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[Felgar]

I’ve been playing Dwarf Fortress on and off for about a year or so now, and would categorize myself as more experienced than a newbie, but not a vet by any means. In my current endeavor I had my fort get a leader promoted to baron. Shortly after that a dwarven diplomat came and went and it was announced that the fort was now a county about a month after he left. Then within a month or two of that announcement, a goblin siege arrived and all I can say is wow.

42 goblins all riding underground creatures ranging from olms, giant bats, giant rats, etc… in addition 8 trolls arrived. That’s a total of 92 creatures attacking my fortress which had a population of 130 or so. Needless to say I was wiped out.

I had a reasonably sized (at least I thought it was) military of 2 poorly trained squads of 10. One was melee the other ranged. This was only year 4 of my fort, so my squad training wasn’t great, but I did have a few guys around adequate or so in their gear and weapons training.

Equipment was either copper (armor and edged weapons) or silver (blunt weapons), with some steel weapons mixed into the mix, but I hadn’t been able to buy enough steel yet to equip everyone with a decent weapon.

I have never seen such a huge siege launched against me before and am wondering if this is due to my accepting the early barony which was then followed by the county promotion? Or are sieges of this size something I can expect in any game I play. If so it looks like every single dwarf needs to train in military skills as it was almost a 1-1 ratio of attackers, all of which were obviously trained in weapons and fighting skills.

[Dakk]

Probably, or you accumulated alot of wealth with crafts and such. It seems the higher your fort's wealth, the stronger the sieges are. I'm not entirely sure barony and county increase siege size, though.

But yea, sieges are, more often then not, quite a bit larger then your fortress's army due to how long it takes to train military dwarves to an acceptable level combined with the work needed to get them decent equipment.

[Caldfir]

If you manage to piss off a human civ you can get stomped on pretty hard as well - I once had 150 humans all riding lions attack in my second year (hadn't noticed the WAR tag on embark even). 

But Dakk is correct - it is a wealth threshold thing.  Probably someone made some totally bonkers artifact encrusted with platinum and star rubies or something. 

[Greiger]

As others said the size of seiges is determined by the wealth of your fortress and the population.  So is Baron, count, and duke too so the very fast promotion to count was probably an indication that things were about to get nuts.

As for repelling them, good equipment, high skill, and great defenses go a long way towards your survivability. 

A couple defensive setup tips,

Marksdwarves behind fortifications can rain death almost for free, only needing to worry about the elite crossbow and archer goblins, since the lower skill goblins lack the skill to hit your dwarves behind fortifications (they won't even try).  Setting crossbowdwarves to defend a burrow directly adjacent to fortifications during a siege alert is a good way to keep your dwarves close enough to your fortifications to fire through them.  Though if you are particularly protective of them you may want to pull them back to hang with your melee guys if one of those high skilled ranged goblins show up.  Crossbowdwarves are very bad at prioritizing targets, and a single elite archer can disable entire squads of marksdwarves if there are other goblins between them and you.  Dwarves prioritize targets by distance, not threat, an unconscious troll with a throat wound that's 2 tiles away is a more appealing target to your guys than an elite crossbowgob 3 tiles away.

A checkerboard hallway is a good way to reduce line of sight for your melee guys.  Which believe it or not is often a good thing.  Making it so that your melee guys can't see an enemy until they are right in their face helps reduce their spreading out.  In an open field your guys in front will see the enemy and move to engage well before your guys in the back will due to the maximum sight range.  A checkerboard pattern hallway makes it impossible to see more than a couple tiles down the hallway and helps keep your squad together.  It also strongly nerfs enemy archer goblins, since when they finally do get a line of sight on something they can shoot, they are already nearly at melee range, significantly reducing their range advantage.

[darkflagrance]

As sieges go, 42 is only a medium sized siege, monsters not withstanding (and those are easily stopped by armor in vanilla).

[Felgar]

Thanks for all the comments everyone. It must have been fighting skill differences that got me wiped out so quickly then, because I had an L shaped entrance hallway running north then east, with double doors at the east end leading into the barracks. The north edge of the hall was a fortification with my marksdwarves in the archery range behind it.

The entrance was full of traps and stopped about 8-10 creatures mostly mounts were trapped in the cage traps and then the goblins moved ahead into the stone fall areas and finally a few were trapped in cages in the second line of cage traps. But as I said the traps only dealt with the first group of 8-10 or so invaders.

Outside the entrance were my pastured animals, so they helped break up the waves of attackers as some broke off to chase down animals and the rest began filtering into the entrance hall in small groups of 2-3.

I had placed all my dwarves into squads and had the unequipped ones hiding deep in the fortress, while the 4 ½ melee squads that had some level of equipment waited in the large barracks room. My marksdwarves hit a few goblins but simply weren’t good enough to take enough down before the doors were broken down and the fighting began in earnest.

So I had a good entrance setup for fighting, but to give an example, 7 dwarves were going round and round chasing after a single lasher goblin and he killed them all one at a time. My one melee squad that had some training killed a few goblins, but in the end the only real way to describe the fight that unfolded was that the goblins simply overran my military and slaughtered everything else after that.

The trolls never even made it inside before the end came as they were happily going about tipping over beehives and killing fleeing pasture animals.

Looking at my created wealth shows an excess of 600k, so the fact I was trying to make enough stuff to afford steel for better weapons is probably what killed me. In the future I’ll let my military train up to decent skill levels before I start trying to create a lot of trade crafts if my map lacks decent ore for weapons and armor. This map only had Tetrahedrite ore on it, so I needed to buy any non—copper/silver equipment I wanted to get for my troops.

[Mister Always]

Protip: stonefall traps suck grievous amounts of elf schlong. Build weapon traps. Even three serrated copper discs in a tile will give most enemies some pause - and making a long line of 'em is super fun.

[Wiles]

I find live combat helps training out a lot. I set up cage traps in my passage to the caverns below to catch a bunch of fairly weak critters like crundles. When I have enough I set them all loose on my recruit squads.

Layering armour helps too. I've seen people stack six cloaks on a dwarf, but that's a little too gamey for me. But I do like to put a leather cloak and hood on my military dwarves along with their armour as it seems to help with coverage (the cloak especially will cover areas not covered by armour).

While goblin sieges are hard at first it isn't long before they are a joke. A few legendary dwarves can make mincemeat out of an entire siege.

[Jacob/Lee]

Cage traps are strong, almost overpowered. They instantly and permanently disable anything not trap immune and gives you some sparring dummies when you strip them and let them loose on your soldiers, which also gives way more experience than sparring.

[Lormax]

Layering armour helps too. I've seen people stack six cloaks on a dwarf, but that's a little too gamey for me. But I do like to put a leather cloak and hood on my military dwarves along with their armour as it seems to help with coverage (the cloak especially will cover areas not covered by armour).

How exactly does that work, anyway?  I've read the wiki, but I don't see how you make the dwarf actually put all that stuff on?

[Telgin]

Perhaps it's just luck, but I'll second that layering armor seems to make dwarves a lot tougher.  I equipped a squad of 10 dwarves with 3 layers of steel chain (a bit silly, I know, and the wiki claims this might not help more than 1 layer, but I wanted to be sure), a steel breastplate and a leather cloak and they repelled a goblin invasion without a scratch.  I don't recall the number of goblins, but I think 20 is about right.

I can't recall the specifics on how to make them layer armor, but I believe you just assigned multiple cloaks to their uniform and they'll put it on.  There were some specifics on the ordering that I don't recall, or bugs related to it anyway.

I'd also like to ask exactly what levels of wealth does it take to get seiges like this?  I've only created 2 fortresses so far, both of which I considered to be quite successful with over 100 dwarves and decent industry.  I never saw any ambushes with either fortress, and only had a couple of thieves up until year 4 when my first siege arrived (same year in both forts).  The sieges were smallish too, if this thread is any indicator.

[Wiles]

I'm not sure on the number of goblins, but I think the variety beasts they bring depend on their civ. I have over 20 million dwarfbucks of created wealth, but the goblins only ever come with trolls.

[Mister Always]

I'm not sure on the number of goblins, but I think the variety beasts they bring depend on their civ. I have over 20 million dwarfbucks of created wealth, but the goblins only ever come with trolls.

Goblins always have trolls at their command, and several kinds of cave critters (giant bats, olms, cave crocs etc.) if they have a...I think it's a general? If they have a general, yeah. (The general seems to work as the goblin equivalent to a Dungeon Master). However, if their obsidian tower is located in an evil biome, they might come with ogres. Ogres are like trolls, except they're a whole lot bigger. Fear the ogres.

[iEpinephrine]

Architecting big traps with lots of moving parts, fluids (preferably the burny kind) and narrow ledges is the best way to hold off large groups of enemies.

[Angel Of Death]

I had about 64 land demons attack my fort. They were all slaughtered