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[TheEqualsE]

I've never messed with the tags on creatures before but I'm not afraid to.  I was thinking of adding the ability to learn to giant animals.  Would they learn during the fights on the history screen?  Or would that only happen once they got to my fort?  Mostly I just thought it would be cool if tamed giant animals became better fighters from their experiences.

Is there a tag that would let them talk and be able to join civs?  What would happen if I did?  Would some civs elect a giant talking eagle or lion to be the king of their lands?  Is there some kind of horrible down side to this I'm not seeing?

This post was inspired by an engraving of a giant crocodile that was slaying an elf.  The giant crocodile was pointing and laughing.  It would be cool if that could really happen.

[Staalo]

Someone accidentally managed to get intelligent wolverines once; apparently it wasn't as fun as one would think.

I myself have noticed that animals with an added [CAN_LEARN] tag will learn combat skills in fortress mode, as expected. I suppose it would also work during worldgen, but according to the wiki [INTELLIGENT] would be better for what you're after.

[newoldbroccoli]

you would need to add the [INTELLIGENT] tag to the giant animal that you want to make intelligent. [CAN_LEARN] can also work but if you want them to talk you would need to and the [CAN_SPEAK] token added doing this would let you butcher them too. after that you would need to add the creature token to the entity raw using [CREATURE:] then the thing you wants name just add it to the top of the civ you want it to appear in i'd recommend the animal people civ because it's the easiest and they won't build their own cities you could also just copy and paste one of the civs and replace the creature in the [CREATURE:] token. also if you want to mod the game further i would recommend looking at the tokens page on the wiki.

[TheEqualsE]

Thanks, this is just the kind of info I was looking for.  Yeah I didn't mean for the giant animals to build cities, just be able to join them.  I'm really curious to see how it would effect world generation.  I did spend some time looking at all the tags to see if there were any more that did what I was looking for and nothing jumped out at me.

It seems to me if I did this some would show up in taverns sometimes and might ask to join the fort which would be awesome.

There's got to be some kind of horrible downside to this right?  They become too powerful and weaken the civs around them and take them all over?

[Shonai_Dweller]

Thanks, this is just the kind of info I was looking for.  Yeah I didn't mean for the giant animals to build cities, just be able to join them.  I'm really curious to see how it would effect world generation.  I did spend some time looking at all the tags to see if there were any more that did what I was looking for and nothing jumped out at me.

It seems to me if I did this some would show up in taverns sometimes and might ask to join the fort which would be awesome.

There's got to be some kind of horrible downside to this right?  They become too powerful and weaken the civs around them and take them all over?

LOCAL_POPS_PRODUCE_HEROES allows wild animal-men to join civs. You could experiment with that and see what happens.

[newoldbroccoli]

Thanks, this is just the kind of info I was looking for.  Yeah I didn't mean for the giant animals to build cities, just be able to join them.  I'm really curious to see how it would effect world generation.  I did spend some time looking at all the tags to see if there were any more that did what I was looking for and nothing jumped out at me.

It seems to me if I did this some would show up in taverns sometimes and might ask to join the fort which would be awesome.

There's got to be some kind of horrible downside to this right?  They become too powerful and weaken the civs around them and take them all over?

i've done crazier and have seen no problems. Any effect it may have is insignificant, so you'll probably be fine just play around with it and you'll figure it out.

[Fleeting Frames]

There's got to be some kind of horrible downside to this right?  They become too powerful and weaken the civs around them and take them all over?

I'm afraid the biggest downside you'll experience is changes not being all that dramatic, with perhaps some buffing in war for the giant animals' favourite sites (I'd wager biggest bonus on town and almost nothing on goblins) and possibly more favourable megabeast encounters.

Cunning and skill beats youth and talent, but even beyond that I don't recall seeing a site that is led by animal man at the end of worldgen - to the point where I find it a little odd, given the sites I pay attention to frequently manage to be led by a different civilized race such as goblin or elf in a town, and not-infrequently manage to get three-digit animalmen population, and even four-digit ones on quite rare occasions. I suspect the cause is the same which makes visitors of their unusual species abnormally rare.

Elephant or rhino men, despite being vastly larger than most giant animals, do not seem to dominate anything, so I expect that if you give the same set of tags as animal people get on giant animal variations you'll just have effectively twice as many animal people joining sites.

[Shonai_Dweller]

But curiously gorlaks seem to do quite well, I've several sites with gorlak rulers. Maybe they just make for convenient administrators when goblins take over a site?

[Paxiecrunchle]

 Posting to watch, I can't wait to see where this… Experiment…goes, while you're at it you could probably change their files to have some humanoid arms ( because opposable thumbs should let him do a lot more things ) to most of the things with hooves I imagine.

[Cathar]

Cunning and skill beats youth and talent

It's more like "alone we are weak, but together we form a mighty faggot !"
I think there's an "escape velocity" for any given population. You need at least n members of a certain race at the same spot if you want to see them multiply.
DF has quite harsh conditions for reproduction. Individuals must be compatible, have fitting marriage preferences, be under 10 years of difference, not be siblings, etc. So short of micromanaging their reproduction, the chances of spawning a population from a low number of couples is very low. And since rhinomen and elephant men are rare to begin with, their numbers invariably dwindle... Whereas gorlaks live in huge tribes under the ground.

[PatrikLundell]

Adding arms, speech, etc. to giant animals would make them very similar to the corresponding animal people. The arm bit is definitely going too far.

The age marriage (and other) restriction applies only inside fortresses. You can get married migrants and visitors with larger age differences, and world gen characters can also have rather incestous parentages.

[Staalo]

The age marriage (and other) restriction applies only inside fortresses. You can get married migrants and visitors with larger age differences, and world gen characters can also have rather incestous parentages.

Ah, so it isn't a bug? I've been wondering at some of my migrant families lately whose family trees look like a plate of spaghetti. It's a miracle they don't have banjo music following them everywhere they go.

[PatrikLundell]

You'll have to ask Toady if it's intentional, but I suspect the close family are unintentional, at least. If not, the banjo is missing only because of DF's limited sound and because Toady hasn't yet coded the degeneration part (that part missing makes animal breeding a lot easier...).

[Cathar]

Adding arms, speech, etc. to giant animals would make them very similar to the corresponding animal people. The arm bit is definitely going too far.

The age marriage (and other) restriction applies only inside fortresses. You can get married migrants and visitors with larger age differences, and world gen characters can also have rather incestous parentages.

One could also argue that non-HF figures can produce offsprings rather easily compared to inside fortress dorfs, but my point remains about the escape velocity you need to any given population - you need pops to be gathered in enough numbers so their reproduction rate is higher than their attriction (old age, war, random accidents, ambushes etc). That's what Im trying to say. Most animal men simply never reach this number and therefore are doomed to extinction

Of course I can be completely wrong but to me it seems a pretty solid reason the elephant men dont take over any given world. I see this scenario happening over and over : a carnivorous animal man (tiger-man, wolf man etc.) will come to prominence, do a lot of crazy stuff, become the leader of a goblin city or a kobold pack, then... simply die off without offspring. He is then replaced by vanilla kobold or gobbos and that's the end of the story for another 50 years

[Fleeting Frames]

While other people (Max™) have reported flymensplosion in elven sites, I'm not sure I've seen animal men increase in number beyond joining a region - from "few dozen rat men join fortress" twice to that fortress having 120 rat men century and half later, which is in range of maintaining (but of course, they could have joined the fortress from elsewhere, or df may be deciding that "right, this fort will always have this many X" [though that is countermanded by other less populous animal people species dying out after joining, I've definitely seen a fort maintain hold of single instance of dozens of lion tamarin men joining over four and half centuries, as I only have two regions to check on this]).

World history doesn't list the species of  ruler, but you should be able to easily notice that scenario happening in towns easily by just checking keeps in legends mode, given they're mostly short chronicles of rulership changing. I haven't seen it, but I haven't given nearly any attention to keeps beyond their founding date.

I don't if this is linked to their no-showing as visitors (though I've seen, like, three in total), but at least they can become leaders of zombie groups and make towers. Heh; I find on an average tower will have more animal people than any other site of same population.