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[Pinstar]

The idea is this: Breed lots of dogs, have a dedicated animal trainer make them all war dogs.

At the far edge of my fort's entrance, channel a single tile down (leaving the ramp) and dig a single tile out back one space. Build a cage, fill it with war dogs, build a hatch over the 1x1 tile ramp.

Connect the cage and the hatch to a lever. Pulling the lever will open the hatch and deconstruct the cage, freeing all the dogs.

The idea is to use it for two purposes:

1. When a thief is wandering away from my fort outside of my archer's effective range, releasing the dogs to take them down.
2. During a siege, after sending in my melee squad, releasing the dogs to attack the invaders from behind, and/or attack the ranged attackers.

I have a few questions:

1. Can a building destroyer smash open the hatch and/or cage?
2. Will the caged dogs impact an invasion's target selection even if the dogs can't be seen?
3. Do the dogs get a bonus for attacking/charging foes from behind?
3.1 Will a ranged attacker be rendered seriously less threatening if forced into melee with dogs?
3.2 How close would this burst of dogs need to be to auto-engage in the fight if they are not assigned to any of the military dwarves?
4. If I have a LOT of dogs all piled into one cage and thus one tile, will that cause problems with them getting out fast enough to be effective? Would a 1 cage-per-dog setup be more effective?
5. Does an animal trainer bond with every single animal they train? If so, how do you keep them sane in the event that my dog swarm takes heavy losses?
6. How long does it take to train a single dog/puppy into a war dog?

[smjjames]

One thing though, can you actually build the cage on top of the hatch? They're both structures so you shouldn't be able to.

1. It should be safe from the building destroyer, unless they get above it or something, as for the cage, I don't think so, no.

2. No idea on this.

3. I don't know if there IS an attacking from behind bonus, but it's not something you would have control over. However, if they get stunned or whatever from the fall, they'll be vulnerable.

4. Nope, attatching the cage to a lever and pulling said lever will release everything in there instantly.

5. I don't know the answer exactly myself, but the wiki does go into that a bit.

6. Fast, within an ingame day I think.

[Blue_Dwarf]

That's a very fun idea that won't work 

Here's a list of what is wrong dwarf with it:

1) Only one dwarf can haul animals into a cage (unlike a pasture), so after you release them it will take a while to get them back into the cage

2) If you put the cage out of line of sight to the invaders, the dogs will run to your meeting area instead (which is probably your dining room)

3) Most of the dogs will die during the siege

4) Trying to repopulate the cage will ruin your frame rate

Releasing them from a single cage shouldn't be an issue (you'll have worse problems anyway). 1 cage per dog would be a nightmare to micromanage.

Training them just turns them into a War Dog (Tame). It's assigning them to a dwarf that causes them to get a name and makes them his pet. Training jobs take the same amount of time as other jobs.

[Pinstar]

The cage is one Z level UNDER the hatch

_H    <---Z
Cr     <---Z-1

_=flat ground
H=hatch cover
r= ramp
C= mined out square with built cage

So the cage cannot be seen by anyone on the surface as long as the hatch cover is closed. The 'release the hounds' lever would be hooked to both the cage and the hatch. (Thus deconstructing the cage and opening the hatch in a single pull). The dogs would then run up one Z level using the natural ramp and be able to attack things on the surface.

[acetech09]

The idea is this: Breed lots of dogs, have a dedicated animal trainer make them all war dogs.

At the far edge of my fort's entrance, channel a single tile down (leaving the ramp) and dig a single tile out back one space. Build a cage, fill it with war dogs, build a hatch over the 1x1 tile ramp.

Connect the cage and the hatch to a lever. Pulling the lever will open the hatch and deconstruct the cage, freeing all the dogs.

The idea is to use it for two purposes:

1. When a thief is wandering away from my fort outside of my archer's effective range, releasing the dogs to take them down.
2. During a siege, after sending in my melee squad, releasing the dogs to attack the invaders from behind, and/or attack the ranged attackers.

I have a few questions:

1. Can a building destroyer smash open the hatch and/or cage?
2. Will the caged dogs impact an invasion's target selection even if the dogs can't be seen?
3. Do the dogs get a bonus for attacking/charging foes from behind?
3.1 Will a ranged attacker be rendered seriously less threatening if forced into melee with dogs?
3.2 How close would this burst of dogs need to be to auto-engage in the fight if they are not assigned to any of the military dwarves?
4. If I have a LOT of dogs all piled into one cage and thus one tile, will that cause problems with them getting out fast enough to be effective? Would a 1 cage-per-dog setup be more effective?
5. Does an animal trainer bond with every single animal they train? If so, how do you keep them sane in the event that my dog swarm takes heavy losses?
6. How long does it take to train a single dog/puppy into a war dog?

1. Yes. Hatches can't be destroyed from underneath, though. The easiest way to work around this is to make the ramps into the wall, with a hatch on top of those, and a area next to it for the cage. See edit. **

2. No, not if the hatch is closed & indestructible.

3. Yes. There will be a bonus to attack rolls if the target is already engaged with another enemy.
a. Yes, provided there are enough dogs.
b. LOS, with which the prescribed deployment system would be nearly instantly.

4. The dogs' natural AI will want to spread out, but if they are released and in immediate sight of an enemy, they'll charge. no problem.

5. Not sure about bonding, but animal trainers should be isolated from the rest of the public and contained before the dogs are released. They should be expendable.

6. No clue.

** EDIT: Even a better solution is to make a bridge-wall with the cage behind it. That would ensure immediate LOS, as well as building destroyer invulnerability.

Like so.

Code: [Select]

Entrance

O+++O
║+++║
║+++╚═══╗
║+++╥+‼<║
║+++╨+‼╔╝
║+++╔══╝
║+++║

Fort

╥
╨ is a 1x2 bridge that raises left.
‼ are your cages.
< is a up stair with a hatch placed over it. So your dorfs can restock cages but still invunlerable from destroyers.



[Snaake]

1. Yea, if the hatch is on the surface and the cage underground, trolls (and other building destroyers) will see the hatch and want to destroy it. You could also exploit this by placing (ideally webbed) cage traps around the hatch, if you want.

2. Don't think they'll try to attack the dogs, if they're in a cage and/or behind a locked hatch.

3. There IS an attacking from behind bonus (or at least I assume so, because why mention attacks from behind in fortress mode combat reports otherwise), but I think it's mostly/only for being shot at from behind. So sending 2 forces at invaders from different directions will give minimal benefits, if any, in terms of combat rolls, but of course you'll surround them faster, and they'll have a hard time running away, so the tactical advantage still remains.

And, as noted, a lot of the dogs will die; they're unarmored, and smaller than a dwarf/goblin anyway.

3.1. Yes, because a) they'll be hitting the dogs rather than shooting railguns crossbows at your dwarves, and b) a crossbow isn't a proper hammer in melee, nor is a bow a very good sword (bows use sword skill in melee IIRC). Neither are harmless if made of metal, but not as dangerous as the actual weapons either.

3.2. Line of sight, so no doors/walls etc, and a distance of what, within 20 tiles or so? Thereabouts, anyway (compare to how close invaders need to get to stationed military before said military notices them and charges at them).

4. 50 dogs per cage is fine if you want to do that. There's no delay on leaving the cage, but they might take a few extra seconds all squeezing through the 1 ramp tile, much like dwarves squeeze past each other in 1-tile wide hallways. Probably wouldn't take so long as to be uneffective, but yea, maybe 50 in 1 cage isn't the best of ideas, even if it is still feasible.

5. The animal trainer bond is a loose one, and not a proper pet bond. All it does is make the animal follow the trainer around like a pet does, instead of hanging out at a meeting hall (assuming it isn't in a pasture, cage, or restraint, of course). The trainer gets no bad though if the animal dies. If you put the animal for adoption, or assign it as a war or hunting animal, then the owner will get a bad thought from the death (but also of course be comforted by the pet while it's alive). The trainer bond is actually a handy way to e.g. give your hunter 5 hunting dogs by having him train them, but with no risk of bad thoughts even if they all get killed.

6. In my experience, war/hunting training is pretty quick, gets done within a few days. I've never paid attention to how long the job itself takes. The dog has to be a dog, not a puppy, so at least 1 year old, before you can do it. They won't reach full size until 2 years old, though. Btw, grizzly bears are trainable/full size at 1 and 2 respectively, as well.

Another option is pitting the dogs in, but then you have to make the enclosure bigger, so they won't fight each other to death (1 tile per dog or thereabouts?). You'd still need to trigger a door/hatch/bridge to open the path/LoS, but the advantage of pitting is that multiple "pit animal" jobs can be queued simultaneously.

[CaptainArchmage]

A much better idea is to use the larger war animals. You can also use pastures on top of a retracting bridge to quickly store the animals, and then pull the lever to release the animals. This will limit you to a smaller amount of animals to stop them from fighting, but you do not need to worry about mechanisms and reloading the room after sieges should not be as time consuming.

[hostergaard]

I have had the same idea in the back of my head for a long time and here is some things that I worked out;

- Any animal that don't graze will work. Got crocodiles? Throw them in there.

- Depending on the size of the map it may be useful to deploy them in a grid and make a smaller copy with levers inside the fortress to control them so you can accurately release where they are needed, especially useful for slower animals.

- Can be combined with a vampire surveillance system. But the vampire in a small tower with fortifications to spot and attract enemies, once the enemy gets close enough raise the bridge to protect the vampire and release your animal horde. Perhaps automate it with pressure plates.

[Bihlbo]

If you aren't that concerned with the frame rate hit, avoid the cage entirely. Pen the war dogs in a room big enough for at least 1 tile per 2 dogs and close off the room with a bridge that raises to form a wall. Fill the room, pull the lever to raise the bridge, and the dogs cannot be reached by invaders. When they are needed, pull the lever and they will either stay in place, attack any enemy close enough to be noticed, or start to wander if you decided it would be easier to mobilize them by removing the pen after they are enclosed (sending them into your meeting hall, most likely). I would limit access to the fort and build at least two of these near the entrance with windows as some of the walls so the dogs can spot skulking filth. A warning though, as soon as the dogs spring to action the dwarves will want to go re-pen the dogs, so there's another reason to de-pen them once they're behind the bridges.

If you release a cage full of animals into an enclosed space, like a single tile and a ramp next to it with a hatch keeping them in place, then it's very likely they'll attack each other.

[Larix]

Mostly what Bihlbo said - dumping your released animals in one place means they'll start out sitting on top of each other and will need quite a while to untangle themselves. All methods that restrict their line of sight _after_ release, like putting them in a bridged-off niche or on the bottom of a pit (the concept with the hatch) will also make it entirely possible that they spend a long time just sitting around idly because they simply can't see the enemy. Dropping them from above will stun and possibly injure them.

Although a bridge loaded down with heavy animals right above the pressure plate could be useful - when a creature falls and lands on top of another, the one on the ground will sustain the collision damage, i think. So if you have a bunch of otherwise mostly useless black bears, just draft them as drop bears.

EDIT re animal bonding: the risk of dead war dogs causing a trainer meltdown is minimal - the war training job is a very short one-shot deal, the chance of any bonding happening in those cases is negligible. Trainers form bonds with longer-term training partners - wild-caught animals that need lots of reinforcement training. If you have many self-caught war-capable animals, it's a good idea to only use their (fully tamed) offspring for war.

[Urist MacNoob]

Prepare to have your animal trainer go totally depressed insane from having all the dogs he's watched grow die en masse when the goblin siegers engage them in chaotic combat.

He will appear later in Dwarf of War II, voiced by Steve Blum, who also voices Steve Blum and Armok.

And Armok is Steve Blum.

...Unless, of course, you aren't going to throw them at sieges. Then he'll be fine and voiced by someone who isn't half as Steve Blum.

[Pinstar]

Thank you for all the responses. One more question.

If a war dog who is in a pasture gets LoS on a hostile creature outside their pasture, will they leave their pasture to go fight?

If they do, will this spam 'return creature to pasture' requests that might be fulfilled in the middle of combat?

[Snaake]

Thank you for all the responses. One more question.

If a war dog who is in a pasture gets LoS on a hostile creature outside their pasture, will they leave their pasture to go fight?

If they do, will this spam 'return creature to pasture' requests that might be fulfilled in the middle of combat?

My experience is yes to the first (even for non-war creatures like black bears, wolves etc., so basically if they're not the sort to just run away, they'll leave the pasture to attack), haven't noticed any spam for second. My guess the jobs don't get generated if the creature is fighting.

I mostly just keep war dogs in packs at entrances. Usually have so few other war animals that I keep them all together as a 2nd line of defence a bit further in.

[wooks]

War animals are fun, but I wish there was a better system for training that encompassed all animals based on your civs knowledge. It's the only thing I condone editing my Raws for. Sometimes you just want giant war moose.

[warwizard]

If the enemy has any helmet it just takes forever for even huge packs of dogs to kill the enemy, they can exhaust or cripple and make them pass out then it's the war dogs all try to chew through the copper cap and fail, for many pages, then the goblin wakes up and gets bitten where it does some good. so the proposed usage of near the edge to intercept fleeing thieves is reasonable, the thieves do not have helmets.

  I tried opening a cage full of about 40 dogs to stop a ambush squad, and the dogs only nabbed 1 goblin, the rest were able to path into the fort, less than what I'd call a stellar result.
   I let anybody train war animals and three training jobs run at the same time, and the trainers do not get bad thoughts from the deaths and a war animal or two following every dwarf makes for very few surprises and even fewer deaths.