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[UncleTumble]

I play DF on a middle-aged laptop. I had to abandon my last fortress because it was a little too much for my system: at about 120 dwarves, every time the goblins seiged, my system would slow to a crawl and freeze.

I'm planning on doing a Windows re-install, which is sorely overdue, that should improve performance a bit. What other performance tweaks would you recommend making to improve gameplay on a slower machine?

Kind of weird asking this question for a Rogue-like game   It never ceases to amaze me how much is under DF's "hood."

[Stromko]

Turning music off in the configuration settings, as well as weather and temperature, might help a little. You can also set a maximum dwarf population, I believe that one hundred dwarves is enough to unlock all features.

Also try having few to no animals in your fortress, maybe just war dogs and a couple cats. Animals can easily hit populations in the low hundreds in just a few seasons, and they like to run back and forth between well-rooms and statue-gardens, wasting valuable CPU time on their path-finding.

Flow calculation is exceedingly CPU intensive from what I can tell, my system always goes to a crawl while I'm flooding an area. Going light on canals, floodgates, moats, etc might help manage lag.

I'm a bit surprised that sieges are causing such dramatically higher lag, but I've only seen sieges of a dozen or so goblins so I suppose I haven't seen the worst of it.

Personally I also try to save my game every 30 minutes and make a backup of the save folder every time. I drag the old backups into a different folder to make room, so that the newest backup of region1 and region1.sav  always pastes into a clean slate. I clear the way because I've heard that overwriting the save files can cause problems, and a glitchy backup would be of no use.

[UncleTumble]

quote:Originally posted by Stromko:
<STRONG>
Flow calculation is exceedingly CPU intensive from what I can tell, my system always goes to a crawl while I'm flooding an area. Going light on canals, floodgates, moats, etc might help manage lag.
</STRONG>

Thanks for the help! Reading the above, I think I understand now why sieges are causing my machine to have a nervous breakdown. I was using a magma-flood defense, which I activated at the start of every siege. Come to think of it, this definitely caused the problem.

I am going to go for a simplified magma system now -- I was using a lot of floodgates, channels and moats in my last one, but this time I'll dumb it down -- and try turning off some of the options as you suggested. Hopefully when I do that Windows re-install my system will run more smoothly.

Of course, getting better hardware is the simplest solution, so one day when I can spare the cash...