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[Senshuken]

You know it's a good thing that Gnomes are naturally able to tame and get along with wild animals.

If we were dwarfs, considering the giant animals roaming the land above, we would be trying to find the best way to cover the surface world with magma.

[IndigoFenix]

Yeah, Gnomes actually benefit greatly from embarking in Savage regions.

So many giant beasts... it's cool you're running an animal-based fort, most people seem to get into gnomes mainly for the machinery and don't want to deal with the complexities of the nature merit system.  Let's see how well they hold up in combat once the sieges come.

[Meph]

If they are unarmored at the time, not that well. Arrows will incapacitaty many of them before they reach their targets.

[celem]

OOC: Yeah the gnome druidic system is so beautifully realised Indigo that I thought i'd showcase it a bit, once you get the advanced trainer and gain the ability to nickname the animals everything becomes so much easier as you can pasture the right critters to receive medical care/armor/training.  The first round of healing on my tigers was done before they were named and I had to pasture all 3 war Tigers to be sure of getting the injured one. 

Thankfully the scripts are well written and its not too micromanage heavy.  Both healing and armoring pick the first viable target they can see and allow me to pile a load and set repeats without worrying about it healing healthy animals or repeatedly armoring one paw.  With the addition of nicknames I can see who is moving where through pastures and I dont find it cumbersome in the least.  To be honest i'm as comfortable with what you've set up here as I am the vanilla military interface anyway, and on the grand scheme of DF micromanagement, your druidic system is more hands-off than half the vanilla feature-set.  Well, coded mate.

I embarked them across multiple high savagery zones for just this purpose, it's been a very productive first year on that front though :p  I've experimented with these things in combat before however and Meph is quite right, everything needs armor.

And agreed Senshuken, most races would have scattered immediately on embark and unpause, their ability to ignore wildlife is a big deal.  Our chances of surviving the Giant Hyenas in particular would not have been great, packs of those are vicious.

We were also very lucky that the critter that escaped from the caverns into the fort happened to be a Nith.  Little immediate threat and charmable with the druids to boot.  That could have been a lot worse, flicking through the RAWs (I dont know masterwork underground much at all) there are not many options down there with the [NATURAL] tag the druids need. 

[Meph]

OOC: [NATURAL] tag is needed for taming animals with druidism? How about making a larger altar, that costs 20 druidic totems or something similar. A late-game altar that you only get when your nature merit is high, and it can start taming [CREATURE_CLASS:UNDERGROUND_CREATURE]. Or I go through the raws and add a syn_class or specific tag to all animal-like monsters down there.

That would add a lot to the system, and isnt too much work. 1 new workshop, copy+paste reaction, copy+paste script lines, replace NATURAL with new tag, and I add the tags to the creatures.

Sorry celem for abducting your fort a bit.

[celem]

OOC: No problem Meph, i'll be back to posting updates later tonight and the discussion is on topic for any other gnome overseers out there.  Its why I've been adding comments about the dfhack mechanisms driving the race, for other players to see what issues I encounter and how the system can be used.  DFHack is heavily required for this race to work at all, yet is pretty darned seamless and unobtrusive.  There are however a number of feedbacks available from Indigo's scripts that provide useful oversight.

Im pretty sure it's the NATURAL tag.  I dont know how Indigo wrote it, but I seem to recall at some point either the manual or the gnome thread indicating this is the tag involved.  When I embarked I specifically trawled the masterwork underground (which is new to me) in the RAWs.  Nith certainly are natural, so it holds thus far.  Additionally the various Animal man species (both the sneaker-thief types and regular Otter Man or whatever) are immune, some kind of exclusion of sentients, its a complex system, therefore ought be plenty of room for future expansion.

Coincidentally it's been useful having Indigo gnomed as a druid, I've credited his character with a number of crucial bits of druidic knowledge that I actually gained from Indigo's forum posts.

[IndigoFenix]

Technically, you can tame any creature that has either NATURAL, PET, or PET_EXOTIC.  But creatures that are not NATURAL will be hostile to your gnomes (NATURAL determines whether they are included in AT_PEACE_WITH_WILDLIFE), so they won't get close enough to be tamed using the Nature Shrine (unless you run the 'attempt to tame all roaming animals' command, which costs a token).

The difficulty in taming an animal is based on the creature's petvalue, that's why giant bugs and especially giant spiders (which have a very high petvalue) are so hard to tame.

NATURAL creatures that cannot normally be pets (like certain animalmen) CAN be recruited by gnomes, but they will be regarded as though their petvalue is 10000, so you won't be able to tame them until you have both very high nature merit and a very skilled trainer.

[Meph]

If gnomes run away from the cavern monsters, the only way to fix it is to add NATURAL to them. Which honestly I think wouldnt be too bad in most cases. Mostly cavern 1 would benefit from that, the lower ones are way more hostile. Having a friendly first cavern would give Gnomes a more unique settings, people can embark on caves and directly inhabit the cavern, without having to worry about the creatures in it.