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[VerdantSF]

I did some match-ups featuring some of the tougher animals that can be trained for war*. Here are the results.

10 vs. 10, Creatures left standing

Cave Crocodiles vs. Grizzly Bears, 9 Cave Crocodiles
Cave Crocodiles vs. Giant Tigers, 8 Giant Tigers
Cave Crocodiles vs. Elephants, 10 Elephants
Cave Crocodiles vs. Jabberers (modded to be available in the Arena), 10 Jabberers

From these results, I assumed elephants and jabberers would be an even match-up, while elephants would dominate giant tigers.  This was not the case.

Elephants vs. Jabberers, 10 Jabberers
Elephants vs. Giant Tigers, 7 Giant Tigers

The giant tigers didn't steamroll the elephants like the jabberers, so I was surprised by the next match-up.

Giant Tigers vs. Jabberers, 6 Giant Tigers

However, when up against armored goblins, there was some rock, paper, scissors action going on.

Goblin Axemen (full iron armor, novice combat skills)

Goblins vs. Jabberers, 8 Jabberers
Goblins vs. Elephants, 8 Goblins
Goblins vs. Giant Tigers, 10 Goblins

*Actual war animals can't be created in the Arena, so against armored humanoids in Dwarf Mode, the animals might do a bit better.

tldr; Giant tigers tore up the other war animals tested, but jabberers were the best against goblins in iron armor.

[CriticallyAshamed]

Jabberers seem to be the strongest in general. Sorta surprised they beat the goblins so hardout but the elephants got wrecked though.

[sweitx]

Is this just one test or several tests?
A single test might not be conclusive. One team might've gotten lucky with an early kill, and just snowballed from there.

[VerdantSF]

I did multiple tests with the giant tigers vs jabberers, since I was so surprised, but just single tests for the others.  You're right, though, more testing is needed.

[duckman]

Looking at the raws, even though attacking with their tusks is labeled as goring the target, elephants have no edged attacks. For the most part, any bleeding caused by an attack is either from jamming a bone through something, breaking the bones themselves or tearing cartilage. That would probably explain why they did so poorly against jabberers since they're only about 500,000 smaller than the elephants, but have an edge based biting attack that would let them bleed out the elephants.

[VerdantSF]

Yup!  Jabberers are definitely my overall favorite.  Not only do they have an edged attack, they also "wrestle" and often attempt to pull enemies apart.  I've never used them in previous forts, but it's one of my prime goals for my current one.  The giant tigers cause massive bleeding against unarmored opponents, but against iron, their claws just can't land enough hits.

[Mr S]

...  Not only do they have an edged attack, they also "wrestle" and often attempt to pull enemies apart. ...

FTFY

[slothen]

the other consideration is that elephants have grasp on their trunk (I expect), but don't attack with it.  Jabberer's main attack is pecking, using their beak, which has a grasp flag and the attack itself has [ATTACK_FLAG_CANLATCH].  This might not make a big difference vs similarly sized elephants, but vs smaller humanoids, the result is the Jabberer will pluck something up, and immediately tear it to pieces.

[duckman]

Nothing seems to show that trunks can grasp.

b_detail_plan_default, body_default and body_rcp don't anything where trunks can [GRASP]. The elephant raws themselves don't seem to have it either. A bit odd, since elephants* do often use their trunks when attacking things.

*That is, real elephants, not our elephants.

[slothen]

well, the point stands, elephants don't grasp, jabberers do.

[Ubiq]

Adding [GRASP] to the trunk entry under body_default and giving elephants a grasp strike using that trunk seems to make a fair amount of difference.

Three groups of jabberers vs three groups of elephants resulted in 21 dead elephants and 15 dead jabberers.

I put one group of each in the center, one in the lava pool tower, and one in front of the castle.

The first group in the center had ten elephant casualties. All ten jabberers survived with three of them having broken bones.

The second group of survivors was made up of five jabberers with three of them having broken bones and one of those being unable to walk.

The three group was nine elephants with all of them receiving some injury or other. Five have broken bones and one of them will probably bleed to death.

They still prefer really ineffective goring and the trunk strikes only bruise, but they seem to be able to fend off the jabberers much more effectively. If the goring could be fixed, it'll be a whole new ballgame.

[Urist Da Vinci]

You get better results from running 10 1v1 tests, than you do from a 10v10 test.

In 10v10 tests you tend to see a ganging-up effect where the last surviving member of the losing team is being attacked by all surviving members of the winning team, which isn't fair to the statistics.

[duckman]

Goring has [ATTACK_CONTACT_PERC:100] which basically means the elephant is slapping their opponent with the side of their tusk, which are as dense as bone as a placeholder it seems.

Changing the [ATTACK_FLAG_WITH] to [ATTACK_FLAG_EDGE] results in them swinging around the equivalent of giant tusk swords that consistently rip apart skin, fat, muscle, nerves and arteries but rarely, if ever, touch the bones of even a human sized target due to their absurdly large contact area and the poor shear values of [MATERIAL_TEMPLATE:TOOTH_TEMPLATE].

These values* are identical for hooves which use the horn template, but their much smaller relative size gives hooved animals their supreme ability to smash bones and bruise muscles and organs through multiple layers of armor**.

Unicorn horns are as deadly as they are thanks to having [ATTACK_CONTACT_PERC:5] and an edged attack on an animal bigger than a bull moose while most other animals that use their horns to attack have the same 100% contact area and and blunt attack as the elephant's goring attack.

Basically, a lot of animals are actually less dangerous than they should be based on the attack types they use.

*Impact values for blunt attacks, that is.

**It also helps that most animals have gigantic muscles and above average body size in their descriptions.

[Ubiq]

You get better results from running 10 1v1 tests, than you do from a 10v10 test.

You're right. I ran through it again and got results more in lines with what VerdantSF got.  Only one elephant successfully killed its opponent and that's because it kicked the jabberer in the head and broke its spine as an opening move. The grasping ability makes a lot bigger difference in a scrum than it does in a duel since one elephant will latch onto a jabberer while the others swarm it.

Doing it as a series of individual matches also makes it much clearer what is going on in the fights; the jabberers are inflicting painful cuts on the elephants that make them pass out or stun them long enough for a jabberer to tap an artery and make them bleed out.  The elephant has to rely on a kick to the head either crippling the jabberer or killing it outright; even a relatively minor cut to an elephant is enough to incapacitate them while a jabberer will ignore broken toes and what-not.