In the interest of science, boredom and potential FUN, I decided to create a fort in order to test some of the functions behind animal training in .34.11.
So here's what I learned after taming over 2000+ Ravens and 2500+ Alligators:
- Animal Trainers really don't like training animals if all your food is inside containers. 60 idle animal trainers and 50k food stockpiled inside pots and barrels. I butcher 10 animals and all the sudden everyone goes on a taming spree. I haven't been able to narrow this one down to a point where I'm 100% sure of the behavior, but it seems pretty accurate.
- An animal child born from a trained parent can be domesticated while it is still a child. Once it reaches adulthood, it can no longer be domesticated. If you want to keep gaining animal trainer experience and overall training experience for your fort, have masterfully trained parents give birth and don't assign trainers to the children until they become adults.
- Domesticating 2000+ of an animal isn't enough for a fort to reach "Domesticated" in the Overall Training menu screen. Neither is decades of reinforcing training for non-domesticated parents. I'm not sure if you need a completely ridiculous amount of animals trained, if you need more than 30-40 years' worth of caravans bringing back knowledge or if reaching domestication of a species requires some other method; end result is that multiple Gatorsplosions weren't enough for my fort to Domesticate Alligators.
- Animals born from egg-layers don't gain their parent's Pasture status, animals born from non egg-layers keep the parent's Pasture status. Made my Giant Dingos significantly less of a hassle to train and handle than my Ravens and Alligators.
- Trying to domesticate Alligators, Giant Dingos and other assorted animals made training my Weremammoth army really easy.
Oh right, Vucardomas is home to near 80 dwarves who have been turned into Weremammoths. I caught a Weremonkey early on during my fort's life and I was trying to get a weremonkey army started when some Snake Man man showed up and got randomly caged. When the next full moon came about, I realized the Snake Man was a Weremammoth and abandoned my efforts towards making a weremonkey army and started working on a weremammoth army. Here are some of the stuff I found out doing this.
- Not all werecreatures are equal. I had one of my better militia dwarves become a weremonkey and fed him hundreds of war dogs/disarmed goblins to train him up to legendary. I then had him fight animal men to transmit the curse to said animal men (mostly moth/loose/mosquito/tree frog men). Every other transformation, he'd end up with broken bones and other various injuries that would've sent a dwarf to the hospital. Weremammoths will win against 20 legendary wrestlers/shield/armor users, force most of them to run away due to broken or severed limbs and kill a few of them during a single transformation - without sustaining more than bruises and a broken tail/trunk. 20 legendary dwarves in full masterwork steel and iron.
- Weremammoths are absolutely deadly. They're about as deadly as a speardwarf using full steel masterwork gear. They're also about as hard to kill. They'll break bones and bite off limbs through steel armor. They'll easily sever off limbs (including heads) of an unarmored or poorly armored for and I've even seen a few dwarves get cut in half by angry weremammoths.
- Lycanthropy doesn't transmit if the bite instantly severs off a limb (or if it does, it only does so less than 1% of the time). The bite may or may not transmit the curse if the limb is severed off after the werecreature shakes it off. Even if a bite doesn't sever a limb off, the curse still isn't guaranteed to be transmited.
- It's extremely difficult to transmit lycanthropy to some animal men because of how weak and flimsy they are.
- Ettin weremammoth. Giant weremammoth. Probably Minotaur weremammoths, but minotaurs are way too flimsy to be turned reliably and I got bored of save scumming. I'm guessing anything with CAN_LEARN can become a werebeast.
- Based on how the legendary snake man and the Giant fought while transformed, and based on the couple of times I forgot to properly lock up my weremammoth dwarves before a full moon and based on how my weremonkeys fought, it seems that 1) a werebeast's size isn't properly represented in-game by looking at the cage weight, 2) different species of werebeasts have vastly different sizes and 3) a werebeast gain's his normal form's skill levels while transformed. My snake man who killed hundreds of dwarves in my pursuit of pachyderm army was significantly better at fighting than my Giant, as evidenced by the combat logs that showed the Giant getting few hits on my elite militia for the first few transformations while the snake man was happily killing and dismembering the same elite dwarves with appalling ease. Same with bitten recruits who ran around fighting my military: they'd still win against my militia, but they'd miss far more frequently than the snake man or the giant ever did. But then again, this could be totally wrong and it's entirely possible that what I noticed were just capricious dice rolls.
- For werebeasts to train properly, you have to put down an armor stand or weapon rack, make it a barracks and enlarge the room and then cut off ground access to the armor stand/weapon rack so that the werebeasts don't destroy it. Using an artifact armor stand/weapon rack causes werebeasts to bug out and keep attacking the armor stand/weapon rack until their next transformation. This one probably needs to be reported on the tracker - I can't log on the tracker though, if someone could help out, that'd be great.
- You can station your werebeasts while they're transformed with squad commands: s > squad letter > m > enter. This one's probably a bug, too.
- Werebeasts will still spar (and sometimes kill each other with wrestling throws) while transformed.
- Werebeasts dwarves still need booze every month otherwise they slow down. Giving them a waterskin helps a lot.
- Werebeasts are still scared of fire and will not path through it, making them not viable against clowns.
http://mkv25.net/dfma/movie-2525-weremammothsvsforgottenbeastshttp://imgur.com/a/cYik0Stuff I didn't get to test:
Can a werecreature become a vampire?
If a berserking sentient becomes a werecreature, does it become double? berserk while transformed?
Some other fun things I learned during this:
Training wrestlers who wear a helm/chainmail/greaves will give you plenty of non-threatening injuries to deal with, great for training doctors
On-duty military dwarves don't get happy thoughts from observing furniture
If your bookeeper dies, your fort's records will eventually degrade over a few decades. Might also work if he's relieved from duty.
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Topic: Vucardomas: ‼SCIENCE‼ of animal training and other fun things (Read 14031 times)