Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Egan_BW]

Seems like [CAN_LEARN] would both lead to and necessitate some dog-centric gameplay. So it depends. Is this a pack of creatures, or a gameplay mod with a dog theme?

[Meph]

just wanted to mention that even with larger bodies, higher strength, natural biting and combat skills, dogs will still SUCK at combat. It's like sending unarmed, unarmored dwarves with combat skills and high strength into battle: They die just as easily as any other dwarf.

If you want to make dogs reasonably strong, you have to add weapons and armors (teeth, claw and skin layers) that are the equivalent of metals. In the past I had mods for armored pets, pet training and the like, through Dfhack. Ironclad wardogs, steelclad battle elephants, etc were all the rage in old MasterworkDF.

[Enemy post]

I wouldn't add CAN_LEARN. That would effectively make dogs sentient. I've found that sentient pets can lead to unpredictable gameplay, although it can be done. It's alright if dogs aren't great at combat. Like Meph said, war animals in general have various weakness just as a consequence of the normal gameplay.

Also, you don't really need to worry about their swimming skill. If your dogs have SWIMS_INNATE like the vanilla dogs, they bypass the skill entirely and swim as easily as they walk.

[brolol.404]

The way I see it is that if you send dogs into combat, you should expect some loses. I see them more as support units (meat shield, dodging distraction, extra damage, chase down, wrestle/pin down, etc.) They aren't supposed to replace your army of steel armored soldiers.

I replaced SWIMS_INNATE with SWIMS_LEARNED so that some dogs would be better at swimming than others.

I added the dachshund and pug. Besides the personality traits, all breeds are in game.

[Meph]

Maybe I missed it, but what do the colors mean?

[Enemy post]

I feel like I should warn you, SWIMS_LEARNED will in practice probably just lead to the dogs drowning unless you give them some swimming skill to start with. Most players are unlikely to bother teaching their dogs to swim or will simply assume that they can since most animals have the INNATE version, so the dogs will just never naturally path into water and will drown if they do.

[brolol.404]

@Meph: type of breed, hunting, protection, work and toy

@Enemy: thanks. I guess I'll give all of the dogs at least some swim skill (except for the ones that cant swim like Bulldogs and greyhounds). I could give swims innate to some of the swimmers (labrador, retriever, pointer, spaniel, poodle and collie)

[Meph]

so yellow is hunting-trainable, red is war-trainable, and blue/purple can't be trained?

It's important to know for the sprites, because hunting and war trained dogs get extra sprites.

[brolol.404]

@Meph: I made them all hunting and war trainable. The colors just represent what they are good at in game. (Or at least what I am trying to make them good at in game.)

The breeds can loosely be grouped into three categories: hunting, protection and working. Generally, breeds in the protection category are better in combat than the hunting and working groups (even if they are smaller in size). Hunting dogs are generally better at ambushing, observation/detection and swimming. And, working dogs are generally a middle ground between the two other groups. The goal is to be able to find value in all breeds with no “overall best” option for every situation.

I updated the swimming skills. Take a look:

[brolol.404]

@Enemy Post: what issues have you found with adding [CAN_LEARN] to pets? Does it create gameplay bugs or some weird behaviours?

[Egan_BW]

pr is attack windup and recovery time, right?

[brolol.404]

pr is attack windup and recovery time, right?

Yeah. I really need to spend some more time balance testing those values though lol

[ATTACK_PREPARE_AND_RECOVER]

"Determines the length of time to prepare this attack and until one can perform this attack again. Values appear to be calculated in adventure mode ticks."

[brolol.404]

Would putting [AMBUSHPREDATOR] on coonhounds, foxhounds and beagles allow them to get closer to pray when assigned to hunting?

[Enemy post]

@Enemy Post: what issues have you found with adding [CAN_LEARN] to pets? Does it create gameplay bugs or some weird behaviours?

Well, the sentient pets in my mods were mostly the (completely sentient) Star Wars droids, so I'm not really sure what will happen with only CAN_LEARN. I would expect weird things like dogs requesting citizenship and/or dogs explicitly having human jobs to be the most obvious issues.

Would putting [AMBUSHPREDATOR] on coonhounds, foxhounds and beagles allow them to get closer to pray when assigned to hunting?

I wouldn't expect it, since AMBUSHPREDATOR is a really specific effect intended for wild animals ambushing dwarves on the surface. However, I did want to show you an idea I used in Primal that might make it easier to quickly test features on all your dogs.

Make a creature variation called [CREATURE_VARIATION:DOGPATCH_404] or something like that. Don't put any features in it just yet, though. Then, go to every dog and add the line [APPLY_CREATURE_VARIATION:DOGPATCH_404] just above their descriptions. Once that's done, you can add tags to the creature variation to change all the dogs connected to the system at once. For example, if you wanted to test the effects of giving them all CAN_LEARN, you could put [CV_NEW_TAG:CAN_LEARN] into the variation. At that point, all the dogs would have the tag and you could effortlessly remove it if you didn't like the result.

[brolol.404]

Awesome thanks. Does [CREATURE_VARIATION:DOGPATCH_404] go at the bottom of the creature_ text file? I'll use it to test out CAN_LEARN and AMBUSHPREDATOR