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[Corvo]

I normally ignore animals in DF, but after some research, I realized what a mistake that has been.

First off, I have been trying to figure out what the best war animal is. So far I have seen lions, grizzly bears, and tigers mentioned so far. I'm not sure if there is any variety depending on what attributes you want (speed/damage/reproduction rates), or if there is just an objective best. I would assume that there IS an objective best for meat farming as well, with elephants or some other large animal taking the crown. (Perhaps there is some formula that takes in length of time until adulthood, offspring produced, meat produced, value of meat produced, etc.?)

Secondly, from what I have seen, I would assume that giant variations of animals are necessarily better than their regular sized counterparts. From what I can tell, they have the same food requirements and maturity growth rates, but are still much bigger and therefore are stronger in battle and produce more meat. With this in mind, is there any reason to breed non-giant variations of war/meat animals?

[PatrikLundell]

A reason to use regular sized animals for meat production is to get variation without as much over production. In order to keep a stock going, you need at least one breeding pair of a species (which can be slaughtered after having produced at least one breeding male and one breeding female, even if those are still too young to breed yet). This provides a rough minimum production of meat from each species as young are produced at a reasonably steady rate (and over time the litter size averages out to the average one).
If you want a lot of species you're going to get a lot of meat (and have to manage slaughter and tanning to not end up with miasma due to meat rotting in the slaughterhouse [the morons tend to haul off all refuse first, including non perishable bone, before hauling off the edible things]).

Depending on the size of your fortress, you may find that you build up a steadily growing stock of meat by keeping a variety of animals and may want to cut out one or more species to level the production out.

Apart from that, adult size, time to maturation, and litter size are the main factors when trying to maximize yield.

Note that pets can't be slaughtered and tame animals killed by anything other than slaughter won't be butchered (which obviously includes war animals killed in battle), with necro bacon being the loop hole on that logic.

[Thisfox]

I observe that I get a remarkable number of eggs (and subsequent egg roasts) from my ducks, turkeys, geese... And can eat the animals too. Litter size of 13 anyone? You can argue that they don't make war animals, but a lone turkey gobbler kicked a werebeast to death before it met a dorf at one point, so evidently they're still formidable in battle.

I do wish it were possible to make vanilla war-crocodiles. Those would produce eggs, meat, and so on, with a litter size of... 200 or so?

[Schmaven]

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I do wish it were possible to make vanilla war-crocodiles. Those would produce eggs, meat, and so on, with a litter size of... 200 or so?

That would make for a lethal pit trap to surprise goblins with.  I never hear much of trainable sea creatures, so war sharks too must sadly not be an option in vanilla DF.

[PatrikLundell]

Even if a croc litter was 200, you'd hit the animal threshold with it. However, I've had a snake-splosion in the past where I struggled with slaughtering down the number of animals to a reasonable number (adult at birth can result in a very rapid reproduction, even if the first egg clutch tends to be unfertilized).

The problem with training aquatic creatures is that dorfs won't train animals in water deeper than 3/7. There was a story about a ghost who continued to train animals after having risen, and that ghost might have been able to train aquatic animals if those had had the tag than makes animals trainable.

[DoubleG]

Croc broods are very large. I had a fewq clutches and that was enough to fill my animal cap. Few years for them to grow and I have so much meat now. Plus my civ knows a thing or two about training crocs. I wish crocs gave you leather. But they only give scales, which was a surprise.

[DwarfStar]

Croc broods are very large. I had a fewq clutches and that was enough to fill my animal cap. Few years for them to grow and I have so much meat now. Plus my civ knows a thing or two about training crocs. I wish crocs gave you leather. But they only give scales, which was a surprise.

There are quite a few mods that allow crafting with scales in various ways. Probably because that's a common complaint with vanilla DF.