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[nekoexmachina]

Hello!
From my experience, I can't survive surface of evil region long enough to get even 1 migration wave. So.. 2 seasons tops.
Are zombies way tougher last 2 releases then they've used to be or am I doing something wrong?


P.s. of course, burrowing underground & locking down my special facility of dwarven drunks does the job. But thats not fun.

[Telgin]

I'm not sure about the .42 series yet, but I know in the .40 series zombies got a massive boost in several respects.  They're extremely strong and tough now and from the reports I've seen, it's generally not worth trying to fight them with soldiers.  Even though pulping was put in place to make them killable again, they were still kind of unbeatable.  Severed heads were reportedly impossible to destroy, but I've never tried it myself.

There was an unrelated problem in that they also wouldn't path to your fort properly, so they'd hang out near the map edge and massacre migrants or caravans but never come to the fort to be fought in the first place.  The last patch that fixed behavior of squads when their leader was caged or trapped might have fixed that problem though.

So, unless someone comes along and confirms whether any of that has changed or not in the newest version, yes, zombies and undead are much tougher now than they were several major versions ago.

[Naryar]

You are kinda supposed to turtle in evil reanimating regions. Else you don't survive.

Or you could try to build pit traps... they're relatively quick to do.

[greycat]

I have a 0.42.02 fortress that embarked near a Tower.  I got a dwarf (presumably a necromancer?) leading a small army of somewhere between 50 and 100 walking dead of various races (humans, elves, dwarves at least).

First thing I did was close the drawbridge, sealing myself in.  This caused them to mostly clump together on the map edge, obliterating any visitors that came by.  (And this fort got a lot of visitors of all kinds.  Bards, scholars, mercenaries... didn't matter much.  The zombies killed them all, rarely losing one of their own.)

I dug a tunnel under the surface and put in some green glass serrated disc traps.  I wasn't bright enough to put drawbridges at BOTH ends of the line of traps though -- just at the near end.  So, when I lured some zombies into the tunnel, and chopped a few up, and clogged up the traps, I couldn't send civilians in to clean the traps out.  There was no way to secure the outer entrance.

So I dug another tunnel going the other way, and put drawbridges on both ends.  I tried silver spiked balls this time.  Lured some zombies in... and mostly they were not killed by the traps.  A few were, but even more were able to walk back and forth over the line of traps, being bashed and smashed and so forth, but not dying.  Tried a few iterations of that, but it just wasn't killing them often enough.

While all that was going on, I sent marksdwarves up onto the catwalk behind the fortifications, and took shots at them with silver bolts.  Mostly these caused injuries but not deaths.  I was hoping to get some lucky shots on the non-zombie leader.  And he did take some damage, but not enough to kill him.

The marksdwarves turned out to be a disaster for my side.  Eventually there was a body part on the catwalk that someone wanted to haul to a coffin.  So, what happened was a civilian would go up there, get close to the body part, see the zombie, flip out, somehow end up on the ground outside the walls and become zombie food.  This repeated, over and over, like 40 or 50 times.  Civilians ending up on the wrong side of the fortifications was the major cause of death for me in this entire siege.

At some point the non-zombie leader ended up in a murky pool and drowned.  After that, the zombies dispersed and started wandering more freely (instead of clumping around him).  This didn't really change much, since even a single zombie could take out a visiting mercenary of any kind.

After a few more months, they left.

[ZzarkLinux]

@OP

Zombies get a stength boost when they zombify (at least in the last version). When you "V" over them and look at their thoughts it says "Urist is extrememly muscular" or similiar. I wish there was an option for weak zombies, and not hulk zombies.

You should make backup saves of your zombie-geddeon. Just copy-paste the region01 folder or such. It allows you to savescum as needed, and you can rollback if you hit any of the bugs like "unkillable zombie" or "all dwarves path to some random unforbidden item outside" or "migrant wave spawns in the middle of the zombie pack". You can also savescum at start if you find a really sweet site, so eventually you can reload / stabilize without the zombie giant keas killing you in the first week (versus the extra hours to gen another good map).

Yes, those bugs are all shiggles the first time. But Zombie forts are extrememly fragile. And rewarding. Be sure to post you highest citizen total ! I got a mayor once, good times.

[joeclark77]

I noticed this, too!  I turtled up when I saw undead, but didn't think it was any big deal because I've been away from the game for a couple years and remembered the old version.  I picked some novices to be marksdwarves and had them fire a couple thousand bolts at the zombies to no effect.  (Except that when the living officer/necromancer was killed, they did disperse more widely.)  I figured they were just immune to bolts and needed to be sliced instead, so I eventually opened the gates and let my militia at them... big mistake!

[Witty]

Zombies got a big (certainly unintended) buff following the combat changes brought on by .40.xx. And by buff, I mean three peasant corpses being able to just destroy a five man squad of talented hammerers in full steel.

The reason I suspect is their strength boost, as ZzarkLinux noted. I don't think Toady redid the numbers following the combat changes, so things are little funky on their end.

[endlessblaze]

problem is the game does not even give you time to get inside before slaughtering you.

[Niddhoger]

I did an evil embark, once. A murder of undead ravens killed everyone before my miner could do so much as channel a ramp by the wagon... I haven't yet tried again.

[Robsoie]

Too bad the old "reclaim" feature has been removed from df2010 and further.

This old reclaim would work great in those evil regions in which you need fighting power from the very start.
Hopefully it will be back when Toady will setup the "starting scenario" in a future version.

[Talanic]

Nothing quite like starting to set up a fort and immediately losing your starting seven to three Zombie Ravens.

[Morrigi]

nerf zombies 2016

[PatrikLundell]

Find the embark, copy the embark save so you can retry rather than regenerate, dig fast and turtle.

Cage traps are very effective, as is atom smashing (don't do that with undead blind cave ogres, though).

Undead sapients are FAST. 3*10 tile long raising drawbridges hooked up to a pressure plate might not be sufficient to get them every time. Also note that
a pressure plate cannot be set to trigger on the most dangerous of the undead, like almost unkillable undead peachicks. Sufficiently small head parts (like hair and skin) are probably indestructible, as are small severed heads, unless that's been fixed.

Unless undead behavior has been rectified (haven't had a black tower invasion since 0.40.24), they'll just drift aimlessly around their randomly drifting handler before leaving after either one season or one year of drifting. My (somewhat outdated) experience of zombiefied creatures is that they're better at finding your fortress than undead invaders (who can fight undead critters, get killed, and then be reanimated in a reanimating embark...), but still extremely poor at it. A drifting undead may path to your fortress if it happens to drift close enough to catch the smell of dwarf, but that's rather close, less than 20 tiles, and probably more like 12, and the undead do not communicate, so only the drifter will path.

Hauling spam from the mess topside can be handled with d-b-f marking of the whole surface periodically.

[FantasticDorf]

Purposefully turtle underground and make as little use of direct combat as you can, set all your taverns to residential and try to secure a relatively safe route for caravans when they arrive (via underground winding trap routes accesible via ramp connected to a secure walled above ground depot but not connected to your main base directly for security reasons)

Preferably use traps that pulp, burn and displace the undead (wash them away with water/lava into the direction of more traps or into a pit using grates etc.)

[Spehss _]

I had a fort get sieged by a tower in year 2 last night. It died. The fort, not the siege. The undead path to the fort now when there's an opening, yes. And they can climb walls, although as far as I saw they will not path to the fortress if the only access into the fort requires climbing walls. If a flying animal or something on the other side of the wall gets their attention they will scale walls to chase after it.

Undead seem kinda impossible to beat in dwarf vs zombie combat right now. For example, tower sieges can come with necromancers to re-raise the dead, and the zombies they bring with them typically have weapons and shields. Zombies can even have archers. And all zombies, either tower zombies or evil biome zombies, are capable of sprinting, making for insanely fast chasing down of prey. I don't think they can get tired from sprinting, meaning they will chase anyone and anything that can get tired or overexerted and catch them eventually. And due to the strength of the dead, armor is almost useless against anything dwarf size or larger because one hit can have enough force to pulp a dwarf instantly.

Best current anti-undead options seem to be clever traps or flooding the world with cleansing magma and fire.