Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[immibis]

The main advantage of catapults, IMO, is that their stones can fly over things. Unlike ballistas, which you can't stack wider than 3 tiles without putting your operators in the line of fire, catapults can be stacked as deep as you want as long as the target is in range.

[Urist Imiknorris]

fly over things

I hope that you only mean friendlies. They still can't go up or down z-levels. But they're better than ballistae, for a similar reason to what you said - siege operators' pets can get caught in a ballista's path and in 40d (which I still play) this results in a dead pet, a flying corpse, and an unhappy siege operator.

[garfield751]

Catapults are pretty good for moving stone from a quarry to another location.

you just gave me an awsome idea

[Deon]

I had an impressively ineffective wall of catapults once.  The goblin siege came, the catapults fired (over multiple z levels I am sure, perhaps it was 3 down from where the catapults were), the goblins chased the engineers away.  So much for legendary catapult operators.  I haven't found a decent use for them other than to keep dwarfs from being idle, in df2010 at least.  In previous versions they'd get physical traits built up, but I do not believe anyone but the military gets faster/stronger now, even if you train them to legendary.

Your problem is that catapults do not shoot targets on different z-levels. Wheh the stone changes z-levels it just falls down without doing any damage.

[Hyndis]

I use them for stone hauling.

 


Build a bunch of catapults and then fling rocks from one side of the map to a quantum stockpile to tidy up the place.