Given that I use ballistas and catapults as long-range weapons to take potshots at incoming enemies as they advance across open land (that, and that sadly there's no "Soldiers and siege operators can go outside" option), it's not often that I actually kill stuff with them. But today, I finally managed to do some damage. Nothing major, but enough to satisfy me given that I usually end up killing 0 of the green little bastards.
This map below shows the enemy spawn areas (red crosses) and advances (red arrows), as well as the trajectories of my ballista bolts (orange lines - the catapults and ballistas themselves are marked as orange dots). It also shows with bright yellow crosses where goblins took hits.
First I fired the southern ballista, chopping the leg off of an advancing goblin. Later in the battle, when I had driven back the two squads in the south and was able to set the readiness level to "Dwarves can go outdoors", I eventually got my siege engines manned again and ordered four ballistas to fire at the two squads that stood there huddling together by the bridge, hoping by some miracle that I would be dumb enough to lower it for them. The ballista at the other side of the river had taken a long-range shot already and missed, but the one to the left of the invaders hit two of them and killed them instantly. Then the two to the south opened fire, and one of them killed a third goblin (the other one engraved a nice Ballista arrow-point-shaped hole in the ballista-and-archr tower, but let's not talk about that).
I also managed to seize (I tried to buy them, but I must have accidentally marked something made of wood for sale, and the the pointy-eared snobs didn't like that) a fox, wolf, and
giant jaguar from the Elven caravan
! Dunno quite know what to do with them - I've always wanted a tame fox, so I guess I'll promote that one as a pet, but the wolf and jaguar I'll have to find some military use for. I'll let them wander about for now, when the season change comes about I'll probably put them on leashes so they don't get killed by any goblin attacks.
Besides the fact that the siege reduced my population from 85 or so to 78 (previous siege dropped it from 109 to 87), and that a battery of catapults and ballistas have far more potential than 3 kills and one maiming, it was a
nice outcome.
As an aside... watching the map with its arrows and crosses and fortifications makes me long for an American Frontier total conversion, complete with cannon, musketeers manning the walls, and hordes of Indians and rival nations' armed forces trying to take your scalps and riches.
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Topic: Finally scored some decent long-range siege engine kills! (Read 657 times)