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[Llamageddon]

So am playing 0.44.09 and messing around with world generation and I read on the wiki that larger worlds in the latest versions can reduce your FPS in fortress mode. How bad is this? Should I avoid this like the plague or is it probably going to be OK unless I am running a fort for 100+ years? On a similar note, I've got in the habit of making 3x3 embarks, also to delay FPS drop. How critical is this also? I would love to be making large worlds with 4x4 embarks if pssible, but remember getting FPS problems relatively quickly in older games.

Should I be most worried about pathing, heat/water changes and, animal and dwarf numbers? Or are the above concerns as critical? I also love waterfall embarks but I assume that is just a bad idea in the long term for FPS.

Edit: I know these questions have been broadly answered elsewhere but I suppose I am really asking for a heirarchy of what is most to least important for saving FPS.

[PatrikLundell]

I can't give you any hierarchy, just my observation:
33*129 PSV world with all plants/creatures added to all biomes, 70 or so civs, uncapped sites, and 400 year history (4 hours generation or so).
My 3*3 embark worked fairly well initially, but the save has bloated out horribly. It's currently above 500 MB zipped, and I disabled compression when quicksave started taking more than 5 minutes. The FPS is down to about 15 after about 35 years in a fortress with about 60 citizens and a visitor cap of 40.
My lesson from this is to cut down on the number of sites/civs for the next world, and the bloated save causes trouble (it ceased to be possible to upload bugged saves to DFFD a long time ago, for instance.

I try to keep the item count down somewhat, but it's steadily creeping upwards (around 210000 according to the cyclic DFHack reports).

[Shonai_Dweller]

Practically speaking, and everyone's experience is different (hundreds of things effect fps), you'll notice the save times a lot more than any impact on fps between a large and medium world.

[Llamageddon]

Thanks, I suppose it is quite hard to measure. I'll try making a larger world and keeping history low as I assume it is more the number of historical characters and events the game has to track slows down fortress mode now. Poor dragons though, they won't be fully grown. I don't know why that of all things bugs me so much about a short history.

[Shonai_Dweller]

Thanks, I suppose it is quite hard to measure. I'll try making a larger world and keeping history low as I assume it is more the number of historical characters and events the game has to track slows down fortress mode now. Poor dragons though, they won't be fully grown. I don't know why that of all things bugs me so much about a short history.

Beasts are often born in a time before time several hundred years before worldgen starts, so there's still a chance of big dragons.

[Llamageddon]

I wish I could think of a relatively quick way to do some Science! on this. Particularly what a difference world size to civ number to history length makes to FPS in a fort. Can't think how I could get a baseline for each embark on different worlds. I suppose history length and civ number could be done by using the same embark on the same worldgen but with different civ/history settings. One thing is for sure though, world size and civ populations/sites make a huge difference to load times.