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[Bohandas]

Now that it's going to be possible for animalmen etc to be incorporated into different civilizations I think it would be good to have different kinds of civilizatioms be less or more tolerant/receptive to that sort of thing  (with said level of acceptance of course being defined via tags in their entity raws)

[NW_Kohaku]

To put the devlog in a quote for the benefit of future readers...

05/04/2015
 Some time ago, I mentioned that as part of adding visitors to your fortress inn and tavern, we'd have more animal people running around. I put that in today -- there are now reasonably rare instances of animal people leaving the wilderness and becoming involved with civilizations. Our first was a red panda man that became an herbalist in a human village for some years before taking up a wandering life as a musician. In adventure mode, you can now play as animal people if they are close to a civilization. You can also play an adventurer from any population that has established itself as a regular part of life in a civilized site where you can normally play, so you could play an elf or even a goblin if some already live in a human city, say, but you can't currently select an amphibian person from the sewers. Next up we should have some dev log on fortress visitors!

WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! I've been hoping for this sort of thing for a long, long time. 

I'm just hoping that we'll have more robust capacity to accept non-dwarven characters into our forts, as well as a greater degree of differences.

Currently, IIRC, dwarves can only socialize with dwarves, even if humans or elves or whatever are part of your fortress for some reason.  This is partly due to an assumed "the point of relationships is to get married and have kids" thing in the game, and a lack of cross-breeding. 

Meanwhile, most whatever-people are hasty copy-paste changes to a base template creature.  Some whatever-people have lifespans that are fairly short, while a ton of them are not in any significant way different from one another.  Thanks to things like underwater tiles always being unpathable/unbuildable or canceling jobs, aquatics like squidpeople air-drown (de geso!), and even amphibious creatures are functionally identical to anything else.  Tigerpeople aren't really any stronger than other creatures, nor are slothpeople any slower (in fact being faster than dwarves), and lovebirdpeople are no more loving (nor can they fly).

[helmacon]

Since today has recently overhauled the way Dwarves and creatures think, I wonder if he is going to segway that into a rewrite of how sentients interact with each other. I think it would make a nice juxtaposition, and they could be optimised for each other. Plus, with a game as big as DF is now it would be smart for today to do related features while the mechanics of the one are still fresh in his mind.

I for one would'nt mind him breaking away from his current work for something like that.

[Revenant342]

Having animal people be part of your fort could be a major asset if they actually had different performance.  Imagine an archer squad of avians?  Or amphibians with the ability to build underwater?  Or even tiger people being stronger in combat?  Could lead to some cool diplomatic gameplay, trying to befriend these races for those reasons.

[NW_Kohaku]

But with carnivore tigerpeople, and herbivore snapping turtlepeople... Creatures that require different living conditions.  I remember being in a discussion a couple years back about how tigerpeople might require different quarters or the like... searching... searching... Here we go!

One of the arguments then was that these different creatures need to have at least some sort of baked-in differences between themselves and dwarves, such that tigerpeople are better wrestlers, or a lovebirdperson would have very nimble weaving/craftslovebirdperson skills.

[Niddhoger]

Other than amphibous tags (which don't work as much as we'd wish), the only real difference with animal people is that the serpentmen actually have natural poison.  So they'd be excellent in your military being able to (naturally) poison foes.  However, bites don't work well against armor and the AI doesn't usually know how to properly prioritize various attacks anyway. 

But yes, they'd need something unique about them to make us really care.  Right now, there is only a slight change in diet- like the tigermen that only eat meat.  Given that they have barely any manufactered goods beyond the odd spear and blow gun, and live in tents (at best), I'd say low creativity/analytical skills and high stats in agility, strength, endurance, etc. 

[Vattic]

I think it would make sense to have acceptance of the kind you describe vary on a personal level also. Then you could find situations where only a portion of your citizens have a problem with trigerman migrants (maybe they are from a fort that had bloody battles with them).

Better differentiated animal people is a topic worthy of it's own thread unless I missed one. A number of them shouldn't have claws only as powerful as dwarven nails, or teeth as sharp.

[AceSV]

I've been playing around with differentiating animal people in my Furry Fortress mod.  Mine are designed to replace dwarves instead of integrate them, since that's how it works for now, but here's what I got: 

Vulps (Foxes) - Trancing, alcohol dependent, average stats, bites and scratches are primary, punches and kicks are secondary, natural biting skill of 1, dog teeth
Lagomers (Rabbits) - alcohol dependent, grazers, very agile, very fast gait, rodent teeth, should have larger than average legs, but I haven't gotten around to that
Komodos (Varanids) - carnivores, natural ambusher skill, dwarf-like strength and toughness, tail slap attack (which I never got to work), claws instead of nails
Anatos (Ducks) - amphibious (which doesn't work), high endurance (bird lungs)
Equids (Horse/Centaur) - centauroid body, hooves, large body size, penalty to mining skill
Leokin (Lion) - carnivore, claws, large body size, large eye teeth, males are larger than females and less common, males are natural fighters, females are natural hunters, penalty to mining skill
Ratuls (Honey Badgers) - a joke race, prone to rage, bone carn, maxed out toughness and disease resistance, fart reflex breath attack (like skunks), all ethics and values set to zero because they don't care

One of the things on my to-do list is to change their personality dispositions.  So far, I've only done this with Ratuls to make them not care harder, and with Leokin males to make sure they can reproduce.  I've noticed that changing the ethics and values for civilizations can have interesting impacts on how they behave.  Komodos don't care about craftsmanship, so they don't get made if you melt down a masterwork.  Lagomers like nature, so they don't mind being outdoors. 

My experience so far has been that the interactions in Dwarf Fortress are vague enough that you can reuse a lot of features for different races, Komodos, Leokin and Ratuls all share a lot of traits, and small changes can make a big difference, for example Vulps are surprising good at fighting allegedly because of their preference for biting, but this is true of their legendary swordsvulps too, and the carnivore races promote a very different lifestyle and fortress design.  I made a list of mod tokens I would have liked to have that might turn into some useful differentiation ideas. 

[NW_Kohaku]

I don't think it's impossible by any stretch, but it is something that takes work.

The problem with DF right now is that Toady tends to add a bajillion critters into the game, and add the functionality to make several of them different, and then doesn't; Instead he relies upon copy-pasting their stats over and over again until they're differentiated in name, only.

Take, for instance, the fact that a cow is, except for the tags that indicate aggression, by and large the exact same animal as an alligator.  There is nothing that indicates superior bite strength between a domestic cow compared to an alligator.  In fact, cows are better predators since they have larger teeth, and therefore do more damage with their bites. 

This can be solved with mods editing the raws to some extent, but there are going to be things missing unless Toady adds more flexibility to the raws.

But this is a sort of self-perpetuating problem.  The reason Toady doesn't make these animals unique and detailed is because it takes a lot of time, so he doesn't do it.  So he makes them clone-stamped and amorphous... then, when he tries to add more variety, rather than make what is already there more unique, he gives up, and he winds up just making more clone-stamped things like just adding in every friggin' vegetable whose name he can grab off a list, and never adding any way to differentiate them...  Which makes it harder and harder to go back and reconfigure those things into something unique, as well...