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Note I'm playing a succession game using version 40d.

So I've set up a Maze of Death with a nearly a score of ballista at the ready to fill invaders with pointy death. Unfortunatly my ballista operators run up to fire the ballista, realize they're about to shoot some goblins and flee. what am I doing wrong?

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The problem is that they have line of sight to the goblins. Siege Engineers are just like any other dwarf civilian, and will flee from danger.

Unless you're lucky enough to acquire a forgotten beast syndrome that causes your dwarves eyes to rot, you're going to have to engineer a setup where your dwarves won't see their targets. (As unintuitive as that sounds, just roll with it. They're dwarves.)

In practice, this just means your ballista are too close to your maze of death. The wiki suggests that moving the siege engines back 10 squares should be sufficient.

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  • Sounds good... of course it doesn't do much good this siege as I doubt my workers will get close enough to move the Ballista until I've got the goblins cleaned up...
    – aslum
    Commented Nov 10, 2011 at 4:12
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    @aslum - You're right about not being able to move the ballista, but I believe every square of a ballista can be shot through, so you can simply set up more ballista behind your initial lines, if you have spares.
    – dlras2
    Commented Nov 10, 2011 at 4:42
  • @aslum - There will be more sieges. There's always more sieges.
    – Raven Dreamer
    Commented Nov 10, 2011 at 5:33
  • Further down (df.magmawiki.com/index.php/…) the wiki suggests 20 squares. But in any case, yeah, setting up siege engines is a real hassle sometimes.
    – andronikus
    Commented Nov 10, 2011 at 15:00

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