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[imperium3]

I like the idea of using ballistae but it seems to me that they only work well if you design your fort around them from the outset (in order to have an entrance with the necessary space for a shooting gallery) and that's not a compromise I'm prepared to make.

If only you could put them on towers and have them turn and fire down at enemies.

[Weizen1988]

It works in steel making, you can use digging from beneath a bridge or digging + another dig 1 job elsewhere once the miner has started digging (+ safety water trench right behind miner if they still catch on fire), and as to having magma sources safely on hand, nothing can get up through floor grate or move through a statue without being thrown (true, magma sea has building destroyers, but if you build statue right before a downward ramp they'll be unable to topple it).

(Or if you're content with natural flow, can just use pond zone/bridges to seal up afterwards. Note that natural flow can take months to cross 200 tiles 4+/7 deep.)

Im generally better with pictures than words, but this sounds fairly straight forward, also sounds much less hard than the insane thing I was planning, I was thinking pressurized water, send in a miner to mine the last square into the tunnel (this might kill the miner obviously, I could place a puddle in a small escape hall such that the magma would hit that water and become an obsidian plug, retrieve the miner via stairs or ramp), open the water up just as they finish so it shoots down a tunnel and hits the magma, with the goal of making a obsidian cap inside the magma tube, such that I could mine out a square and stick a pump over the hole to the magma level below that one to access the magma via pump, remove the water system, build a short path for the lava to get pumped through that ends in a bunch of magma workshops, I have a magma pipe (calls itself a volcano, but its just a big circular hole full of lava in the middle of a flat plane), that goes from the surface to the sea, so I could build workshops on every needed level in a cluster around the pipe. I also just noticed you actually posted the worldgen im using I think, sleepervolcanoes or something, I modified it slightly to try and get more necromancer towers and removed the aquifer, one clusterfuck at a time, ill worry about learning to move ponds around and tap magma first, then ill worry about aquifers.

You have a weapon your forgetting. The king of battle, artillery. In my tests ballistae have a steady 200 tile range, and boast the ability of going thru multiple opponents.(and trees,dwarfs,animals) drawback : same z level, no up/down firing.
Train siege operators on the 230 tile range catapult, boasts no hit dwarfs, rids fort of excess rocks. Same z firing. Fairly weak, single opponent hits.
 May take some work to funnel the bad guys, but once funneled the ballistae will mow them down. At ranges over 20 tiles the operators won't even see the enemy die. 

  Goatmaan

I actually have access to blood thorn wood, which supposedly makes for good ballista bolts, if I built a bolt catcher into my hallway to save ammo and those metal arrowhead things, would goblins and such just jump down the hole to the lower level, or will they just try to run down a long weaving hallway getting torn apart by ballista shots, and can you stagger catapults like you can ballista, such that I could get a line of three ballista, backed by 3 catapults, so that anything in my hallway is getting machine gunned by giant logs and boulders by 6 dwarves behind a wall of fortifications 20 or so deep so that invaders cant get close enough to scare them?

I like the idea of using ballistae but it seems to me that they only work well if you design your fort around them from the outset (in order to have an entrance with the necessary space for a shooting gallery) and that's not a compromise I'm prepared to make.

If only you could put them on towers and have them turn and fire down at enemies.

I have plenty of space, and whole top layer of my fort is useless clay, ive got deeper soil layers for farming, but ill place a clay workshop, thats about the only use for it [we're dwarves not hobbits, we live in stone, not mud, (why no halfling species I wonder) besides, I hate building much just below surface, have to constantly patch the holes in the roof as I cut down trees.] I too wish they could fire up or down levels though, but at that point you could cover a whole map with a few towers that could kill most anything by throwing trees and boulders at them all day long.

[Goatmaan]

No idea if ballista bolts can be saved, but masterwork parts supposedly help accuracy, the metal heads didn't seem to have a quality. Got "regular" trees? Train the engineers on ballista/catapult parts, trade away the non masterworks, when they get legendary start making those steel tipped bloodthorn arrows,
I never tried, but don't see a reason catapults couldn't back ballistae, maybe even many rows deep. Got rocks? You'd better have to train all those operaters to legendary.(accuracy/reload time).
Don't forget the prepare to fire command, a dwarf will man (dwarf?) the ballista/catapult continuously (except to/from travel time) but they don't appear to gain skill doing it.
 Some sort of range marker is a good idea, 200+ tiles is hard to eyeball. Colored wall/floor blocks work well.
  You can start firing early, they'll meet in range.

  Goatmaan

[Weizen1988]

No idea if ballista bolts can be saved, but masterwork parts supposedly help accuracy, the metal heads didn't seem to have a quality. Got "regular" trees? Train the engineers on ballista/catapult parts, trade away the non masterworks, when they get legendary start making those steel tipped bloodthorn bolts.
I never tried, but don't see a reason catapults couldn't back ballistae, maybe even many rows deep. Got rocks? You'd better have to train all those operaters to legendary.(accuracy/reload time).
Don't forget the prepare to fire command, a dwarf will man (dwarf?) the ballista/catapult continuously (except to/from travel time) but they don't appear to gain skill doing it.
 Some sort of range marker is a good idea, 200+ tiles is hard to eyeball. Colored wall/floor blocks work well.
  You can start firing early, they'll meet in range.

  Goatmaan

Im digging out what seem to me to be stupidly huge rooms (smallest workshop planned is 31X34 with a 31x31 stockpile and 10 workshops, my tavern should seat roughly 350 dwarves with a large dance floor depending on how those are calculated and some stockpiles for alcohol, instruments, and goblets, and about 30 rooms) I have more stone than I can possibly use, ive got 3 soil layers at the top, followed by basically solid basalt/granite/marble down to magma sea with some smallish caverns. If I can build some kind of thing to catch stones and bolts even better, then I wont be using up materials. As for normal wood, yeah im in the middle of a huge rainforest, got a somewhat irritatingly high number of trees, but with no coal, that will be charcoal, and ill probably be glad to have it later on. Edit: catapults cant fire clay it seems, so there goes that plan. Still got bunch of stone.

[Goatmaan]

You just have to train with stones, unless it changed, siege operator uses both cat/ballista. Save the arrows for combat.
Try using clay as a test, maybe it'll work.
Training close to a wall is a good idea, 230 tiles takes time.
Start chopping those trees quick, can't have too many logs when training engineers 
Superior/masterwork arrows is what you're after they take metal and wood, that's why you just make cat/ballista parts to train them, just wood.

  Goatmaan

[Werdna]

Were ballistae/catapults fixed?  These used to be notorious for doing really underwhelming damage.

Other options have been to give the enemy archers a different, closer target, and to have enemies pass beneath your archers so that they're firing at their backs and if any elite archers pop up they're the closest rather than most distant enemy (behind a meat wall).

I don't think this works exactly.  Archers will select nearest enemy, but they will continue to fire at that enemy once selected, so what will likely happen is that they will latch onto melee invaders streaming past first and ignore the enemy archers.  In order to make what you describe work, you need to constantly reset the archers by disrupting their LoS so they re-select the nearest.  What you described with the doors will work, as will raising/lowering a bridge to block off your line of fortifications, but now the problem becomes getting them to concentrate on their Archers and not other new targets streaming by.

I'd suggest an elbow in the design, such that the melee pass beneath then go round the corner of the elbow removing them from LoS, forcing your archers to reselect nearest.  The enemy archers on the other hand would stop in place to fire on the bait (I use large animals like bulls pastured on the other side of a 4 wide gap - large animals can absorb a lot of ammo before death).

Honestly though, the easiest thing to do is simply have invaders pass by a gapped (non-jumpable) pasture full of animals, and let their archers empty their quivers into the livestock. If you don't want to maintain/replace that much livestock (Elite Archers in particular can make quick work of livestock), put the auto-doors in place to protect a few animals and block bolts.  Since I only care about Elite Archers and let normal archers pass on to get chewed up by my melee, what I do is put the animals behind fortifications, so only Elite enemy archers will stop.   One of my favorite tricks then is to lock a dogpile of war dogs in a room next to where they will stop, and release the dogpile on top of the archers.

[Weizen1988]

You just have to train with stones, unless it changed, siege operator uses both cat/ballista. Save the arrows for combat.
Try using clay as a test, maybe it'll work.
Training close to a wall is a good idea, 230 tiles takes time.
Start chopping those trees quick, can't have too many logs when training engineers 
Superior/masterwork arrows is what you're after they take metal and wood, that's why you just make cat/ballista parts to train them, just wood.

  Goatmaan

So just set up a room big enough for the engines, then a wall and a hole for the ammo to fall down when it hits, and have haulers bring the ammo back up to the stockpiles to be fired again.

Were ballistae/catapults fixed?  These used to be notorious for doing really underwhelming damage.

Other options have been to give the enemy archers a different, closer target, and to have enemies pass beneath your archers so that they're firing at their backs and if any elite archers pop up they're the closest rather than most distant enemy (behind a meat wall).

I don't think this works exactly.  Archers will select nearest enemy, but they will continue to fire at that enemy once selected, so what will likely happen is that they will latch onto melee invaders streaming past first and ignore the enemy archers.  In order to make what you describe work, you need to constantly reset the archers by disrupting their LoS so they re-select the nearest.  What you described with the doors will work, as will raising/lowering a bridge to block off your line of fortifications, but now the problem becomes getting them to concentrate on their Archers and not other new targets streaming by.

I'd suggest an elbow in the design, such that the melee pass beneath then go round the corner of the elbow removing them from LoS, forcing your archers to reselect nearest.  The enemy archers on the other hand would stop in place to fire on the bait (I use large animals like bulls pastured on the other side of a 4 wide gap - large animals can absorb a lot of ammo before death).

Honestly though, the easiest thing to do is simply have invaders pass by a gapped (non-jumpable) pasture full of animals, and let their archers empty their quivers into the livestock. If you don't want to maintain/replace that much livestock (Elite Archers in particular can make quick work of livestock), put the auto-doors in place to protect a few animals and block bolts.  Since I only care about Elite Archers and let normal archers pass on to get chewed up by my melee, what I do is put the animals behind fortifications, so only Elite enemy archers will stop.   One of my favorite tricks then is to lock a dogpile of war dogs in a room next to where they will stop, and release the dogpile on top of the archers.

These are all good ideas, ill find something that breeds in huge numbers fairly quickly (crundles? Will goblins shoot troglodytes? Both end up clogging up my cage traps, and I see no better use for them) and fill pastures with them to soak up ranged ammo, and ill probably just end up throwing these ideas together one after the other, ive got the whole top clay layer of the embark to turn into a nightmare passageway to funnel creatures through if I want. I have no idea if the damage was improved on siege engines, but i figure every bit helps, if they have to run down a long hallway being constantly struck by rocks, trapped narrow walkways to make them dodge into open air and fall into pits of spikes/water (spiked water? Will traps work underwater?), and ballistae, I figure that should thin them out a bit or at least hurt some of them, and fewer and more injured attackers are always good.

[Fleeting Frames]

Point on target locking. In my defence, I hardly use archers

As far as ballista go, used them with wooden bolts for treecutting in Deathgame (42.06). The massive distances crossed look cool, but an errant dwarf who got hit got only bruised, I think. Even slow unloaded wooden minecarts are usually more damaging than that.

@Weizen1988:

Yeah, same for me on pictures. Just So You Know, the safe bridge-digging system works like this:
~#R____
~#▲____

R=Unlinked Retracting bridge. Miner stands on the ramp and mines the wall above next to bridge.

And heh, it was actually slightly difficult to get aquifer into sleepervolcs - "all but aquifer" sites were far more common in generating :V

Anyway, since you have volcano, I suggest experimenting with copious amounts of magma-based defences - it's so much easier to flood the world with that rather than via pistons or minecarts. Though I recall recent report of undead not dodging dodge-me traps in...what's going on in your fort thread, I think, so take that under advisement. And well, necros can arrive at just about any time, unlike gobbos, so worry about them first.

[Werdna]

I recall awhile back that I embarked with a Siege Engineer and enough materials to make ballista, then proceeded to fire them through meeting zones loaded with my starting dwarves and dozens of turkeys.  Dwarves repeatedly were bruised, turkeys only occasionally would take a headshot.  I was only using wooden bolts at the time but recall steel tipped bolts were not terribly more impressive.  But I forget what version this was on, so I'm wondering if there have been changes since.

Weizen, as I recall the biggest hassle with siege weapons is that the operators are civilians that eventually flee at the sight of invaders, yet the dispersion of the weapons is so wide that it is hard to funnel the shots effectively.  In other words, they're horribly inaccurate at the ranges that they tend to be usable in.  That said, it's been years since I last used them and even then I didn't train up everyone to master levels.

The basic problem with archer bait is this - you want something large that absorbs and survives tons of bolts.  Smaller creatures get wiped out quickly unless you amass a ton of them, but that's a FPS issue.  The problem is that most large, easily obtained creatures are grazers, with its requirement of fitting a large pasture into your defenses.

I think they will attack crundles though so use them if you got 'em.  You do have the right idea on how to wipe out large invasions - thin them out, string them out, bleed them out, whittle their morale down; the idea is to have them hit your melee in small wounded groups instead of the default massed mob.  Even the most highly trained and armored dwarves will succumb to exhaustion or a lucky whip to the head.

You have a magma embark?  I agree with FF, I think you had best stop piddling around with mundane defenses such as these and enjoy the fun of burninating everything.  You will have plenty of other embarks to sharpen up non-magma based defenses, so enjoy this one!   

[Weizen1988]

I recall awhile back that I embarked with a Siege Engineer and enough materials to make ballista, then proceeded to fire them through meeting zones loaded with my starting dwarves and dozens of turkeys.  Dwarves repeatedly were bruised, turkeys only occasionally would take a headshot.  I was only using wooden bolts at the time but recall steel tipped bolts were not terribly more impressive.  But I forget what version this was on, so I'm wondering if there have been changes since.

Weizen, as I recall the biggest hassle with siege weapons is that the operators are civilians that eventually flee at the sight of invaders, yet the dispersion of the weapons is so wide that it is hard to funnel the shots effectively.  In other words, they're horribly inaccurate at the ranges that they tend to be usable in.  That said, it's been years since I last used them and even then I didn't train up everyone to master levels.

The basic problem with archer bait is this - you want something large that absorbs and survives tons of bolts.  Smaller creatures get wiped out quickly unless you amass a ton of them, but that's a FPS issue.  The problem is that most large, easily obtained creatures are grazers, with its requirement of fitting a large pasture into your defenses.

I think they will attack crundles though so use them if you got 'em.  You do have the right idea on how to wipe out large invasions - thin them out, string them out, bleed them out, whittle their morale down; the idea is to have them hit your melee in small wounded groups instead of the default massed mob.  Even the most highly trained and armored dwarves will succumb to exhaustion or a lucky whip to the head.

You have a magma embark?  I agree with FF, I think you had best stop piddling around with mundane defenses such as these and enjoy the fun of burninating everything.  You will have plenty of other embarks to sharpen up non-magma based  defenses, so enjoy this one!   

Yeah, I have like 2-3 magma pipes, one on the surface, others in caverns, been too scared to touch them for anything other than garbage disposal and pitting creatures into it after reading various "I flooded the universe with magma" stories, capped the surface one by making a small lake after an unfortunate incident with things coming out. Figured its time to try and learn the basics of safe magma use. I guess I could set up a lava pit for undead and a drowning pit for goblins, that way i keep the goblinite, but can make short work of the hordes of undead. Lava pit wouldnt even really need to drain probably, will still include one probably, good practice.

Im actually starting over on sleepervolcano again, Im giving dwarves more clothing options (underpants because I thought it odd they lacked any craftable option, and masks because I thought it'd be cool). So ill be able to build all this stuff without running into my various aborted trapped entrances that wound up ineffective and extremely poorly planned passageways from early on.

[Fleeting Frames]

Heh. It's pretty hard to accidentally flood your fort with magma, in large part due it lacking pressure. If your fort is in soil layers and you've breached caverns, grass wildfire is far more threatening.

A far as goblinite and magma goes, bit of magma mist will probably not melt their copper/bronze/silver equipment, and their iron gear will stay safe even fully immersed in magma. I think the clothes will only stay intact if you encase them in obsidian water-first, though.

If you mod dwarves, the world gen might give slightly different history result (never tried), so could need to tailor that a bit.

[Weizen1988]

Heh. It's pretty hard to accidentally flood your fort with magma, in large part due it lacking pressure. If your fort is in soil layers and you've breached caverns, grass wildfire is far more threatening.

A far as goblinite and magma goes, bit of magma mist will probably not melt their copper/bronze/silver equipment, and their iron gear will stay safe even fully immersed in magma. I think the clothes will only stay intact if you encase them in obsidian water-first, though.

If you mod dwarves, the world gen might give slightly different history result (never tried), so could need to tailor that a bit.

It took a while, but ive got all civs and a tower, somehow giving dwarves underpants made no one become necromancers and humans die out, had to adjust some other things, think I added a megabeast, I forget exactly, but it was adjusting something really stupid that seemed like it would have nothing to do with necromancers, id set it to 1000 secrets already and had no luck.

[Fleeting Frames]

With worlgen, changing even the littlest thing tends to bend everything that comes after it. But changing the available headgear can result in different war result, sure enough.

Tossing in a megabeast, however, is like hitting it with magma shotgun after setting it on fire. They tend to destroy civs, yes - imagine you're human hamlet in year 5, and Trodgdor cometh.

Also, secrets are mostly a cap. Necromancers are born from fear of (massive, violent) death during history. Wars and megabeast carnage qualify, though even savage wildlife can cause one to pop up sometimes. This is why standard advice for lots of necro towers is upping civ count. Also goes well with ensuring somebody survives. SleeperVolcs PSV was more built for other requirements and singular strong civs, tho - for maxing towers/megabeasts you'd want something more like CowNMuffin's to fit three-digit number of civs into pocket world (I later learned that such fort placements will completely block major retreats and towns, so maybe not exactly like that).