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[EvilBob22]

Not the randomly generated creatures like titans and forgotten beasts.  You can tame dragons and rocs though.  Careful if you tame dragons, the fire they breathe can be worse to your own dwarfs than the enemy.

[wierd]

That's why you install them in fortification slit pillboxes.

Dragons don't eat, and don't die of old age, so just entomb them inside a 1x1 room with fortification slit walls, and a roof.

The idea there is to account for the splash damage area, and space/position the pillboxes for maximal overlap, but far away from areas VIPs and dwarves will be. That way the dragon fire won't destroy bridges and the like.

[Tevish Szat]

Traps: Your best choice for weapon traps is probably 10x Serrated Green Glass Disc with the best mechanism you can find.  Forcing invaders to walk a trail of those grinds most sieges to a fine, red-and-cyan mist.  Still that's a LOT of discs if you want to really just clear sieges with the trap hall: 500 or so.  Even with magma glass furnaces and sand in the embark, that can take an awfully long time to manafacture and install

Siege Engines: Ballistas are the only really effective ones, but even a wooden ballista bolt can slaughter.  Still, they have a narrow firing arc, are resource intensive to build (on wood no less), and the operators are civilians and will spook.  A ballista defense can be effective, but is more of a challenge than a strategy.

Some other tricks
Create a cage trap at your entrance.  Trigger a cat/puppy-splosion.  Assign all pets to the cage.  Tie the cage to a nearby enemy-only pressure plate for automatic release or a lever for your choice of setting it off.  When the siege approaches the cage, pull the lever (or let them walk on the plate) and watch potentially hundreds of domestic animals swarm and shred the goblin menace.  The more dangerous the animals you stuff in the cage, the better: cats are worth very little, dogs are somewhat effective, and the lovely monstrosities that the elves bring you or that you can tame on a savage map are the best: a cage bomb of grizzly bears is powerful, if not as awe-inspiring to witness as the larger numbers of weaker pets.  It may not break the siege, but it's hilarious.

[edgefigaro]

Sieges happen after ambushes. Ambush happens. Kill goblins. Collect goblinite. Put goblinite into weapon traps. Build some cage traps. Siege happens. Weapontraps kill goblins, collect goblinite. Cage traps capture goblins. Collect goblinite. Build more weapon traps. More weapontraps --> more dead goblins --> more goblinite --> more weapontraps.

Or make glass serrated disks and slaughter everything.

If you are having trouble with sieges, build more traps. Once you discover how irrelevant traps make goblins, you will want to move to a different tactic.

[wierd]

the problem with traps are the !!fun!! Activities that goblins get up to when Trap Avoiders, like Kobold thieves, show up at the same time.

[Burnup]

One of my particularly favorite things to do in DF is to have a perfectly scheduled military. I usually have all dwarves in the military (except for a core skeleton crew of eight) And have a series of alerts that swivel my military into action. I also usually have a different alert for every direction the enemy might come. I have alerts from 0 people on duty to all ppl on duty and many stages inbetween.

Normal alert - each squad: 1/3rd train 1/3rd patrol 1/3rd civilian, with only 1/3rd of squad ever being on duty.
Medium alert - each squad: 1/3rd train 1/3rd patrol 1/3rd civilian, with only half of squad ever being on duty.
High alert - each squad: 1/3rd train 1/3rd patrol 1/3rd civilian, with only two members of squad ever being off duty.
High North alert - Northern walls/towers/choke points
High West alert - Western walls/towers/choke points
High South alert - Southern walls/towers/choke points
High East alert - Eastern walls/towers/choke points
All Hands On Deck alert - Everyone, at all times.
Fallback1 alert - First choke falls!
Fallback2 alert - Second choke falls!
Fallback3 alert - Third choke falls!

(Can also be Fallback1 North, Fallback1 West, Fallback1 South, Fallback1 East, etc..)

Civi1 alert - First of the civilian burrows (stay underground!)
Civi2 alert - second of the civilian burrows (Stay out of top two stories!)
Civi3 alert - third of the civilian burrows (Get near the "Final Bastion"!)
Haven Alert - I usually create a way of sectioning off food industry / living quarters into a "Final Bastion" This alert drops all defenses, except for the drawbridges that need to close for the "Final Bastion" to be sectioned off.



You may ask "how do you keep up industries?"
A lot of scheduling.
because of each squad having civi duties 1/3rd of their year. between all the squads cycling throughout the year, Every month is a new "main" industry. The correct industry becoming the "main" Almost immediately when you begin thinking you need it.

MONTH       Squad1       Squad2         Squad3
1                Train!          Patrol!          Civilian!
2                Civilian!        Train!          Patrol!
3                Patrol!         Civilian!         Train!
4               Train!          Patrol!          Civilian!
5                Civilian!        Train!          Patrol!
6               Patrol!         Civilian!         Train!
7               Train!          Patrol!          Civilian!
8                Civilian!        Train!          Patrol!
9               Patrol!         Civilian!         Train!
10               Train!          Patrol!          Civilian!
11                Civilian!        Train!          Patrol!
12               Patrol!         Civilian!         Train!

(rigorous trial and error isn't exactly necessary for this. Just have "jobs" be really loose (idle) until you find a need for that person that month [or if you have need of him a different month, then put him in one of the squads that has that month off.]. after a good 2 - 4 in game years everyone should be extremely busy.) (you shouldn't let it get to '0' idle. DON'T GO THERE. But it shouldn't be above 24 idle.[I usually maintain between 4 and 15.])

Ever since I've developed this system and gotten the hang of it, I haven't needed traps at all, I haven't needed danger rooms, nor elaborate defenses, and after I get up to at least 100 dwarves I don't even need gates (except for deadly dust and such..) Infact I have a fort with 250 dwarves, 242 being in the military, whose defensive strategy was built around getting as many people on the surface as possible without cluster %$&@ing. It ended up with 8 different "airlocks" to the surface in strategic positions each with a barracks in it. each barracks having 3 squads. The point was to open all "airlocks" at once. My worst battle losses were 12 deaths ^^ against 10 cave dragons, 10 trolls, 20 goblin spearmen, 10 goblin macemen and 10 goblin archers. (rough estimate) I believe there were 4 enemy leaders.

(because of the airlock positioning I was able to flank almost every enemy grouping effectively, at the correct times.)

[The_Kakaze]

I like to start a pair of Axedwarfs training at the very beginning of a new embark.  I just put a few points in fighter, axedwarf, shield, and armor user to start them, but they'll get legendary surprisingly quickly.  They'll skill from the enormous numbers of kobolds and wild animals that try to get in if they are in the first room after your entrance.  Give em nice bed rooms and they'll be happy to do it.  Just get em some armor as fast as you can.

Also I like to do a spiraling ramp 4 wide down from the surface to the main depot.  If you run traps along the inside wall, it'll catch most of the gobbos as their pathing will try to follow the shortest route in to your fortress.  Combine that with a fortification along the outside wall and you've got yourself a goblin death trap.  I haven't even had to button the front door and I'm in my ninth year on my current fort.

Oh, and a civilian alert that gets everyone inside is a good idea.  Burrows are pain in an expanding fortress, but they'll save you a lot of filled coffins.

[Mushroo]

1. Build your fortress with defense in mind (walls, moats, fortifications, drawbridges, etc.)

2. Train your military properly. Read the wiki or one of the 1,001 threads here on the forums about this topic. Danger rooms are not necessary.

3. Use military alerts to put your civilians indoors during the "late" month of each season, because that's when the sieges usually come.

4. There is no 4. But you can use traps or magma or whatever if you really like.

My most defensively successful fort has, as its main entrance, a fortified archer tower in the middle of the map. A 3-tile wide walkway spirals in to the main entrance. Anything approaching gets completely riddled with arrows from the archers, or dodges them and splatters on the ground below. Then I have a 1 tile wide walkway lined with traps that short-cuts the spiral and is the shortest path to the front gate. The goblin AI is dumb, so it always takes the shortest path, straight through the traps. Anything that gets past the archers and traps gets slaughtered by the squad of 2 legendary melee dwarfs inside the winding main corridor between the entrance and the trade depot.

Oh, and one last tip, that new players often overlook: Don't put your staircase down to the caverns inside the "safe" area of your fort! Put the entrance to the cavern-stairs outside your main defenses. Then any nasties coming up from the caverns are treated to the same welcome as goblin sieges. Last thing you want is cavern creatures coming up the stairs into your civilian dining room!

[Broken]

Send scouts to check for traps and guards. Never enter a supiciously open corridor. Be the last to charge to combat. if you see
enemies fully covered in shiny metal(especially the blue one), throw your weapons and run. It's the only way to come back
home in one piece.

[Starver]

I tend to want to make killing-zones with archer-overlooks.  Lined with fortifications to bother protect against retaliatory shots (not always terribly helpful against goblin bowmasters, admittedly), to prevent flyers (with a suitable roof, of course) from getting up there and as a handy 'safety-railing' to prevent anyone who does get injured (or, for some reason, finds themselves in hand-to-hand combat up there) from dodging off the edge.

For example, I might have set up my depot as follows..


 
 Ground                                        Z+1
 Level                                     (grey is tops of walls from below, if that
                                            shows nicely differently in your forum colours)
                                           HHHHHHHHHHH
#########                                  H+++++++++H
#       #                                  H+HHHHHHH+H
# DDDDD #                                  H+H     H+HHH
# DDDDD ####                               H+H     H++++
# DDDDD |  < - depot and door access       H+H     H++++ => access from inside
# DDDDD ####                               H+H     H++++
# DDDDD #                                  H+H     H+HHH
#       #                                  H+HHHHHHH+H
###|=|###  < - raisable bridge barrier     H+++++++++H
  #   #                                    HHH+HHH+HHH
  #   #                                      H+H H+H
  #   #                                      H+H H+H
 /  /  /   < - for an abitrary distance      /  /  /
  #   #                                      H+H H+H
  #   #                                      H+H H+H
  #   #                                      H+HHH+H
  #|=|#    < - outer bridge barrier          H+++++H
                                             HHHHHHH


Z+2 is floored over as a roof (assuming not already subterranean).

With a set-up like this, I can send archers around aim down at any bit of the bottom, as necessary.  With a long-ish entry tunnel (with or without animals stationed above to actually alert me to covert incursions, which is obviously not the case for sieges) I prefer to lock down the attacking forces in-between the outer and inner lock (but, if nothing else, before they make their way past the depot, and any traders who are there[1][2]), then I can pick them off.  If I have any problems with this it's usually getting enough ammo picked up (there's always some archers standing around with nothing left in their quivers).


Not shown are the (occasionally added) side-entrances to the killing-zones that I can open up at leisure to send a pre-stationed set of melee-dwarfs (or battle-hungry and now ammo-less bowdwarfs) to wade in for hand-to-hand.


Of course, this needs preparation.  Or half-preparation with an eye to completing the rest as time progresses.  More than once I've had to do clever things to prevent dwarfs building some of the defences on top of some walls from wandering atop other walls which are in hand firing-range of some hostiles...  either trapped or just milling about because I closed off their entry-way.  When its am ambush (i.e. non-siege) attack I have to be careful that I'm not suddenly discovering the second/third unit of sneak-troops while carrying things, precariously atop said walls.

Assuming I've seen all hostiles (or am prepared to react quickly to any that are still to be revealed), I've been known to actually open up another section of wall (with appropriate protection now built behind it; to close down the pathing into the fort from, at will) to draw milling hostiles through in order that I can either get an unfinished layer of protection completed in more safety or recover items/reset the defences (cage traps FTW!).  Still, when things are at that stage of (non-)preparation, flying hostiles are usually the big problem, taking any chink in the armour as licence to just drift over the walls regardless of what land-routes I've specifically closed or opened.


[1] I might modify the design to allow me to open an alternate path or two to allow traders in/out while invaders are heading towards (or trapped within) a different entry-way.  When I do this properly I basically own the territory, and deaths to non-hostiles (my own guys or traders, or immigrants) are left to just those that actually spawn too close to the hostile ones before I've isolated them.

[2] Trader escorts may or may not have their own ideas about attacking...  I do try not to kill traders, or allow them to come to harm, but sometimes they get attacked or their guards rush out into enemies or over closing bridge-walls...