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[jerank]

Since I've been busy recently with my .31 fortress, I have not kept up with the news and missed the latest release by a while. However now that I read about it, I can't help but wonder; couldn't werewolves and vampires be used to your advantage?

I've already read about using vampires as infinite labour, but werewolves strike me as the more useful of the two. Werewolves naturally regenerate missing limbs and damage whenever they shift forms, so I can't help but wonder if this could be used for the military. A weredwarf would never have to fear anything but permanant death on the battlefield. They could be reduced to nothing but a torso and an angry mouth and still be right as rain by the next full moon. Inventory management would be a pain, but a small price to pay for an army to whom the word 'attrition' is something to be bullied and given wedgies.

Thoughts?

[Girlinhat]

The issue is containment.  Every month they're gonna try and kill everyone nearby.  Best bet would likely be private rooms and hatch-dropped meals, with a door to the outside that only opens during siege.

Powerful and dangerous, but equally dangerous to you.

[jerank]

Keeping the weredwarves seperate shouldn't be that much of an issue. In a mountain biome I'd probably give them their own fortress inside the mountain and keep everyone else below ground. The only thing I'm worried about is infecting a large enough population. Twenty legendary dwarves is usually enough for me to slaughter +80 goblin sieges with zero casualties, so that'd be my end population goal. Perhaps lock new recruits in with the werewolf while wearing steel everything and wielding feather-tree training weapons? Or wouldn't this be good enough?

[Girlinhat]

Depends on were-what.  Were-groundhog, lol.  were-yak, abandon ye all faith.

[Supernerd]

If all of the dwarves in a fortress are werebeasts, would that cause a game over on the next full moon?

[Agent_Irons]

If all of the dwarves in a fortress are werebeasts, would that cause a game over on the next full moon?

I think Toady thought of this while testing werebeasts(it came up.)

So no? Maybe?

[smeeprocket]

Someone must test this. I haven't seen a were anything to do something like this.

[Nil Eyeglazed]

I think both have their uses.  I would probably never use a vampire military, because the vampires' speed seems to be affected by alcohol withdrawal, but they're awesome for a lot of tasks-- never sleeps/eats/drinks makes up for lost speed when it comes to production, and simplifies putting them in physically isolated burrows for purposes of keeping watch or doing logic.  I've already experimented with vampire woodcutters and vampire weavers (both worked fine), and am thinking about experimenting a bit with vampires in the food production chain (a vampire, a kitchen, and 200 chickens in a burrow).

Werebeasts sound promising, but I understand there's a lot of difficult infecting dwarves (civil war type difficulty).  If you can make all of some group of dwarves into the same kind of werebeast, then the idea is, they should all change at the same time, and then nobody gets killed, which is a nice idea, and since they don't really need to eat or drink, it's not hard to keep werebeasts isolated from your general pop, no harder than it is for vampires.  But I think that once you have a legendary warrior, it would be rather more of a pain in the ass than a help if he suddenly dropped his weapons and armor and turned into a horse while charging goblins-- but then, I've never seen a legendary kicker horse, it's probably something fearsome.

I think that probably the best military application would be marksdwarves, because of the kind of injuries marksdwarves sustain, and because they're probably never in a situation to charge the enemy unarmored.  You could even use cage traps on likely posts to protect any dwarves that fall unconscious, without worrying about starvation.  I think a group like that could be functionally immortal, rapidly turning into legendary marksdwarf/shield user/dodgers.

[olopi]

I'm not sure i this works for making Werebeasts but:

HHHH    LLLL
HHHH    LLLL
HHHH    LLLL

H=Hatch  L=Lever

Each lever is connected to one Hatch
If the Beast bites a dwarf(Reports) Pull the lever one of them is standing on(of course there must be a floor under it)
Then one of them should fall down, and because of the injuries he will get carried in the hospital...