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[guessingo]

anyone get to the point where they are so strong they can go on forever? Or does everyone get wasted in the end? What is the longest anyone has lasted in terms of game time?

[Kofthefens]

The real enemies are boredom and FPS. Walling yourself in isn't too hard. You can also have a vampire locked in a 1x1 wall somewhere, and you'll survive nearly forever (ghosts)

[Mungrul]

Yeah, I've had plenty of fortresses get to the stage where they're incredibly unlikely to fall, but as Kofthefens says, FPS eventually drops to a level where it becomes too frustrating to play.

[Tjoh]

I think the record is 150-200 years or so. My personal record was ~25 years on a 40d fortress

[Drazinononda]

Define "strong" and "survive." Vampire in a panic room? Simple. Open fort frequently assailed by megabeasts and large sieges? That's a bit harder to do.

I tried one lockdown fort with my original seven that got very boring after several years. For the founders all I had to do was oversee production of the basics: food, booze, clothing. The whole fort was smoothed and engraved, Great or Royal bedrooms for everyone, legendary dining hall, etc. The only "extra" task was the memorial hall for the filthy serfs who frequently died outside the walls, to keep the ghosts away, and even that was mitigated by a carpenter's shop where the migrants could dig their own gra... er, make their own coffins.

Now, on an open fort, about the only way to achieve indefinite survival is with liberal use of overpowered traps. Unless you manage to kill off all the goblins in existence, you'll eventually reach a point where the losses due to sieges (in an untrapped or undertrapped fort) begin to pass up the gains from childbirth and immigration. I wouldn't say it's certain or inevitable -- with the proper military setup and fort infrastructure you could probably defeat a siege of arbitrary size and meanwhile prevent tantrum spirals within the fort -- but the game design stacks the cards against you.

[Larix]

If you switch invaders off, a walled-in fort won't even suffer FPS death. As long as extraneous junk only occurs within your walls, you can always keep it under control. It's much harder keeping up with caravans and goblins compulsively littering the countryside: ~50 adult dwarfs usually take a full month of non-stop hauling just to collect the junk from a standard ambush-caravan collision and might take at least another week or so to dispose of everything.

Although an island embark or a pocket world with no goblins to begin with is similarly safe from FPS murder.

[guessingo]

how big does your population/fort get before you have serious FPS issues on a high end system? Has this improved any with newer releases or is it just newer computes? I have an intel i5, 16 gb ram, flash drive with the game installed. any idea how big i can get? Does the game employ any threading so its not  just serial programming?

or basically do we just have to wait for CPUs to get better over time so we can get larger? What can you do to prolonge fps death? Any mods for it? or just don't get too big?

by walled off fort you mean no doors to the outside world? Short of a vampire how do you get enough resources to do that? dont you need to get wood etc... ?
has anyone ever gotten to the point where they conquer large parts of the surrounding world ? Is it possible to expand into multiple forts?

i generally dont last too long. so just asking.

[VerdantSF]

The longest-lived fort that I know of is Flarechannel at 270 years.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Now, on an open fort, about the only way to achieve indefinite survival is with liberal use of overpowered traps. Unless you manage to kill off all the goblins in existence, you'll eventually reach a point where the losses due to sieges (in an untrapped or undertrapped fort) begin to pass up the gains from childbirth and immigration.

There are several forts with open designs, including mine, which are decades old.  I'm at 50 years at the moment.  While I close off certain exits during sieges and close everything up while collecting the spoils of war, I have enough legendaries that sieges have minimal casualties, including a lever mishap where all twelve entrances into my fortress were left open by accident and enemies poured in from all sides (oops).

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The following Legends report was taken when the fort was around 38 years old.  Unfortunately, I can't take a more recent one as Legends Viewer stopped working when I ported over to LNP r18 .  More soldier have died from old age than from battle.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I also don't use danger rooms.  I included a hammerdwarf and an axedwarf in my embark team and had them training from the start.  Until I started getting legendaries, I kept squads small, usually 3 with 2-on/1-off scheduling.  I also don't have native iron on my map, but I do have flux.  I quickly traded my way to steel weapons and iron armor by the time the first siege arrived, and steel everything soon after.

For Forgotten Beasts and Titans, I use cave-ins.  I don't use weapon traps, and I only have 1 barely used corridor with cage traps for catching things like dragons.

The second half of my fort's life has actually been a lot easier than the first.  Once you get several legendaries in the military, training speeds bumps up significantly.  At any given time, I have 32-36 dwarves on active duty and 10-12 on reserve (newbs in training).  By the time a spot in an active duty squad opens up, there's a recruit with 10+ skills ready to join .

[ORCACommander]

I am on an intel wolfdale E8200 overclocked to 3.2 ghrz and the exe is hacked to be large address aware. my longest going fort which is about 30 now has 2015 dwarfs tens of thousands of items and has an fps 20-30. in short an i5 should get similar performance.

[AWdeV]

anyone get to the point where they are so strong they can go on forever? Or does everyone get wasted in the end? What is the longest anyone has lasted in terms of game time?

Most my forts died due to me not being interested in playing with 5 fps anymore but there isn't really anything other than that. Food, clothes, goblins, FB's; no problem.

[Di]

2015 dwarfs

Wut? Are you serious?

[Deepblade]

I can hardly stand more than 60 Dwarves, I can't even imagine 2015.

[ORCACommander]

lol wups I meant 215

[VerdantSF]

Lol!  2015 dwarves would put ME in a strange mood.

[wierd]

I've built fortresses that could, "in theory", accommodate 2015 dwarves..... but DF would need to be 64bit flat and SMP aware to pull it off on my rig.

(Have 2.8ghz (had to underclock due to case heat buildup issues, despite loading the case with fans) i7, with 12gb ram in the living room. 8 cores baby. It's a space heater! I still get FPS death.)