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[Zackanian]

So, the dead walk, i get ready, some 70 corpses show up with a necromancer. With only ten (mostly) legendary military dwarfs i decided to let them come to me through my traps first.

I was not accounting for them to just... walk straight into the river instead. In a small area at the edge, it's constantly 5-6 levels of water as it drains. For some reason, the undead army + necromancer has decided that those five tiles (and some surrounding water tiles) are their new favourite tiles. They will not move away from the water, and the few that haven't gotten in is sticking within some twenty tiles of their bathing master. 3 Zombies have so far attacked my fort, two of them busy killing a straggler (For some reason forbidding the corpse he was carrying did nothing, and neither did it for his luckier compatriot who was only carrying an iron bolt) and the last entering my trap chamber, and getting hit so hard by a mace that his corpse disappeared entirely, leaving only his clothes behind.

That corpse was lucky it got raptured, cause unlike them i'm still stuck in this situation. My game is running kinda slow already (250 years of history seemed like a good idea at the time. A decision i regret) and adding 70 corpses has the game running at a crawl. Needless to say, i need to get rid of the bastards. But ten dwarfs against 70 is.. not good odds. Has anybody had a problem like this before?

[delphonso]

Pathing to the draining edge of a river is pretty common. It can also happen that a siege leader can get a bit stuck in the water. Since they're undead, they won't be drowning and might hang out there for a while.

Sending a squad to the region may be enough to motivate them to run out of the river toward your dwarves.

Otherwise DFHack certainly has some commands for killing characters, if you just want to problem fix that way. After they're gone, you may want to build a bridge over the river to avoid this (or dwarves/diplomats taking the same route)

[Schmaven]

If they're really intent on not leaving any time soon, you could set up ballistas and take them out that way.  It may take some time to land a hit if you don't have any trained ballista operators, but a skilled siege operator can send a ballista arrow many screens away with just 1 or 2 tiles wide of a shot pattern.

[anewaname]

You could also help them exit the river by redirecting the river into the caverns. Do almost all of the digging without exposing your dwarfs to the surface and install a water-control lever so you can get your river back afterwords, then dig the last bit so the water floods down.

[Zackanian]

Pathing to the draining edge of a river is pretty common.

Damn. Well, guess i'll have to look out for that in the future :/

If they're really intent on not leaving any time soon, you could set up ballistas and take them out that way.

Oh right, Ballistas! Good idea.

You could also help them exit the river by redirecting the river into the caverns.

Well, it would certainly be effective,  but with the amount of slowdown i have it would take a very long time.

Either way, i think i'm sending in my military. I do love this fort (even if i never got to do what i was trying to do in the first place) but i really need to play in a younger/smaller world anyway, so... might as well go out with a bang! Who knows, got full steel armour so maybe they'll make it? As long as they don't step into the river that is...

[delphonso]

World size, in my experience, mostly just impacts saving/loading times. Your site size and population does far more. Over in Smallhands, we did a 2x1 tile embark and it has taken active effort to ruin the FPS of that place (though, we did achieve it)

Rivers/flowing liquids slow things down, as well as having a lot of animals/dwarves. Some of the fun is having a lot of dwarves, so you tend to sacrifice crazy constructions or animals in order to keep things going smoothly.

[Zackanian]

Huh, that's interesting. What impact does age have then?

[delphonso]

Age of the world increases the number of historical figures and events, which the game seems to handle pretty well. All of that is read and written on save and load, and the game checks who has died of old age every time you press "start playing" (and you see the calendar work through 2 weeks before creating an adventurer or choosing where to embark a fortress). Obviously, the more historical figures you have, the longer that takes.

My current world started in year 5, only, so that takes such little time I can't even read the month before it's gone, but in fortress mode I don't notice a big difference between that world and a world that is, say, 500 years old. There might be a bit more work in the background, because more people are interested in more artifacts, etc.

Age of the site (the fortress you've been playing) effects FPS only in how many dwarves there are and junk there is lying around. DFHack has some commands to take care of that for you, or, if you're like me, garbage management becomes one of the many systems you set up in the fort. collecting all those goblin bits from outside does help, as long as you obliterate them with a bridge/magma.

[Zackanian]

I see. also, i just remembered that i decided to play with more maximum sites. Don't think that is negatively impacting my fps, but it does explain why i am getting absolutely bombarded by bards... And also why my tiny tavern is always full. And having just taken a look on the framerate page on the wiki it seems like a lot of collisions cause a lot of pathfinding, with cause lag...

Hm. Whoops.

[delphonso]

I tend to go lighter on sites just to make world gen faster, but it shows in my taverns which are perpetually empty... It's all a balancing act. Having a bunch of bards and adventurers hanging around will impact FPS, for sure. The less bodies (living, dead, or both) on the map, the faster it should run.

[Zackanian]

Yeah, i usually have some fifty guests around at any one time... Definitely leaving at default next time.

[delphonso]

So, what a lot of us tend to do is turn our FPS efforts into a story. You could start capturing bards, or turn the taverns to 'citizens only' (in the 'l'ocations menu), go a bit more reclusive and start turning away from the outside world. Or just have a good old-fashioned bloodbath in the tavern...maybe release a caged undead in there! It's your world to ruin!

[anewaname]

I would elaborate what delphonso said, "Rivers/flowing liquids slow things down, as well as having a lot of animals/dwarves" and say that units moving through flowing water exponentially burn FPS because the units get into a constant loop of get-knocked-prone-by-water, stand-up-and-repath, then get-knocked-over again. A dozen untiring-undead trying to path out of this sort of water trap can cut your FPS in half.

They will be stuck in that water-trap until you either reduce the water or dfhack-vaporize them. Once the units are gone, build a 3 to 5 wide bridge over the river and it will never be a problem again (new invaders/migrants will use the bridge instead of the river-exit).

[Garfunkel]

Wouldn't the water push them out of the map at some point? Or is that impossible.

[Zackanian]

Well, it never happened to me so i'm guessing not