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[Girlinhat]

A good bear swarm WILL take down goblins, because goblins are not fully armored.  Arm and leg bites will pile up quickly, given enough bears.  Plus, small bears are easier to kill and don't distract a goblin quite as long.  When it's just as easy to cage them and wait a year for a fully grown war bear, you might as well do it right.

[Iton Ibrukrithzam]

Am i the only person who just dumps junk in magma and thrives soley on home produced stuff? I am anal retentive over junk. :T

I don't dump goblinite in magma, I dump it on elves.  I love the mental image of the elves walking away happy from a deal where they give me valuable things(and also rope reed) in return for 3 camel loads of used troll fur loincloths.

[khearn]

War animals also follow whoever trained them.  Enable animal training on your commander.

This is very useful. If you assign a war animal to a dwarf, and the animal dies, the dwarf gets a bad thought from having a pet die. And you can definitely count on war animals dying. But if you don't assign it to a dwarf, it will just follow the dwarf who trained it and when it dies, the trainer doesn't care.

So I've enabled animal training on all of my soldiers (and disabled it on everyone else), and then I put a "train war dog" job in the kennel. An off-duty soldier comes and trains a dog, then I go to Dwarf Therapist and sort by training and find the guy that now has 30xp in it, and turn it off for him. Then I put another train war dog job in the kennel and let the next soldier come train the next dog. It's a little bit of micro-management, but i just come back to the kennel from time to time and check to see if the job has been done. And now almost all of my soldiers have faithful war dogs trailing them around (except for the guy with a War Giant Jaguar).

And nobody got sad when a half dozen of the dogs got killed by a FB. But the FB spent a lot of time detaching dogs and hitting dogs when it could have been hitting dwarves with its deadly sting.

[AWdeV]

Most war animals are really rather useless against gobbo's though. They're a distraction at best but they can play hell on your framerate.

Giant beasts tend to be more effective.

[Tevish Szat]

Employing war animals in a cage bomb tends to be more effective than fielding them as fighters: pen up all but one adult male in a cage at your entrance, attach the cage to a pressure plate.  Stuff war dogs in it too, and anything else you've got.  War animals may not be terribly effective, but when a swarm of 50 is released on your enemies it makes for quite a show.

This WILL kill your framerate when it fires, though.

[Itnetlolor]

Spoiler: Obligatory considering thread title (click to show/hide)

[Psieye]

And here I thought this was going to be about an elf siege charging in with polar bear mounts.

[twwolfe]

Employing war animals in a cage bomb tends to be more effective than fielding them as fighters: pen up all but one adult male in a cage at your entrance, attach the cage to a pressure plate.  Stuff war dogs in it too, and anything else you've got.  War animals may not be terribly effective, but when a swarm of 50 is released on your enemies it makes for quite a show.

This WILL kill your framerate when it fires, though.

I believe Syrupleaf did this with war moles. they called it MOLENAROK, and it actually tore several sieges apart before it lost too many moles to be effective.

[AWdeV]

Ooh, this reminds me of a vaguely relevant question: I've got a stray war cave crocodile and I know it has kill-power. I have a stray war gorlak and it has kill-power but not an awful lot and needs practice. I know a giant bat (an untrained one) is quite capable of killing a non-military dwarf but won't stand up to military dwarves. I know my giant war toad is useless.

However, I'm wondering how efficient my stray war giant rat and stray war giant moles would be.

I still have some goblins and elk birds left to process so I could test it out but that won't give me any information regarding their efficiency against armed and (poorly-)armoured goblins. Can anyone help me out here? Is it worth bringing them up for a fight or should I just leave them to loiter?

[i2amroy]

Well both giant rats and giant moles are about 3.33 times as large as a dwarf, so I would think that they would at least have some effect. It might not be that much against someone with armor though.

[Ubiq]

To really be effective, war animals need size, useful attacks, and numbers on their side. Giant Moles and Rats have both of the first two; it's the latter that's the problem. Both Giant Moles and Giant/Large Rats only live two to three years by default. Barring altering the raws to make them live longer, you're going to have a difficult time replacing losses or even building up an army of them in the first place.

[Tevish Szat]

I'm pretty sure they tend to breed in huge numbers, though: you just need to get a good starting population.