What to do against Dark artillery if you are a Dwarf?

This post is prompted by XViper's recent guide for using calvary.  In my experience, the tactic laid out there does not work very well for Dwarves because Ironforts move so slowly. This causes three problems.

First, an Ironfort can only barely keep ahead of the units chasing it so that it often gets reared before it can finish off the enemy artillery.  Second, it cannot hide behind obstacles because it basically needs to keep charging to have any chance of getting all the way to the back of the enemy in time. Third, when some of the chaser units are archers, the Ironfort has to endure so many volleys (again because it's so slow and can't hide behind obstacles) that it is often forced to flee.

So, what can us Dwarves do against Dark artillery?  Our HI,LI and LIA are even slower than the Ironfort and our artillery almost never have a clear shot at the Dark artillery.

In my experience, we just have to ignore the Dark artillery, try to kill everything else first and hope we have enough units left to rush and kill the Dark artillery.  This seems to work for the most part, with Skellies being the most problematic.  Any better suggestions would be greatly welcome.

As a side note, what's the point of Ironforts?  So far, the only uses for Ironforts that I can figure out are either keep it with other units to use simply for flanking or still send it up the side and pray that it'll take out an artillery before it dies.  The first seems silly since the AP is better spent on just about anything else and similarly, the second also doesn't make sense due to the low likelihood of success and again, the high AP cost.