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[Captain Crazy]

Giant bugs are quite uninteresting compared to the chitin-clad, emotionless monstrosities they could be. In general, giant bugs are little more than vermin that have been sized up through RAW magic,but could achieve so much more with specialized editing. I have some suggestions that would make them more flavorful and useful to the discerning fortress.

A lot of bugs and creepy crawlies have antennae. Antennae are sensory organs that function differently from bug to bug, but could function in Dwarf Fortress as a general nerve-dense bit of anatomy that could serve as a "weak spot". Destroying the antennae would have a disorienting effect. Bugs have mouths, but many of the giant bugs can't bite. Many bugs, like grasshoppers, don't seem to bite people all that much in real life, mainly because they're many many times smaller than us. But they definitely have chewing mandibles, which they use to eat grass. Bump up their size a couple of orders of magnitude, and they ought to be able to use those mandibles to chew on dwarf heads. More on the grasshopper (just as an example, I'm more of a fan of Giant Mosquitos), they have legs that, proportionally, are incredibly powerful. If that grasshopper is now donkey sized, proportionally speaking their legs should be able to kick a dwarf a mile or so into the distance. Other creatures will have combat skills tailored to their biology: Mantises with brutally powerful, agile strikes, Giant Jumping spiders having a fantastic innate jumping, ambushing and sensing skill and the ability to pin down prey while they attack with fangs.

Bugs also lay eggs, for the most part. If we were biologically accurate, there'd be game-breaking clutches of hundreds and hundreds of eggs, but average clutches would be less insane. A breeding pair of giant bugs would go from useless to a useful supply of meat, eggs and other animal bits. Life spans should be adjusted from a single year to multiple years - having young that goes from egg to fully-grown adult in a single year seems pretty imbalanced and it's basically psychological torture for anybody who would adopt a giant bug as their pet. I'm not sure if it's possible for RAWs to express life-cycle stages like larvae and pupae in an anatomical sense, so they'd be larvae and nymphs and stuff in name and tile only.

Giant bugs should be trainable to some extent. No war snails or anything like that, but let me tell you, I had a jumping spider in my window once and I'd drop it bugs and it would pounce on them in a blink of an eye. I feel like if that spider were still alive and also the size of a horse, he'd be a pretty darn good hunter. Predatory insects like giant mantises and spiders of all sorts should be able to accompany soldiers and hunters. Creatures who are obviously passive, like moths, should not be trainable as war or hunting animals though.

If you read that, thanks! I'm sick and it's summer and I'm just getting back into Dwarf Fortress so I'll probably dig into the raws and do some of this myself, but it would be great if these features were available to everybody.

[Karakzon]

Just to note:

Muscle efficiency is inversely proportional to the size of the organisms.
The bigger the organism the less efficient their muscle mass. Scaling an ant up will not produce something that can lift cars/buildings.
In fact their exoskeleton after a certain size would be too heavy for them to lift.

This little fact is something allot of people into bugs seem to forget or disregard. Now i know this is a fantasy world, but toady hasent stated how these giant variants come around so. Something to keep in mind.

[GavJ]

It's not a matter of muscle efficiency. Your muscles produce just as much force as an ant's per cross-sectional area for the same amount of glucose or whatever per cross-sectional area. It's because of the ratio of force to body weight. If you double in size, your weight multiplies by EIGHT, but your muscle and bone cross sections only multiply by FOUR. So the resistance of your own body increases faster than your strength does, just because of squaring versus cubing.

If your exact body (proportionally that is, obviously you can't squish atoms down) were the size of an ant, then you would also be able to lift 5x your own weight, or probably actually MORE than that, because you have beefier, human sized proportions. You might be able to life 10-20x your weight potentially (although you are squishy and undefended versus mandibles)



On the other hand, it's a fantasy game...

[Dirst]

DF does its own thing when adjusting attacks for creature size.  I think the OP's point was that some attacks which are pointless at insect sizes (and thus absent from the raws) should be added to giant creatures.

Probably the easiest way to do that would be to make a CREATURE_VARIATION:ADD_BITE_AND_KICK_ATTACKS and sprinkle it on creatures as needed.  Some giant creatures are already singled out for trainability, so adding to that list becomes more of a case-by-case issue for flavor.

[2074red2074]

If we want to talk about realism, then we shouldn't have giant bugs at all. Most bugs' body systems are impossible when scaled up. An ant the size of a horse would suffocate unless it was constantly in hurricane-force winds, for example. Also, why would a grasshopper attack dwarves anyway? It would be more realistic if it decimated all of the above-ground plants until you kill it. Killing it should also be very easy, because grasshoppers don't fight. They only run away.

[Dirst]

If we want to talk about realism, then we shouldn't have giant bugs at all. Most bugs' body systems are impossible when scaled up. An ant the size of a horse would suffocate unless it was constantly in hurricane-force winds, for example. Also, why would a grasshopper attack dwarves anyway? It would be more realistic if it decimated all of the above-ground plants until you kill it. Killing it should also be very easy, because grasshoppers don't fight. They only run away.

And the dragonbreath that's about 4 times the temperature of the Sun?  Remember that it's a game.

The "realism" here is maintaining suspension of disbelief by maintaining some level of consistency.  If there was a 50s sci-fi B movie with a giant grasshopper, I would certainly expect it to bite and kick people.

[Niddhoger]

Giant Cave War-Spiders? I already pen them outside the front of my fortress.  The two of them have made short work of hte last so many goblins dumb enough to enter my domain >D Having them actually assigned to (especially marksdwarves) would be infinitely better.  What immobilizes better than giant cave spiders? Once they are down (through poison or web) the marksdwarve can easily shred whats left. It would be almost too powerful... 

If we are also bitching about realism... I seriously doubt that a bug has the capacity to be trained in any way.  These things aren't anywhere near the top of the food chain when it comes to intellectual capacity.  There is probably too much of an evolutionary gap between species anyway (dogs are also mammals and can easily tell our sexes apart from a distance, and can easily understand our tone of voice/body language as an example- those last two make training so much easier).

As for eggs... I always thought it silly that as many statistics as this game has, that 1 unit of food=1 meal across the board.  So a handful of spinach leaves is worth the same calories as the same weight in pure lard!? Also, take 2 plump helmets.  They are worth exactly two meals.  Turn one of them into 5 Dwarven Wine and mix the two together and you wind up with 6 plump helmet biscuits... worth 6 meals.  If foods had different nutritional values then you could easily have your 1000+ clutch sizes for bugs, but you'd need to eat 100 or so for a proper meal. 

The first thing I'd like to see change about giant bugs, however, is the use of chitin.  As it stands chitin (and shells) are good fer nothing.  At least let use make chitin crafts/decorate with it if not use it for lightweight armor.  Once we can properly use their remains and add breeding to them, we can worry about training them as war beasts.

[GavJ]

Bugs can be trained. Ants have been trained to use a leaf as a teleport pad, for instance. If a person routinely lifts it and lays it down near food, they will gather on the leaf and wait for a ride, and then go get food and gather and wait for a ride again.