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[mardouille]

I'm currently under siege by 50 undead.

I know how to kill them using menacing spikes on repeat but I want to kill them with my military. I have one squad who is legendary and they kill a few before going down.


Should I train a mace squad?

Also, I managed to capture a necromancer but I don't want to kill him, since I want him to siege me later. If I kill all the undead and release him, is he going to flee?

[Detros]

Also, I managed to capture a necromancer but I don't want to kill him, since I want him to siege me later. If I kill all the undead and release him, is he going to flee?

I guess building his cage in far end of your map, linking it to lever, building walls with roof around that cage but leaving a corridor to map edge should raise chances of him fleeing once you release him. If you want to be sure he won't immediately go for your fort again don't leave him any other path then to map edge. This should be doable with bridges.

[pisskop]

Was he invisible when you caught him?

[mardouille]

No, he was not hidden.

He appeared in plain sight side by side with undead.

Does this change anything?

[pisskop]

Necromancer come in 2 forms, ambush and siege.


Siege necromancers hang out in plain sight, arriving with the siege and taking most of the siege with them should they get bored or feel threatened.

Ambush necros will sneak around the map, reanimating body/parts.  There can only be so many (ambush) necros at a time, evidenced on my public fort where I locked them into various tombs and ambush necros stopped spawning.  When I released a wave of zombies, the ambushers presumably got out, and new ambushes started appearing.

[PatrikLundell]

Divide and conquer, i.e. separate a few of the undead using bridges, send your fighters to do their thing, pull your forces back, cut off a new batch, rinse and repeat. You can also use cage traps and then release them to fight them (e.g. by pitting them to a room where your forces will use them for training). With this scenario you can also strip them of their gear first. Beware that pittees sometimes get lose (haven't found any logic to it), so you may want your melee fighter present (at the top) while pitting.
Cutting off the view of the undead from the necro (with your drawbridges) should also block it from reanimating the bodies (and their parts), but it should be possible for them to reanimate while you open up again, unless you clear out the bodies first.

[Niddhoger]

Should I train a mace squad?

The whole point of having mace-dorfs is splattering undead! Other weapons rely on piercing damage (organ failure) or slashing damage that causes loss of limbs.  Now, while cutting a zombie apart makes it a little less threatening , it just won't have the same effect.  Zombies are immune to pain, have no need for organs, and won't bleed out.  Worse, those chopped off bits can return if in an evil biome/necromancer is present.  Thus, the best way for dealing with undead is to mangle their corpses to the point that they can't reanimate... aka mace-dorfs. 

Also, undead have double/triple physical attributes and keep the skills they had when alive.  So long as the undead retain their equipment (ala Tower siege), they are a significant threat.  I wouldn't send 10 mace-dorfs against 20 undead yet alone 50.  As someone else stated, use a series of "airlocks" via drawbridges to only fight a handful at a time.  All it takes is one bad roll in combat (or a really lucky hit on the zombie's end) to cripple/kill one of your legendary dorfs.  I"m not saying don't use them, I'm just saying be smarter about it than throwing 10 dorfs against 50 zombies.  Divide and conquer!

[NonconsensualSurgery]

Silver warhammers > maces

Fighting undead in current version = OMGWTFBBQ

It is possible to set up a training arena using a captured necromancer and a piece of horse hair or other nonthreatening bodypart.

[mardouille]

Thanks for the tips everyone!

I decided to use a bunch of weapon traps with pits to make them dodge into it.

First mistake I made: not using bridge or door: mechanics went and got promptly killed by undead in the pit.

Second mistake: undead can climb out from my 1z pit.

Third mistake: I made a shooting range with the pit by stationing my marksdwarf using carved walls fortification. Now I get a bunch of cancelation spam for cleaning them.
I will fix this eventually with a pit to remove access to those messy and bloody fortification.

I still have a 20 undead in my pit, and have started making cage traps to move them deeper. They will make a perfect shooting range and will fight the HFS once I have enough of them.

Does caging undead remove the siege?

What needs to be done to remove the siege tag without killing too much undead?

[PatrikLundell]

Caging, as will killing and fleeing (when they're off the map) will remove the siege tag.

Another mistake you made was not to use civilian alert burrows, or your engineers wouldn't have tried to remove the cages. If you have big sieges you may have to make several passes of the enemies to cage them all. When the enemies arrive, I activate a civilian alert (or wait a while if safe). The associated burrows excludes the traps. When the enemies have filed in in suitable numbers I close the draw bridge to that entrance to get them to go to another one, and once all enemies in the chopped off bite are safely caged (or mopped up by the militia) I extend the burrows to allow the civvies to haul off the catch, remove (some) bodies, and reload the cages. At some stage the other entrance is "full" and needs to be closed, but when the first one has been cleaned sufficiently, I reduce the burrows again and reopen for business for a new wave, often then extending the burrows to clean up the other entrance.

[mardouille]

You're right about burrows, I should have used it.

I've finished caging my undead and it removed the siege tag.

Something funny is that while the undead were going into my cage tunnel, one of them decided to climb out of the pit and went outside. He then proceeded to flee slowly so I sent my soldiers and he managed to flee the map while my soldiers were puking outside. When the order to kill the zombie got canceled, they all became normal civilians for a few sec... So they were outside, nude and still nauseous. I don't get why they became civilians because they are scheduled to train all the time.

[PatrikLundell]

When militia are removed from duty (kill orders or station orders, and probably some others I don't use), they revert to civilian, and then revert back to military again after a while if they're supposed to train.
The nakedness would follow if they are set to switch between civilian and military clothing, but yes, cave adaptation is dangerous to the militia.

[Verjigorm]

This is why I always build a tower on the surface, so my barracks is above ground and my soldiers are not cave-adapted.   No Voms for us!

[Niddhoger]

Silver warhammers > maces

Under normal circumstances, yes.  However, the great lethality of warhammers is due to their small contact size which allows them to masquerade as a piercing weapon.  All those delicious insta-kills with your warhammer are due to the hammer crushing the skull and destroying the brain... which is futile since zombies are immune to organ damage.  What does work with a zombie, though, is breaking every bone in its body and puling all of its muscles.  Its the one thing maces are great for- take out zombies and making sure they don't get back up.