Fort is Capital with no king

[xDDD]

Currently my fort is at 183 population but I haven't been appointed as a Barony or any other title. It says "Capital" under my fort name in the corner so I'm assuming that my civ died out and I became the capital?
I haven't gotten a Liarson in a very long time and all of my civ's caravans have been incredibly small.

Does anyone know how to fix this issue?

[Audax]

the king is is living in another place (and not willing or able to leave it). my last fort was a capital but the queen and all the nobility lived in a small enemy goblin town as citizens. funnily enough raiding that goblin town ended up with one of my legendary macedwarves caving the queens skull in and having one of my dwarves back home be elected as the new king

[xDDD]

Originally posted by Audax:

the king is is living in another place (and not willing or able to leave it). my last fort was a capital but the queen and all the nobility lived in a small enemy goblin town as citizens. funnily enough raiding that goblin town ended up with one of my legendary macedwarves caving the queens skull in and having one of my dwarves back home be elected as the new king

LOL what a wild story!

[Sus E. Baka]

I had the same thing happen and did some minor experimenting -- it might be related to retiring and unretiring a fortress. In my case, this is how it went:

I set up the basics then immediately let my fortress manage itself while I played some adventurers travelling there with a haul of artifacts and useful skills. When they settled there and I regained control of my fortress it was like you described: suddenly a capital, but not even a barony position.

I continued playing and noticed that I hadn't gotten a single siege, though forgotten beasts and titans kept arriving. The liaison stopped showing up and the caravans never increased in size even as the population boomed. It was like we were invisible to the rest of the political world (though not to migrants or the friendly necromancers dropping off dead bodies at my border for some reason).

I retired my fortress again and founded a second one in the same civilisation out of curiosity. Everything was suddenly working normally again. To test my theory, I retired it and migrated some adventurers over. During the adventure I discovered that one of the founders of my first fortress was now apparently Queen and the population there had exploded even more than when I last left it, like it was actually being treated as the capital.

Once my adventurers settled in fortress #2, however, it gained the "Capital" descriptor and also became politically invisible, almost like they'd declared independence. I went back into adventure mode to scope out the political landscape and there was apparently some sort of civil war going on. though all of the nobles were getting along just fine in person. The Queen from fortress #1 was still the Queen. She got her hand stabbed off my a rather impolite companion of mine, but that's neither here nor there.

TLDR; My theory is that somewhere between retiring and unretiring, fortress somehow become an independent faction while simultaneously staying a part of their original civ. If you didn't unretire anything, then may Armok help you for I cannot.