After about 6 fortresses that were practically invincible to any invasion, tantrum spiral or the God Armok himself, I can't stand this game anymore. Every time I get to the good part of the game.....the game's FPS drops to 5-15 and becomes totally unplayable. What's the reason? I'll tell you.
It's not the dwarf count or movement, not the regular buildings, not the monsters, animals or invasions. No, it's not the windmills or any other building that is known to cause lag for others. NOPE! Not the map being revealed either, no!
STOCKPILES! It's the fucking stockpiles. The game basically says, "No.....you can't hoard treasure and wealth, no....no you cannot" FOR I WILL LAG YOUR GAME TO DEATH!!!! FUCK YOU!!!
I tested this by autodumping/destroying every single item on the ground leaving all my 140 dwarves, dozens of animals, crafting buildings, walls, traps, bridges, etc etc etc all intact. I also fully mined out several levels completely leaving them totally exposed and in plain sight.
When I deleted all the items......my fps went from 17 to 185 and continued to climb up to 200.
And that is what makes this game extremely flawed, you cannot play it the way it should be played. Keeping stockpiles of food/wealth and supplies is what keeps your fort prosperous. But if you cannot do that, there needs to be a outside currency tracking so I can just sell off the majority of the stuff. You insist on keeping a physical item for everything and trade is nothing but BARTER. So its impossible to have wealth in that kind of state.
Anyways, its killed the game completely for me. I have a fast computer, tons of ram, latest up to date hardware. Besides hooking up the game to a super computer cluster, I'm done with this game until the dev optimizes the coding. It's a fucking mess right now.
And what's even more depressing is that the game industry sucks ass right now, so there's nothing else worth playing. Sigh.