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[Dwarfotaur]

I just witnessed, "Beware! The undead have risen!" for the first time (or something similar).

Three necromancers, who seemed to have gone to every civ's graveyard and 'recruited' literally hundreds of undead dwarfs, humans and elves. Not to mention they reanimated my entire refuse stockpile (which only had corpses in as I crafted all the bones/skulls but it was still a lot of random animals).

Anyway, I sent my military out in to a choked corridor in hopes of fighting them one by one... My legendary hammer/dodger/armor user/shield user dwarves (yeah, I used a danger room) didn't even last 20 seconds... They were totally dog piled and had enemies biting nearly every body part simultaneously.

These undead were in huge numbers, very strong and unkillable... I assume to stop it you need to kill/capture the Necromancers but all three of them were just chilling at the edge of the map. The only solution I have in my head is probably to coat the surface in magma or something similar.

[XXSockXX]

Necro attacks can be quite devastating even for experienced players. You should definitely keep you refuse pile out of sight from the outside, either by moving it underground or by walling it in, roofing over and have it accessible only from inside your fort. Traps can help you to capture or kill some enemies and decimate their numbers. Also I'd recommend if the enemy outnumbers you, to raise your main gate and stay inside. Caravan guards might decimate the zombies further and the siege will eventually leave. An early fort is probably going to be overwhelmed otherwise.

[Gavakis]

For me, I use two squads of marksdwarves to blindly shoot into the crowds, hoping you hit a necromancer.
Also, the bolts are wooden, makes no difference to me.

[Loud Whispers]

For me, I separated the hordes into three separate groups, only attacking wherever the necromancers were not. Then I took out the necromancers using marksdwarves stationed in walls and towers dotting the surface. Not much you can do without pre-emptive preparation.

Do not let the corpses outnumber your Dwarves and/or join together into one uber horde. Use clever employ of cave in traps to scatter/smash corpses.
If all else fails, hundreds of cage traps.
Only ever attack necromancers directly if your military outnumbers them 10 to 1.

[Psieye]

It's one of those "if only my siege defence protocol was industrially automated" situations. Necromancers have a maximum range to re-animation so a fall-trap that's longer than that will stop them re-animating the dead. Your corpse pile is a different matter.

[Di]

I've been digging tunnels to their campfires and digging ramps when military arranged there. Still there's a chance that dwarfs will decide to charge nearby corpses instead of necros. And you'll need a couple of weaponmasters to do that anyway.
Also, both zombies and necros will path inside your fort, but unlike z's necromancers will run screaming away from your military even if those are on walls or behind fortifications. Use this to divide them.

[nbp]

You don't want to engage them hand-to-hand, that's for sure.

My current fort has had a bunch of necromancer sieges.  I handled the first few by opening the outer entrance to my cage-trap hallway, letting ten or so zombies get caged, closing the entrance, and then sending in dwarfs to haul off the full cages and put in empties.  The zombies would get dumped in a pit underground, and the traps recycled.  This was tedious, but it works, and as a bonus you can end up with caged necromancers for later use.

Since then, I've generally let the zombies blunder into a fairly automated system I have, whereby they trigger a pressure plate, resulting in the retractable bridge floor opening up, dumping them all into a pit.  I periodically need to knock a zombie off of the pressure plate with a blast of pressurized water, but the system fairly painlessly collects all the zombies into a small, contained space.  Then I can have my marksdwarves train by shooting into the horde.  From time to time I accidentally end up with a necromancer in the pit with the zombies, which makes cleaning them up with marksdwarves pretty implausible.  In that case, I'll flood it with water or magma, either drowning or incinerating the necromancer, and then letting my pump out the extra fluid and kill the remaining zombies with marksdwarves.

[laularukyrumo]

Well. Lesson is, never have a corpse stockpile. (seriously. Anything that can't get butchered in my forts always gets atom-smashed.)

As far as the outside zombie hordes, yeah. Seal up, dig for the caverns, build a gigantic pump stack, and flood the world.

I actually don't know much about minecart SCIENCE but if it's possible to actually flood the world with it, do that instead--probably more resource efficient. (Unless you have glass. In which case, a hundred screw pumps is no consequence.)

The cage-trap hallway is quite useful, too. I recommend setting up 20 or so cage traps in a 1-wide hall, then digging a little further, building a bridge, linking it up, then have the miners expose the tunnel and immediately seal it up. Evacuate everyone, pull the lever, let zombies get caught, pull lever again, atom-smash them, rinse repeat. Cheap wooden cages (or ideally glass) are your friend, since you can just dump the cage to the bridge and obliterate them that way.

[NightlinerSGS]

From time to time I accidentally end up with a necromancer in the pit with the zombies, which makes cleaning them up with marksdwarves pretty implausible.

On the other hand, you just got an infinite live target marksman training room.

[nbp]

From time to time I accidentally end up with a necromancer in the pit with the zombies, which makes cleaning them up with marksdwarves pretty implausible.

On the other hand, you just got an infinite live target marksman training room.

I actually already had a captured necromancer locked up with controllable LOS to the contents of the pit, so that I could use it for just that purpose.  So having a necromancer in the pit itself was superfluous.  It's nice to be able to kill everything in the pit, and then send in dwarves to grab the particularly desirable goblinite, and then reanimate a little later, instead of having it perpetually swarming with zombies.

[Cavgunner]

The zombie horde is killable.  But, I have found that you need 3-4 squads of well-equipped, decently trained dwarves to pull it off with minimal casualties.

Also, I always, always put my refuse pile in a walled-off surface enclosure (typically the same enclosure that contains my main animal pasture).  Necromancers can't reanimate anything that they can't see.

I assume that your fort's surface entrance is sealable with a gate.  If not, that is a major mistake.

[Darnis]

10 tile bridge triggered by a pressure plate before the bridge.

[omg_scout]

Necros are pain in the ass. DAS on repeat is the only good solution I can think of. I had once necro trapped between two squads of 10 trained and armed dorfs each in a 3 tile wide corridor. He just dodged twice in good direction and got away. Armoured dorfs were too slow to catch him with his godlike trained agility. Also corpse baiting - get a forbidden corpse behind a trap somewhere outside and the necro might try to go and animate it, thus getting caught. And then bacon time.

[Silent_Thunder]

Thankfully the only time I had gotten one of these was when I had made a huge megaproject I called the Fire Sprinkler. Essentially I build a ludicriously massive tank suspended above the walled in entrance to my fort (an outside hexagon area maybe 30 tiles across) The tank's walls were nothing but magmasafe floodgates, and I had been slooooooooooowly filling the thing up with magma pumped from below. It just so happens that right when it was full, they necromancers arrived. Naturally I told a few of my favorite nobles to go stand in the center, and once the undead all piled in, Necromancers and all, I pulled the lever.


... It was than that I realized my fort's front doors were NOT infact, magma safe. 

EDIT: Actually, looking back, I realize even if they WERE magma safe, my invention didnt actually have a way to get the massive, for lack of a better word LAKE, of magma out of my entrance area.

[FlavorCat]

Not much you can do without pre-emptive preparation.

This.

Necromancers are a lot easier for me than evil biomes. I seal myself in with a raising bridge, and just wait for the necromancers to leave, occasionally taking pot-shots from inside towers. They'll take the corpses they brought in with them, but the corpses they raise from anything on the map will stay. If it's a small enough attack or the straggler zombies are too tough, I use a system very similar to what nbp uses. You could also set up DASs in your entrance corridor operated by a lever in your meeting hall instead of cage traps if you don't need any items / are worried about reanimation.

Something you could think of doing for corpse abatement is create a retracting bridge over a pit, and designate that bridge as the refuse point. Then once you have everything you want there, retract it and the junk should fall into a deep pit, out of range of the necromancers. Set it up behind a raising bridge and you should have access to it should you accidentally dump something you need. Haven't completed mine yet, so I can't guarantee it works, though.