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[Hague]

I was thinking that perhaps animals could be trained in different ways. Specifically two options:

Raise a Feed Animal: This option will allow you to expend a unit of edible food (for that animal's type) and make the animal into a "Feed animal" ie "Feed Cow" Effectively, a feed animal becomes a size or two larger allowing it to produce more meat, fat, and bones when butchered. The higher quality of the training, the more the animal produces relative to its size. This would give your animal trainer a more domestic use than training animals of destruction.

Train a Pack Animal: This task would give the creature the ability to act as hauler for any number of goods. A pack animal could be assigned to a hauler and will follow the hauler and pick the same type of goods that the hauler has tasked. The higher the quality of training the animal gets the stronger and tougher it becomes, allowing it to hold more weight. Additionally, the quality can affect personality traits that dictate the animal's work ethic, stubborness, and the time it takes to make pathfinding decisions.

If quality isn't really a hidden factor in animal training, it should be. For example, a legendary trainer should be able to train better war dogs than a novice. War dogs would be faster, stronger, tougher, and get a damblock bonus based on quality level. Hunting animals could have sharper senses and be able to detect hidden units from farther away or have more agility and greater ambush skill. Also, a well-trained animal could also be a point of admiration for fortess-dwellers. You could have thoughts like: "Tobol Smashedbins admired an excellently trained war dog lately. Tobol Smashedbins admired his own highly trained pack mule."

[Drunken]

I like it, especially as the pack mule idea is a very elegant solution to some of the transport ideas that keep coming up, and because I find hunting dogs dont seem to perform to the standard I would like. I actually stopped making hunting dogs because they simply chased animals around and only seemed to catch one after the hunter had shot a bolt into it's face, after which the dog would take credit for the kill by chomping the uncoscious creature.
Drunken has admired a finely crafted suggestion lately

[Thassa]

Well, the feed animal idea while nice, would fit better as a new skill (Animal Husbandry) and possibly a new building (Stable?).  That said, I like the pack animal idea, and adding in Train Mount would be nice as well.  Better yet, Train War Mount (a War animal that can also carry a warrior).  I know Toady is working on getting mounts into Fortress Mode already, from the dev logs, so this could be an extension of that.    

If the stable idea is used, instead of having large milkable creatures be taken to the farm workshop (which doesn't work yet anyway), we could have ones in need of milking be summoned to the stable instead (in the same way animals get summoned for training).  Dairy cows aren't just milkable... they NEED to be milked.  It's actually painful for them if they miss a milking.

[ April 23, 2008: Message edited by: Thassa ]

[Hague]

The idea was that animal training isn't nearly as useful as it should be. I believe that adding a quality factor to animals would be imperative to making it so. Also, animal husbandry implies the selective breeding of animals which is far too complicated for a simple suggestion given the nature of animal breeding in DF.