I was laughing my ass off at this entire thread, and go to reply, when I notice that i've been
sigged! <3 DoctorMonch.
Anyway, back on the rails. To this entire thread:
- The mass of giant sponges makes them dangerous even with a shove. One might wonder exactly
how they are able to move.
- They have no nervous system, yet they feel anger. Poor thing.
- They have no central nervous system, yet cutting off the head of a sponge man seems to kill it. And no conventional weaponry seems to be able to have effect on a normal sponge.
A bit of arena testing makes the following conclusion:
Conventional (non-chemical and thermal weapons) are the wise way of dealing with giant sponges. A shove from a giant sponge was more than enough to cave in the skull of an olm man in my arena testing. Rushing a giant sponge with 10 olm men led to something interesting. The sponge crushed 5 of them, before
giving in to pain. And it's just sitting there now, still being hacked apart by the olm men with steel battle axes, to no avail. I tried it with a small sponge. It was definitely less lethal, a single olm man fighting it couldn't get crushed, and the sponge quickly passed out in pain.
In the past, I did research on flesh balls as training devices. They could make a legendary soldier not much slower than a danger room, but only with blunt weapons. Sponges seem to be the pinnacle of semi-live-fire training devices, cause they don't move and don't fall to edged weapons. I'm probably gonna do some research on it and report back later.
Obviously, sponges are a sentient, intelligent alien species inside an organic landing pod, cushioned to absorb the impact of hitting the ground from orbit. Inside these pods, the creatures sit. They will sit for as long as it takes, watching. Watching how we function, behave, and react. They will wait until the time is right before emerging from their passive girth that has been their disguise and conquer the world. If you attack the pod, they can fight back, they will get mad at you for denting their ride, and if they are too overwhelmed, they will curl up into a passive state and wait out the onslaught. We need to bathe the impostors with liquid fire, or use their pods as equipment to train the legions of axedwarves necessary to repulse the onslaught when it arrives.
The DF raws as they stand don't really have the structure (no pun intended) to deal with strange, abhorrent creatures that don't have nervous systems and strange, uniform body material.