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[Ruttiger]

I'm still pretty new to Dwarf Fortress, and for the first time today I was ambushed by goblins.  Now, my only squad was asleep and I lost a couple of good dwarves before they woke up.  So of course, I make a second squad as soon as a new group of immigrants show up.  Now, this works for a little while, a few little groups show up, and get slaughtered with minimal injuries on my side (I love crossbows), but suddenly two groups show up at once and slaughter an entire squad.   Then, a third group shows.  A group of marksmen. I lost more than 10 dwarves to them, we didn't kill a single one either.  If they hadn't simply passed by they would've killed everyone.  

Now I want to be prepared.  I built a wall around my surface entrances.  It'll have two floors (I'm right next to a hill so I want one entrance leading out there, and one on the ground floor).  I dug a pit which I'm going to place a retracting bridge over, and on the second floor another bridge the leads to the hill.  

Now with the siege engines, I want to place a ballista at each of the two entrances.  The wiki article suggested it's hard to get enemies in the sights of a ballista, so I figure placing them at the two choke points are going to be the most likely means of getting them to actually hit enemies.  This may be a bad idea, it might get my dwarves killed for all I know.  On the second floor, I want to place a Catapult on each corner, but this would be useless if Catapults cannot aim across the Z axis, so I want to be sure I'm not going to be wasting my time.  Also, I've placed fortifications every few spaces on the first floor, and I'll be placing them all over the place on the second.  I'm not sure if this is smart, should I have very few of them or should I forgo walls in favor of fortifications?

[Derakon]

Catapults can't shoot through z-axis changes, no. Also, siege weapons should be far back from their targets, because otherwise the siege operators, who are civilians, will run away from their targets.

Honestly you'll get better results by just training your soldiers. Give them shields and armor and tell them to wrestle in the barracks - they'll train shield use, wrestling (a useful fallback attack), and armor use. Shields are important since they're how you block attacks (including ranged ones). Then once they're good wrestlers, hand them crossbows and point them at an archery target. Be certain you have plenty of bone bolts.

[Crushy]

Agreed. Siege sucks. Majorly. The operators either don't come, come and miss or SHOOT A FREAKING SOLDIER WHO WOULDN'T STAY PUT ALONG WITH 2 PANTS-LOVING CIVILIANS.

[I3erent]

Hate the way the projectile wanders slowly to its target too....

[Tamren]

Siege weapons are extremely powerful but you have to set them up just right and get masterpiece parts and legendary gunners.

[Crushy]

quote:Siege weapons are extremely powerful but you have to set them up just right and get masterpiece parts and legendary gunners.

They'll just get lunch during the siege.

[ March 21, 2008: Message edited by: Crushy ]

[ March 21, 2008: Message edited by: Crushy ]

[jester]

A ballista looking down a corridor 3 wide and fairly long can work quite well, Ive had 2 kills a a wound from one shot.  I still havent found a good catapult setup.  they are good for training though

[Gaulgath]

There is a bug where having very highly skilled siege operators will make the aim even worse.

[Untelligent]

Yeah, but after you train them for awhile, they start to get stats rather quickly, making catapults good for training soldiers. I have three ultra-mighty, perfectly agile, superdwarvely tough siege operators who did nothing but shoot at a wall for the past 2-3 years.

[Tamren]

quote:Originally posted by Crushy:
<STRONG>They'll just get lunch during the siege.</STRONG>

Thats only a problem if you don't plan ahead.

I put lunch right beside the ammo stockpile behind the balista. And I also lock him in.

[Dasqoot]

^ROFL^ Good idea.

The only fort where I invested massively into siege weapons had something like 12 siege engineers, 20 training catapults, 15 ballistas staggered at chokepoints and protected by water and fortifications. During the siege I got lucky and all 6 of my forward facing ballista operators weren't sober and were on the job. I killed probably 20 goblins in the first 5 shots. Then they all ran and my 28 man marksdwarf team killed the other ten without blinking.

So 12 guys spent 5 years training and got maybe 1 or 2 kills apiece, one time. Siege weapons need massive love imo, they just require a pretty specific and uncreative design.

Z-level firing would make these things way more fun. I would probably make 1 million catapults, rome: total war style, in the middle of my base.