

Partying doesn't happen until the dorfs are friends it seems, but I suspect partying can generate friendship between two dorfs who are friends with the party organizer (two dorfs who held grudges against each other from embark routinely partied together with their mutual friend without any visible improvement in relations, though). I suspect I might not let them idle enough, but my attempts at doing the minimum amount of work for a season at a time did not generate any new friendships, although the number of passing acquaintances and friendly terms seemed to increase. I've reduced my mess hall/meeting area size to increase the chances of the buggers rubbing elbows with each other, but hasn't given any visible results either. I've also organized the chairs and tables in the mess hall with 4 chairs in a square and the tables outside of that (e.g. two to the north and two to the south), as dorfs are supposed to chat with those adjacent, and tables apparently cannot be shared.

The starting 7 comes from the same place as the two fixed waves, which is probably a secret room hidden in the civ's capital (possibly ex capital) either in suspended animation or generated by an Armokian dorf maker. The dorfs are then hidden under a veil of invisibility granted by Armok while they sneak out of the goblin controlled city towards their embark.

[Niddhoger]

Basically you have to increase the amount of exposure they get to one another.  As I mentioned, there are rules governing this: Age gap (I believe no more than 20 years), sexual preferences, and desire for marriage.  So even if you get two horny dorfs of different sexes that are the same age as one another... if one of them isn't interested in marriage they'll never pop out kids.  They'll be perpetually stuck in the "lovers" status.  As I mentioned, the only way to find out a dorf sexual preference is to look at the raw files (or wait till they take anothe man/woman as a lover, but then its too late).  If you do this... you can assign adjoining/overlapping bedrooms to the dorfs you want to hook up.  You can also find the bisexual dorfs and shoehorn them into hetero couples as well.  I believe you have to disable any sort of meeting hall (they idle in their rooms after that) and don't give them any labor.  I've heard that sparring partners can become intimate too (hey sugar lips, how about we "wrestle" today GIGGITY!") Anyways, when done right you'll have kids popping out within a season or two.  This greatly accelerates the friendship->lovers->married->babies progression that won't get a chance to happen in large, spacious dining rooms with you (the overlord) cracking your whip endlessly.  So if you wanted the lazy version of this, spacious grand dining rooms are out.  Try and keep your dining room space to be as crowded as possible.  Dorfs have to be in proximity to one another to form friendships, and if everyone is off doing their own thing in different corners of your 20x20 legendary dining hall... no one actually hooks up.  You can also try making two-man mixed sex squads for sparring, but you could wind up pairing up a dorf that doesn't want kids/gay dorf with a breeder.  Really don't mean to sound homophobic here, but if you actually WANT dorf kids (like to repopulate a dying civ)... then your dorfs need to get biblical with each other. 

Its a ton of micromanagement, so I didn't commit to a long term generation fort to repopulate my civ, and instead just made a seccession of ~5 year old forts that I typically abandoned after they gained a few nobles. 

[PatrikLundell]

Thanks Niddhoger!
You largely confirm what I thought, but it's good to get confirmation. The overlapping bedroom approach sounds rather promising, especially if sleeping in beds next to each other counts as exposure (hm, 4 beds, MF top row, FM bottom row). I think the age difference is just 10 years, which I think is approximately "right" for humans, but dorfs live twice as long and are reproductive up to the end (like naked mole rats).
The sparring trick sounds useful as well, although it goes counter to my usual militia selection criteria, which include males and unreproductive females only (purely practical, to avoid baby mashing, although that could be achieved by withdrawing any married females [and probably males to, to avoid any breeder getting hurt]. I separate games from real life when it comes to ethics [which is good, given that most games involves massive amounts of slaughter of people/sentients, and you definitely don't want that IRL]).

[Niddhoger]

I never cared for breeder status in the military.  If a she-soldiers gives birth I just remove her from that squad until the wee-tyke is crawling around on his own.  Its a little micro-management, but I'd rather do that than exclude the exceptionally strong/tough/agile/quick healing she-dorf from my military because of the occasional baby.  Especially if she has a very annoying material preference, like shells (soldiers never mood).  In that last case, I'll just reassign her to a training-only squad.  That way she can lead demonstrations for the latest batch of legendary cheese-makers and fishers I'M IN A DESERT WHY ARE YOU EVEN HERE!? *sigh*

[LegCheeseMaker]

Hey! You can make awesome cheese in a desert!

How long/how many forts did it take to get non-hard coded waves? I recently started a map with a dead civ (and an exiled queen, apparently). My idea is to start a fort that would become my mountainhome, retire it, make a bunch of outposts, then come back to fill out the mountainhome. What do you guys think?

[Agdune]

How long/how many forts did it take to get non-hard coded waves?

I'm not sure if my situation is exactly the same (hostile world with 2 surviving dwarves, so the parent civ *technically* wasn't dead), and I've continued receiving migrants up to my popcap of 25. About six waves of random-genned dwarves (the last two were lone dwarves). I'm pretty confident that, with past attempts in mind, as soon as the game runs out of dwarves in world population, it'll just keep genning new ones in perpetuity. Which is a bit of a bummer, because I've tried to get the 'repopulate the world' thing going on a few times through breeding... but I instead just get swamped by migrants.

[StagnantSoul]

I had a civ where there was only three dwarves: the king, his king consort, and the champion. They were all in one little mead hall in a tiny ruined house town. I went there, asked the king what I could do, and he sent me off to disturb neighbouring enemies and such. When I came back, there was quite a few more dwarves running about... I'm not sure how it happened.