The main issue I encountered with using ballistae, at least in the previous version, was that siege operators are still civilians, so they get scared or enraged at enemies, even when they're decently far away, and would abandon the task to fire the ballista to instead flee or run to punch them directly

You stated that ballista arrows need a metal arrowhead, but wooden ballista arrows can be constructed from a log without using an arrowhead. Those are the best for training your siege operators because metal arrows and rocks can weigh several hundred units, but wooden arrows weigh only about 20 units so they are hauled much faster.

I love ballistas, they’ll hit 4 trees before shredding 3 war bears and 6 elves and still fly all the way across the map

Don't mind the sounds coming from the basement

EDIT: Blind already has a video for what I wanted. I just never spotted it because it's in a different playlist. ~~I'd like to see some tips on FPS friendly pathing and routes(stairs, ramps, walling or using traffic designations) and other tips to maintain a sane framerate.~~

there are three issues I have with siege weapons: there's no workers' menu to pick a specific dwarf for the job, siege weapons cannot be linked with stockpiles, siege ammo is still in the furniture list instead of ammo in the stockpile menu. At the very least they worked but still hope for better.

catapults dont hit the ceiling tho? the wiki is wrong about a lot of stuff about siege weapons

In my experience the "ready to fire" or "fire" mode are not needed to trigger the loading job. It will always trigger when a siege weapon is empty. The "prepare to fire" mode will only make your dwarf wait at the ballista side until you want to fire it

Good to see the channel method being used for the seige engines, what's not mentioned, is that if the ammo hits a wall without a Z level to drop into, the ammo is destroyed. Not usually an issue for stones but if forging arrow heads for ballista, it can become very expensive unless using wooden arrows (unless you have a hard time getting wood)

Love this series so far, incredibly informative and helpful! Quick tutorial on clothing management would be awesome.

If you use a ballista to cut down trees, do the elves get mad?

Ballistas are aweome on paper ... but since siege operators are civilians, they run when enemies are too close. Even when I put them into a Milita

I had ballista's set up to deal with friends found in suspicious walls, and one of them kept missing when one of those friends lost the ability to stand. I know you can drop natural rocks on them from above, but only dug into one of the layers at that level at the time.

Siege Engines need a option for military dwarves to use them and only fire when enemies are in sight, it's silly that they only have fire at will to shoot at nothing, or prepare to fire to just stand there and fiddle their thumbs. Besides, the users of these siege engines will at best fire once, then run away when they actually see the enemy, even if they're safe behind a fortification. This has to be fixed!

One thing I've heard you can do is set the front of ballistas to no traffic zones or put fortifications in front so no one will walk in front

Yay for another tutorial!!! Love them .. please do more :D

Maybe for some video ideas, you could go over some dwarven mechanics, like a dwarven water reactor, or the dwarven shot gun?

game's tough to master, but i love learning new stuff every day.

I love siege engines and I love that someone talked about them. I am do hyped for them

Kewl! something I looked forward to

i love youre videos :)

You've done some guides on stockpiles, and you've complained about containers within stockpiles. The DF wiki makes a few mentions of something like a feeder stockpile that gets around the containers issue, but I haven't been able to find an article that actually explains how to do it and how it works, or what it means exactly. I can make some guesses and experiment I suppose, but I figure why not ask an expert what that's all about.

Last time I used a ballista I had an accident. Mom says no more ballista in the house.

Hey ! How many z levels can ballistas fire at ?

YEAH BALLISTA!

no demonstration ?

as if he didn't set up live targets