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[psychologicalshock]

So this has been happening in a game ive been playing for quite a while - flying animals tend to be very easy to kill as 1 bolt is enough to do them in, the initial bolt makes them fall and impact, after that they have pain+bleeding, they take off the ground as soon as possible and sooner or later faint from pain or blood loss and hit the ground again. I have observed a giant sparrow do just this - my archer only shot it once, the rest of the damage it did to itself (it broke more or less every bone it had + broke its beak off).

Sparrows in my control tend to not fly much and are thus MUCH more powerful being able to kill half a squad of goblins.

[Garath]

if a bolt hits a leg or otherwise takes out a leg, the flier falls, strange but true. Falling a few z-levels will cause severe damage. Your birds try to stay closer to the dwarf they are assigned to or who trained them, and thus would never fall as far, getting less damaged.

edit:
the chances of hitting a creatures leg is probably bigger than hitting an eye if it's above you.

[psychologicalshock]

Yeah except the flyer survives the fall and then flies up again, passes out and then falls to the ground for a second crash and it keeps doing that until it finishes itself off. Flyers in my control don't tend to do that, wild flyers especially are susceptible to slamming themselves until they're dead even if the initial fall doesn't kill them (80% of the time it does not), that's what I am talking about

[Garath]

are your fliers hunting/war trained and the suicidal ones not?

[Broseph Stalin]

if a bolt hits a leg or otherwise takes out a leg, the flier falls, strange but true. Falling a few z-levels will cause severe damage. Your birds try to stay closer to the dwarf they are assigned to or who trained them, and thus would never fall as far, getting less damaged.

edit:
the chances of hitting a creatures leg is probably bigger than hitting an eye if it's above you.

This is misleading, when a flying creature "falls" in the air it doesn't stop flying. The reason they fall out of the sky is the pain causing them to pass out.
I'm not really sure this is super unrealistic, they get hurt and try to get out of dodge the quickest way they know how.

[SharkForce]

last i heard, flying creatures never fly when tame (at least, not when they are tamed by dwarfs). this is likely part of the reason they don't try to fly away when they get hurt.

of course, i haven't been closely following that, either.

best 'proof' (and i use that lightly) i have is in http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Giant_eagle under the last paragraph before the raws, which states "There is a current bug where tamed animals that have the [FLYING] tag, don't. So once tamed, your giant eagles will remain earthbound and never take to the sky..."

of course, i have no idea if that was ever true, let alone if it is true right now. i do know that it's been in the wiki entry for giant eagles for quite a while.

(i do find it slightly ironic that the above sentence continues "...which makes them somewhat less deadly than they would be otherwise." when the OP is essentially complaining about the inverse of that situation).

[psychologicalshock]

Ok well this is more of a bug report/amusing thing but my point is that wild fliers after getting hurt even a little keep hurting themselves until they're dead which makes fliers way easier to deal with than a land animal almost unfairly so

[mnjiman]

Bug? No. Animals who are injured tend to make it worse. In nature a simple injury normally ends in death.

[psychologicalshock]

Except land animals tend to stop bleeding and manage to leave wounded, flyers even with a minor wound always end up breaking every last bone in their body and severing anything breakable.

[SharkForce]

Ok well this is more of a bug report/amusing thing but my point is that wild fliers after getting hurt even a little keep hurting themselves until they're dead which makes fliers way easier to deal with than a land animal almost unfairly so

understood. i was just providing a potential explanation for why you don't see the same thing with tamed flying creatures.

[NonconsensualSurgery]

It may be suicide, but it's excessively violent and bloody assisted suicide. If you tried to tell Fish and Wildlife that you're not hunting but rather encouraging birds to kill themselves by hitting the ground I bet you'd get a good laugh.

[tommy521]

Land animals walk away, flying animals (try to) fly away. It makes sense.

[Deus Machina]

I love watching flying creatures.

One of my forts had the entrance built into a cliff some 15 or 20 Z up, accessed by a bridge connected to a tower with a spiral ramp. During a siege, I would lock off the tower and station marksdwarves at the bottom to shoot through the bottom couple floor's fortifications.

Until the invaders brought flying critters. Which made a beeline for the entrance, which passed right by the tower with all the marksdwarves on it.

Wave of flyers < hail of bolts < rain of 30 flyers and the (previously) mounted invaders.

It got so predictable that I just build a moat under the cliff with a fill/drain system. Conveniently, siege begin to breaking took about the same time as it took to fill, then drain the moat, and end up with no waste but iron.