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[Girlinhat]

For ultimate cage reuse, build a gladiator pit, and start stocking it with all the disarmed goblins you can get.  Get some 100 or so in there, and then set 10 armed dwarves.  Open the gate and let spill the goblins.  Watch your soldiers become suddenly legendary.

[Jacob/Lee]

What is this backstab mechanic?

If I'm correct, it's the mechanic where, if a soldier is fighting a creature and another one comes up on his/her side/behind they get an attack where it "attacks from the side/behind" and basically ignores all weapon skill and shield user for whoever is being attacked, sometimes resulting in lethal hits.

[Rez]

Some people have hinted at it, but the easiest way to destroy sieges is using drawbridges.

My forts tended to have long trap hallways, so the switch to my new technique was fairly organic.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Create 2 paths to enter your fort. 

One should be very short, so you can make moving resources in and out of the fort reasonable.  The only requirement of this path is that you have a way to block it so things can't path through it or destroy the blockage.

The long entrance is going to be excavated >4 z levels deep.  I like 5 because when invaders fall 5 z's they tend to just shatter their leg bones.  Spikes at the bottom optional, mechanisms to allow reciprocating spikes optional.  If you don't put weapons at the bottom of the pit, make sure it's deep enough to kill enemies on impact.  Place retracting bridges over the hallway and hook them up to a lever.

When you see a siege or ambush method, activate a burrow where everyone (no need for any military dwarves if done right) can huddle/watch goblins explode.  Wait till everyone is secure, then close your short path.  Watch the long path and when the invaders walk on it, trip the switch.  Rinse, repeat till all the invaders are dead or they run away.

My entrance usually combines the two entrances I talked about.  I have a hallway in, then I split the death hallway off of it as a U with a pinch at the connection.

If you put an entrance to the bottom of the pit to extract goblinite, remember to secure that entrance before you use the bridges though .  Just lost my last game to a tantrum spiral after I dropped a bunch of tigermen onto my looters.  Successfully took out probably 5-6 sieges with >2 groups and several with mounts.  Only potential issue is flying mounts, which can probably be addressed by flooding the death pit as well.

Bonus Points: Use magma to destroy corpses/clothing and drain the magma to an obsidian farm.

[Stuebi]

Hey, just an idea but maybe you will like it:

I recommend Genesis Mod in this case, it has more Civs and Sieges are a bit more frequent, but you have a bunch of Workshops where you can train the Military Skills. For Example a training Dummy can be used to train Weapon Skills, a Hurdle Race can train Dodge and lifting Weights in the Weightsworkshop will train Armor and Shielduser.

Its not as fast as the Danger Room but faster than the vanilla training, because you can control what gets trained. In my current Game i was able to train my Military on a quite good Level. They were able to hold off Sieges nicely, and for bigger Sieges i still have Fortifications and Floors at my Entrance which get Covered by Marksdwarfs. The Sieges feel very realistic in my opinion, the Crossbowdwarfs soften the Waves up and my other Soldiers finish the rest off. The Sheer number of Invaders later on make it harder of course, but still quite doable if you use the Ressources DF offers you to defend your Fort. Siege Weapons for example do nicely, i have the First Drawbridge covered by Ballista, and they take out quite alot of the Goblins or Werewolves i have to deal with.

Also the mod has more Metaltypes, Black Steel and Red Steel for example, which are hard to make but reward you with superior Equipment to hold off Hordes that outnumber you.

Oh and im in no way insulting the Original DF with this one, i like both^^

[Jacob/Lee]

You can also get near indestructible rare dwarf castes named "Steel Dwarves" which are extremely tough and can't get infections. They heal lightning fast, too.

But of course there are a few pitfalls with Genesis, namely 3 new hostile civs, 1 of which can siege as soon as you get 20 dwarves.

[Korva]

I'd really like to see dummies in the game as an alternative training method (and multiple sparring matches per squad). If they were implemented, and if they worked at a decent pace, I'd stop using the danger room. But as it is, I got too pissed off after the 31.12 change to military skill gains. That was before I knew about the "only one sparring match per squad" thing. In my first 31.12 fort, I had a squad practicing for a year, and NONE of them got a single lousy point in anything. Not one. I can't be arsed with that, really.

[Jacob/Lee]

Stripped goblins are a great placeholder for a sparring dummy.

[slothen]

As for crossbow dwarves, I cant get them to train at all. They may shoot a few bolts into a target, but then they go back to "individual training" for a year or so, making them quite useless. Is there a fix?

I'd like to add, what does individual training even do for crossbow dwarfs?  does it even improve the marksdwarf skill?  or the archery skill?

...full of weapon traps, each with a few steel axes attached.

Hopefully you are using the "giant axe blade" from the trap components list, and not regular 'steel battleaxe.'  The latter can work in a pinch if you put several in a single trap, but weapon traps are more effective when made with actual trap component weapons.  Secondly, have your mechanic make a ton of mechanisms and pick the best quality ones for the traps.  The mechanism should ensure the weapon hits, and steel giant axe blades WILL obliterate anything you encounter in a regular siege.

if your military is untrained, its often best to use them to clean up survivors after the siege has been wrecked and dismembered by weapon traps.  A 10-15 long tile hallway 3 wide with (properly set up) weapon traps should be more than enough to wreck early sieges.

[Urist Imiknorris]

Especially if the trap area can be sealed from the outside to let you clean the traps in peace.

[thegoatgod_pan]

I find the cheapest and easiest way to survive sieges early on is a 10(W)x2(L) bridge filling a hallway and wired to a lever. The bridge is literally all width, and fills the hallway totally.   Get someone pulling the lever on repeat and the siege will be wiped from existence--maybe a goblin or two will make it and give your military some risky but doable practice.

[The Dog Delusion]

Especially if the trap area can be sealed from the outside to let you clean the traps in peace.

This is important.

In my most recent fort, I was trying out some new entrance designs, and ended up with a kind of "double-decker" defense plan in which the military would usually intercept enemies before reaching the airlock or the traps. The problem was that there wasn't really a way to "close up shop" for cleaning up the aftermath, and so it was more common than I would have liked that dwarves would get ambushed while hauling away other ambush goods.

[Makigall]

One thing I've found, if you're planning on doing a mix of cage traps and weapon traps you're generally better served by putting cage traps in front or leaving some space between the weapon traps and cages behind them.  When cages directly follow weapon traps I've found myself hauling goblin corpse cages more than anything else. 

The other thing I've done with my latest fort is to have 2 entrances.  The first is where I started and is just some stairs leading down to my farms and then my first living area.  My trade depot is on the surface next to these stairs.  In addition to the bonus of no elf ever setting foot within Tradeaxe, it allows me to have most of my crafting stockpiles withing 20 steps of my depot.  This entire area is walled off, paved over, has a drawbridge moat combination, and is guarded by a 5x3 cage trap field which has caught more raccoons and sasquatches than goblins.  My second entrance is the one I want enemies using.  It also has a moat and drawbridge, if things get bad I can isolate myself.  It has a few weapon traps, and it has a long hallway leading to my fort through my internal barracks where I keep a squad stationed year round.  Each of my courtyards has a tower, these towers are linked by a bridge, this bridge has fortifications on the side and passes just to the west of the siege entrance, which is in a bit of rocky terrain and is clear year round.

All of this amounts to me being able to pull a lever and funnel an entire siege past my crossbow dwarfs, through some traps, and into a couple of squads waiting in buildings in the courtyard.  All of my gates have a drawbridge at the front and then a short walled hallway.  As soon as the first gobbo gets into that hallway I send my melee out of the buildings and in to kill gobbos.  There's advantages to facing the enemy one at a time, and there's also advantages to swarming them with all of your defenders at once.  I generally opt for swarming squads right as their leader explodes in a weapon trap.  But that's mostly because I find it really satisfying to see my dwarfs run down and chop a fleeing goblin to bits.

[brucemo]

I take the game as is, but don't want to have my soldiers get killed.  That's just my quirk.

So I use a lot of traps and try to divide the siege into chunks that I can kill.  I have cage traps backed up by lethal traps, and my goal is to kill crippled enemies with soldiers coated in steel.

I have four butcher shops for the mounts that I don't manage to trap.

I have a cage stockpile with like 20 cages next to my trap hall.

A marksdwarf on top of the fort will turn a lot of attackers into bloody wrecks and may break the whole siege by himself.

You have huge advantages in this game, which are that you can wall off absolutely perfectly, and that invaders will walk through traps.  If you want to play such that you attack their whole military with your whole military, more power to you.  Sometimes it even works.  I had a dwarf leak out into a siege and he was trained pretty well (he was my one military guy from the embark), so he killed five or ten invaders and broke the siege by himself.  But ordinarily, that's a dead dwarf, and I like to avoid that, so traps, gates, cages, haulers, butchers, steel, steel, steel.