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Author Topic: Are hard-coded migrant waves still a thing?  (Read 1861 times)

comicraider

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Are hard-coded migrant waves still a thing?
« on: May 08, 2018, 05:49:48 pm »

Just come across a bit of a confusion in the succession game I'm running. Dwarven civilization was extinct prior to embarking and the only survivors from worldgen were five necromancers, all at least 800 years old.

I know if your civ or species is extinct you'll still get two migrant waves as standard, and I got both in the initial year, but the guy playing the next turn has just informed us that we got a third wave, consisting of 18 migrants.

Are the hard-coded waves still a thing, or would dwarves have to be extinct with NO survivors for it to take effect? Not complaining about the extra bodies, just a little confused.
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NullForceOmega

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Re: Are hard-coded migrant waves still a thing?
« Reply #1 on: May 08, 2018, 06:59:34 pm »

Hard-coded only applies to the first two waves, and yes, they are still a thing.

As for the additional wave received, a dead or dying civ means that it has few or no sites, not that there are no living citizens.  It is quite common for there to be surviving civ members out in the wilds, having fled from the destruction of their home site.
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comicraider

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Re: Are hard-coded migrant waves still a thing?
« Reply #2 on: May 08, 2018, 07:15:53 pm »

That's the curious thing - those five dwarves were it, and besides the 11 we got in the first two waves the third gave us way more. I'm even double-checking Legends Viewer with the backup save from before I started playing it, nobody left besides those five, none of which came in the waves. Weird.
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MrSelfDestruct

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Re: Are hard-coded migrant waves still a thing?
« Reply #3 on: May 08, 2018, 07:57:53 pm »

That's the curious thing - those five dwarves were it, and besides the 11 we got in the first two waves the third gave us way more. I'm even double-checking Legends Viewer with the backup save from before I started playing it, nobody left besides those five, none of which came in the waves. Weird.

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PatrikLundell

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Re: Are hard-coded migrant waves still a thing?
« Reply #4 on: May 09, 2018, 02:02:32 am »

DF's determination of death of civs is buggy. Firstly, DF culls all civs declared as dead from the list of embarkable civs (this is probably by design), which means if there is a single healthy dwarven civ in the list none of them are truly dead, merely "struggling"/"dying".
A civ can have had neither members nor sites for 1000 years and still be considered struggling because the entity population accounting is bugged and tends to settle on a positive number that stays unchanged until the end of world gen after a bit of fluctuation after the last site is lost (I think refugees can occasionally rebuild during the fluctuation period), rather than drop to zero.

As mentioned, a third migrant wave means the civ was struggling, not dead. Dead civs don't get dwarven caravans either (and never will), nor outpost liaisons.
The only known certain way to determine if a civ is truly dead is to embark and check the civ screen. If the civ section is completely blank the civ is dead, but if the dwarven civ is present, even without any important members, the civ is not dead. As soon as the civ gets in contact with any other civ (peaceful or otherwise) the dwarven civ appears on this menu, and so that determination method can no longer be used.

It can also be noted that if your struggling civ doesn't have a monarch off site, you'll be saddled with one at the two year mark at the latest. If it happens prior to that, a random dorf will take the position of monarch after a polite discussion, while the two year timeout seems to usually (always?) select the expedition leader, allowing you some room to groom one that won't spew harmful mandates.

The "hard coded" waves are made up of void dorfs if no eligible ones are used/exist. The necros are not eligible as they're no longer members of any civs beside their own necro ones(s). Dead civs get two migrant waves, but I'm unsure if a necro siege blocking a wave will postpone the migrants or if the wave is lost. Setting a pop cap works, and can obviously result in waves not appearing.
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Chief10

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Re: Are hard-coded migrant waves still a thing?
« Reply #5 on: May 11, 2018, 01:21:58 am »

DF's determination of death of civs is buggy. Firstly, DF culls all civs declared as dead from the list of embarkable civs (this is probably by design), which means if there is a single healthy dwarven civ in the list none of them are truly dead, merely "struggling"/"dying".

I'm sorry, could you explain what this means? Are you saying that the status of one dwarven civ will somehow affect the status of the other dwarven civs?
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PatrikLundell

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Re: Are hard-coded migrant waves still a thing?
« Reply #6 on: May 11, 2018, 02:39:07 am »

DF's determination of death of civs is buggy. Firstly, DF culls all civs declared as dead from the list of embarkable civs (this is probably by design), which means if there is a single healthy dwarven civ in the list none of them are truly dead, merely "struggling"/"dying".

I'm sorry, could you explain what this means? Are you saying that the status of one dwarven civ will somehow affect the status of the other dwarven civs?
No. The state of one civ does not affect the state of other civs. However the state of playable civs affect whether dead playable civs are added to the list of embarkable civs. That is, if A is struggling and B and C are dead, the list of civs you can embark as contains only A. If A, B, and C are all dead then that list contains all three of them.
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Chief10

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Re: Are hard-coded migrant waves still a thing?
« Reply #7 on: May 12, 2018, 02:59:00 am »

Oh hmm that's a bit counter intuitive. Thanks for clarifying
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mikekchar

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Re: Are hard-coded migrant waves still a thing?
« Reply #8 on: May 14, 2018, 12:12:21 am »

PatrikLundell I'm sure you already talked about this before, but I've got a terrible memory :-)  Given this mechanic, could you do a custom world generation, save the seed, stop generation after a few years (like 10), make sure that there are at least 2 dwarf civs, then: Redo world gen, stopping every 100 years until you have one less playable civ.  So if you have 2 playable civs A and B, you generate until you have only A or B playable.  That means the other one is dead.  Then keep regenning until *both* are playable again.  This means that both civs are dead.  And just to be sure, you can choose the one that died first to play.  Or will that still sometimes result in a struggling civ?

Of course, there is no guarantee that all the dwarf civs will die... It will be very time consuming...
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PatrikLundell

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Re: Are hard-coded migrant waves still a thing?
« Reply #9 on: May 14, 2018, 03:09:59 am »

PatrikLundell I'm sure you already talked about this before, but I've got a terrible memory :-)  Given this mechanic, could you do a custom world generation, save the seed, stop generation after a few years (like 10), make sure that there are at least 2 dwarf civs, then: Redo world gen, stopping every 100 years until you have one less playable civ.  So if you have 2 playable civs A and B, you generate until you have only A or B playable.  That means the other one is dead.  Then keep regenning until *both* are playable again.  This means that both civs are dead.  And just to be sure, you can choose the one that died first to play.  Or will that still sometimes result in a struggling civ?

Of course, there is no guarantee that all the dwarf civs will die... It will be very time consuming...
I'm sure you're the only one on the forum with a poor memory. Wait, what's your name again?

I would expect that to work. However, it would be a horrible way to do it, given how hard it is to get them to die in the first place, and once you've passed 150 years or it seems the chance for a civ to die is diminishing.
The way I went about it before I used tools was to generate a world for about 150 years and scrub it if it didn't looked like the single dwarven civ (entity_defaults.txt changed to have a single dwarven civ) was killed, stop the generation, export legends, look at the legends to see if it seemed dead, embark with defaults in a random place and check the civ screen. If it was blank I'd take the seeds from the exported legends info, add those to my PSV world, and then generate the full length of the history, followed by the "real" embark.

With tools http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=165084.msg7526484#msg7526484 I push struggling civs over the brink and add them to the list of civs I can embark as. I don't actually use slab_civ itself, but rather a custom (for my particular PSV world) version that also changes all glaciers to evil (goblins modded to only start on glaciers) and bio diversifies all biomes. That saves a huge amount of calendar (world gen) time.
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