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[Mostali]

Day 1 - 1st of Granite, 253 - Activate the civilian alert!  Everyone inside!

Day 8 - The reanimated yak hair and severed peasant hand finally made it to the front door, only to be swooped up in cage traps.

Day 15 - Ho hum.... life goes on pretty much as normal.  The leading zombie has moved exactly 11 steps, putting him still 24 steps from the front line of cage traps and 70 steps from the wide open front gate.  Don't suppose there will be any elf or human caravans this year.

[PatrikLundell]

Undead invasions are notoriously clueless about path finding (at least in 0.40.24, and I don't believe that's changed). They very often have to get withing 30 or so steps of the fortress itself to smell dwarf and actually path inside, and since their brains have rotted away, they don't communicate, so only the drifters who happen to drift close enough path inside.
Apparently, their living handlers have rotted brains as well, since they are just as bad at finding the entrance(s) (one can wonder how they ever found the embark...). The only difference with the handlers is that the tend to drag their charges with them when smelling dwarf.
If they can't find the path they typically drift in brownian motion along the embark edge. If you're lucky they'll leave after a season of vegetation trampling, but if you're unlucky they'll drift for a year.
So yes, patience is needed...

[Insert_Gnome_Here]

1) Build loads of ballistae
2) Build metal arrows for them
3) Point at zombies
4) Hope zombies don't move (or shoot legs of necro)
5)...
6) Profit!

(Giving a load of dwarves xbows helps too. You get a brief exchange of fire every now and then.)

[Melting Sky]

Zombies are the most cunning of DF foes. Unlike the clueless goblins that will charge strait into the meat grinder after seeing ten of their buddies explode in that same hallway the cerebral zombies know that time is on their side since they need not eat, sleep or drink. Instead they set up a proper siege and take control of the surface, waiting for the dwarves to run out of wood, water, food and other supplies, forcing the belligerent little drunks to come up out of their trap laden hidey holes and face the zombies on even terms. We are just lucky they haven't figured out how to burrow yet.

[PatrikLundell]

If dorfs would actually run out of booze, food, wood, or water a proper siege would be a valid strategy. However, in that case I'd cover all sides of the embark and actually surround the fortress.

The last time I had a number of such brownian sieges they all came from roughly the same direction, and since 2/3 of that edge was ocean it wasn't that much of an effort to set up retracting drawbridges to drop them into a sea of cage traps (I did set up obsidianization into the aquifer, but gave up that after the test run since it gave me an FPS of 0, but the trap did work as designed). As a bonus, the traps worked on goblins as well, both when they attacked and when they fled after taking sufficient losses.

[Saiko Kila]

I have somewhat different experiences with zombies in 0.42.06. They are easily attracted from huge distances by a single bait-cat (or a clueless visiting scholar), and can be rerouted through different corridors, depending on whether I want to cage them, chop to pieces or just use to get rid of freeloading artists (necromancers are neutral towards visitors, but zombies are not). They aren't very fast, but they path unerringly. Additionally they don't care about any leading necro, unlike goblins who can be distracted by death/capture of their leader, which is very frustrating. However, the zombies I have are 99% armed(*), including bows and crossbows, and they are (almost) whole persons, that is dwarves, elfs or goblins. No pieces of anatomy running loose. Maybe they are different because of that?

*) coincidentally, out of 100 zombies, 99 were armed. The only unarmed was historical figure raised by someone 200 years after death.

[Mostali]

The pieces were from a previous invasion.  Visitors kept coming onto the map and getting slaughtered.  I built a small cave away from my fort and dumped all the bodies and parts in it so the next time they came the parts wouldn't be inside my fortress.  I probably should have walled it up also.  Doesn't matter, now I have magma so all my problems are over.

I found the visitors more distracting then helpful.  The zombie horde would take a few weeks to move 10 spaces forward, then a visitor would show up and they'd run back chasing it.  For this invasion I made all my locations "citizens and resident only".

When all was said and done this siege took just over three months.  I got bored at about 60 days and released my civ alert.  I guess the activity woke them up because they moved a lot faster after that, right into my cage trap wall.

[PatrikLundell]

The "stop by captured leader" bug is supposed to be fixed in one of the recent releases, and I didn't see it happen in my a recent invasion.
Consistent with Mostali's experience, I've never seen invading undead pieces move about, except as a result of being reanimated after being split off from the invader on the local map in a reanimating biome.

[FantasticDorf]

To be honest, you'd be pretty bad at finding dwarves if most of your organs such as your eyes, ears and nose had rotted away to basic less-functional holes.

My own assumption for haplessness is that without these, they just fumble around waiting for vibrations either in the ground or loudish sound vibrations to pass through their skulls besides from far fetched theories such as supernatural extra sensory detection.

[Khalari]

Make an airlock trap for those zombies and then dig right into where they are so they actually path into your trap. Easy peasy and leaves you with a zombie zoo LOL.

[Libash_Thunderhead]

Train an army and kick their undead asses.

[Mostali]

In the works, just not there for an entire horde yet.  In moving from cage traps to their semi-permanent home they had to get dragged through the barracks.  Apparently three of them broke free - probably due to giant flies buzzing around over-head causing cancellations.  Anyway, I only found out by the bodies laying around.  I went back and checked the reports, and as far as I can tell not one zombie got so much as a swing in.  So... they're getting there.

[Saiko Kila]

The "stop by captured leader" bug is supposed to be fixed in one of the recent releases, and I didn't see it happen in my a recent invasion.
Consistent with Mostali's experience, I've never seen invading undead pieces move about, except as a result of being reanimated after being split off from the invader on the local map in a reanimating biome.

I had no live goblins invading in v.0.42,  the goblins with captured leaders problems are in v.0.40.23. However, the highly mobile zombies are a repeating feature in my fuly v.0.42.06 world. I just noticed how different they are from goblins I remember from earlier versions (and from zombies too). My fort is about 10 world tiles from the tower, and they still have energy to chase after everything alive on the map, including sliding on ice during winter. Oh, and embark is smaller than the default one, it's 4x3. Smaller embark may mean less pathfinding problems, who knows. But I definitely don't have this stuck-in-mud zombie problem, and I wanted to share it.

The only problem I had was with a zombie stuck on the ocean's floor, after it thawed in winter and the zombie plummeted down. It was wandering slowly, not swimming out, and even after I channelled a ramp for it to get out comfortably, it didn't. But the ones not in water are very observant of any live prey, and "run" to them without much ado. Being slow, they let pass about half of visitors, but that's not because of lack of trying. They also immediately notice any gate-bridge I open and go for it.

[Findulidas]

Since the nerf to zombies its not such a big of deal anymore. Just moderately trained dwarves could probably easily kill them.

[Saiko Kila]

Since the nerf to zombies its not such a big of deal anymore. Just moderately trained dwarves could probably easily kill them.

Dwarves can kill anything, the problem is with surviving. I've been observing visiting soldiers, and generally they die to zombies, even if there are 2 zombies per one soldier. I saw only one killing of zombie by a human soldier, but he was then killed by another zombie. The reason was over-exertion. Another common reason of dying is losing consciousness because of pain. The visiting soldiers are rather low skill, but still, they should be able to do more. The zombies were armed and shielded, and apparently they retained their respective weapon skills.