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[Plutocrat]

Like the title suggests how many z levels down/up can bolts be fired. Further do arrows/blowdarts behave differently in this regard? Siege engine ammo I think is harmless if they cross z levels, am I correct?

Specifically how tall can a guard tower be built overlooking a flatland to maximize range and defensability and what else can I do to improve ranged attacks.

[i2amroy]

As far as I know there is no limit to how many z-levels a fired bolt/arrow/dart can go through. There are a few things to keep in mind however, in that the farther away a target is the less accurate any shots are going to be, the taller your tower is the larger your minimum range (the point where the floor gets in the road of shots) is going to be, and the final thing is that there will eventually come a point where your dwarves no longer recognize the enemies as dangerous because they are so far away from them. Personally I tend to make towers 2 z-levels, maybe three or four at max and no more then that.

As for siege ammo, siege engines will only fire at targets on their same z-level, so they are worthless unless you place them on the ground level for your targets.

[Plutocrat]

In this particular circumstance I'm using a stockpile of a stupid amount of arrows, so I would like to maximize engagement range so my defenders start firing as soon as possible/ engage wild animals for experience while on station duty. Your advice about inaccuracy would have struck a cord I'm sure if I was using steel or silver bolts.

Also can towers shoot directly down as in a murder hole or is firing at an arc? My diagram demonstrates.

///////////xxxx
/////////..IIIIII
////////...IIIIII
///////....IIIIII
//////.....IIIIII

Looking from ground level

Legend:
I - Tower wall
x - Fortification/Archer
/ - Engagement area
. - Safe zone

[MonkeyHead]

As you assume, there is a shadow zone beneath firing points. Note however that DF acts different to RL - the maximum range for a crossbow is around 15 tiles in any direction. Going up one Z level reduces horizontal range by 1 - still a total of 15 tiles. So, a tower of say 6 Z levels would only have a range of about 9 tiles, most of which would be in the safe shadow. As a result,  fortified and roofed foxholes with a dry moat of 2 tiles (so you can keep enemies away from the fortifications) work better.

[Plutocrat]

Okay thanks for your help with that. I was curious too because the range of noise is calculated not as an effective travel range but an area of noise with an effective range of (X * Y * Z), so the very corner 15 East 15 South 15 Down would still be in range of the noise.

[Funk]

you cant shoot directly up the ammo will fall back down.
no you can shoot by murder hole.

[MonkeyHead]

Try using grates/horizontal bars for marksdwarves to stand on. Dont know if this would allow downwards firing at slight angles. Warning - grates and bars provide no protection against incoming fire.