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[Lummox JR]

I feel like I've asked this before but I can't find the thread, so maybe I'm wrong.

When I send out a raid, oftentimes the raid party comes back extremely slowly. However long it takes them to travel to their target—which is sometimes longer than I expect already—it seems to take even longer to travel back. I'm talking where the site can be a day or two away and it takes the squads weeks to return. (This is something I've actually witnessed in mission reports.) I've never been able to find any info on why this is.

What I can tell for sure is that this has nothing to do with livestock. If I tell the dwarves to only loot important treasures but nothing else, and not take livestock, they still take a long time to come back. This also seems to happen more as a fortress matures.

Does anyone have insight on why this happens, and if so what might be done about it? I love sending out raids but I hate that they take forever when they're not supposed to.

[Mobbstar]

I don't know, but here are some ideas and how to test them:

• Encumbrance - Instruct them to not loot anything and see if the return becomes faster
• Terrain - Check if travelling across/into different biomes yields different times, or conversely if travelling the same biome can yield different times
• Roads - Armies don't generally use them, but maybe they affect the calculations anyways
• Squad size - Compare the times of tiny parties to larger armies
• Slowest member - Overlaps with "squad size", assemble equally sized squads with one having agile unencumbered dwarves and the other clumsy slow dwarves

[Lummox JR]

Encumbrance makes no difference, since as I mentioned I instruct the dwarves to only take important treasures and most of the time they return empty-handed.

It can't be the squad size because I've seen this happen with 10 dwarves or 80.

If terrain/roads were the issue, it should be just as frequent to see slower journeys to a site as on the way back, depending on the site. (Also, I should point out this behavior of longer return journeys can occur on routes that were used in the past with no trouble.)

It can't be a matter of the slowest member, because their impact on travel time should be felt equally both ways. In most cases the dwarves return without injury, so it's not that they sustained injuries in battle that would impact travel time, either. I've given this idea some thought before but the asymmetrical travel time makes this can't be the case.