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[PatrikLundell]

This is almost meaningless until the animals/burrows bug is fixed.

Right now if you retreat your civilians to a burrow during a siege or attack, all the war animals follow them and even the ones which are chained up to guard your fortress will refuse to fight the invaders and just die pathetically.

Didn't know this was an issue, shows my noobishness. Excuse my naivety, but the first thought that comes to my mind, as a possible work-around, would be something like this:

Code: [Select]

Stage One Burrow:
Safe dwarf area                   chained up dogs (not a part of burrow)
         |
         v
   +--------+
   |        |                                   x x x
   |        |
   +--------+
______________________________________________________

Stage Two Burrow:
Safe dwarf area                       chained up dogs area
         |           -note the lack of-          |
         v    -defined burrow tiles inbetween-   v
   +--------+              |                 +---------------+
   |        |              v                 |      x x x    |
   |        |                                |               |
   +--------+                                +---------------+
Assuming it works like I think it does, you could start an alert for for the first burrow, then when all the dwarves are inside their area, change the alert to the second burrow which includes the dog area. The dwarves shouldn't run to the dogs, since they would have to leave the burrow to do so, while the dogs should be able to focus on fighting since they aren't trying to run back inside the burrow.

It seems you're subject to a common misconception regarding burrows: Burrows define where dorfs may take up "work", but has no effect on pathing to or between work places whatsoever. The path taken is the "shortest" one (as DF calculates it) without regard to whether it passes through non burrow tiles or not. Thus, residents are free to move between disjointed burrow locations, but won't do so unless they have a reason to go to the other one (e.g. to pick up a seed for stockpiling).
Civilian alerts add to the normal alert functionality in that it actually forces civilians to move inside a burrow initially (which work burrows don't: burrow someone in a location with no reason to visit it, and the dorf just stays rooted in place [quite possibly cancellation spamming about not being allowed to drop off something hauled, without dropping it]).

The two burrow system would be safe if the procedure included blocking the path between the burrow segments, e.g. with a drawbridge. If you have an open path and the chained animals kill invaders, burrowed dorfs would run to pick up the corpses and corpse bits (including the dozens of half teeth, each generating its own hauling job, unless you change the corpse/carcass dropping settings).

[Iduno]

It seems you're subject to a common misconception regarding burrows: Burrows define where dorfs may take up "work", but has no effect on pathing to or between work places whatsoever. The path taken is the "shortest" one (as DF calculates it) without regard to whether it passes through non burrow tiles or not. Thus, residents are free to move between disjointed burrow locations, but won't do so unless they have a reason to go to the other one (e.g. to pick up a seed for stockpiling).
Civilian alerts add to the normal alert functionality in that it actually forces civilians to move inside a burrow initially (which work burrows don't: burrow someone in a location with no reason to visit it, and the dorf just stays rooted in place [quite possibly cancellation spamming about not being allowed to drop off something hauled, without dropping it]).

The two burrow system would be safe if the procedure included blocking the path between the burrow segments, e.g. with a drawbridge. If you have an open path and the chained animals kill invaders, burrowed dorfs would run to pick up the corpses and corpse bits (including the dozens of half teeth, each generating its own hauling job, unless you change the corpse/carcass dropping settings).

I believe the attempted work-around is that the chained war animals stop trying to path to a safe burrow during an attack, because they are already in one. Changing to "forbid death items" is fairly easy, but a locked door or something to keep the dwarves from also obeying the new burrow is potentially necessary.

[Fleeting Frames]

All animals should have attributes and personality traits, which should affect whether or not a specific animal is trainable and to what extent.    Species should have a set of averages and variances, so pretty much most dogs could end up being war trainable, whereas war bears or giant warvarines might be more tricky, and giant war hornets would take some luck and a legendary animal trainer.

Perhaps you could accomplish the attributes and traits parts by splitting the animals into multiple castes per sex, one with everything suitable to war-train and a not-trainable caste for each trait/stat required, so that there'd be 1 caste with bravery always between 1500 and 2000, 1 caste with bravery always between 1000 and 500 and N other castes with bravery between 500 and 2000.

Though that requires the trainable tag to be caste-level. Don't know if it is, better test first on just female dogs or sth if one wants to try it.


Making the success depend on skill would require dfhack, tho.

[anewaname]

Iduno's method is what I would attempt.... but I would pasture the dogs instead of chaining them.

--- Safe dwarf area ---
          |
--- Some doors and or a gate ---
          |
--- Pastured dogs area and soldier mustering area---
          |
The outside

When the enemy arrives, trigger the civ alert and move the military squads into the mustering area, then lock the door/gate. At this point, you should be able to turn off the civ alert so the dogs will fight (I'm not familiar with how the dogs will refuse to fight while the civ alert is active, but if the civ alert is off and the civilians are on the other side of the locked doors, then the civilians cannot attempt to get themselves killed while retrieving socks, and if the civ alert is off, the dogs should fight).

[IndigoSnake]

Perhaps you could accomplish the attributes and traits parts by splitting the animals into multiple castes per sex, one with everything suitable to war-train and a not-trainable caste for each trait/stat required, so that there'd be 1 caste with bravery always between 1500 and 2000, 1 caste with bravery always between 1000 and 500 and N other castes with bravery between 500 and 2000.

The castes would make a lot of sense actually. Long time ago, irl my family was trying to make decent responsive pets out of domestic birds, chickens and pheasants and such; we weren't master animal trainers, but whether the animal was responsive or not appeared to depend mostly on the individual animal. Wouldn't matter how much coddling you gave a pheasant hatchling, if it still wanted to act like a pheasant, instead of an abomination against all pheasant-kind, it damn well would. We succeeded with a couple pheasants, but most of them were completely useless.

I believe the attempted work-around is that the chained war animals stop trying to path to a safe burrow during an attack, because they are already in one.

Yeah pretty much. As long as there is nothing else in war animal area other than the dogs and you disable the item hauling, the dwarves should stay put, I think.

EDIT:

Though that requires the trainable tag to be caste-level. Don't know if it is, better test first on just female dogs or sth if one wants to try it.

Checked the wiki, allegedly it is caste-level.

[Fleeting Frames]

Huh. Forgot that field, ty.

@anewanme: The problem with pasture is that animals can wander off and have to be brought back.

[anewaname]

@anewanme: The problem with pasture is that animals can wander off and have to be brought back.

When there is no enemy, dogs rarely leave their pasture (there seems to be some case where dogs will leave the pasture for no obvious reason, maybe when they see their animal trainer?).

The objective is to allow war animals to fight during a siege, so if the civilians are behind locked doors or a gate, then you can turn off the civ alert and the pastured war dogs can freely attack goblins without civilians attempting to re-pasture them.

[Iduno]

Iduno's method is what I would attempt.... but I would pasture the dogs instead of chaining them.

IndigoSnakes, but thank you.

[daggaz]

All animals should have attributes and personality traits, which should affect whether or not a specific animal is trainable and to what extent.    Species should have a set of averages and variances, so pretty much most dogs could end up being war trainable, whereas war bears or giant warvarines might be more tricky, and giant war hornets would take some luck and a legendary animal trainer.

Perhaps you could accomplish the attributes and traits parts by splitting the animals into multiple castes per sex, one with everything suitable to war-train and a not-trainable caste for each trait/stat required, so that there'd be 1 caste with bravery always between 1500 and 2000, 1 caste with bravery always between 1000 and 500 and N other castes with bravery between 500 and 2000.

Though that requires the trainable tag to be caste-level. Don't know if it is, better test first on just female dogs or sth if one wants to try it.


Making the success depend on skill would require dfhack, tho.

Why would you need to do that?  The attributes are all you need, you don't even need minimum requirements at that, just have some kind of computation that makes it increasingly unfeasible to train a given animal if it's relevant scores are not high enough.  At one point you will hit the lifespan of the animal and you have effectively set an "impossible to train" flag on it. 

This way, each animal type only needs its average and standard deviation defined for every attribute (how sentient species are done already) and the natural variance included there gives you a controlled randomization on how many of said species are trainable and to what extent, etc, on average. 

[IndigoSnake]

Why would you need to do that?  The attributes are all you need, you don't even need minimum requirements at that, just have some kind of computation that makes it increasingly unfeasible to train a given animal if it's relevant scores are not high enough.  At one point you will hit the lifespan of the animal and you have effectively set an "impossible to train" flag on it. 

This way, each animal type only needs its average and standard deviation defined for every attribute (how sentient species are done already) and the natural variance included there gives you a controlled randomization on how many of said species are trainable and to what extent, etc, on average. 

I think Fleeting Frames was speculating on how your idea could be accomplished/approximated by modders, IE without Toady intervention. When Toady One gets around to working on war animals again, your idea would be how I would like to see it implemented, as it makes a great deal of sense. I kind of hope you make a thread on the suggestion forum about it at some point.

EDIT: Fleeting Frames, not Fleeting Flames, my bad!

[Fleeting Frames]

Yep.

You indeed could skip the additional castes when doing the whole thing with dfhack/attention from Toady One, of course.

Just that generally, if your mod can be accomplished without, it is generally better to do so.

(There's also the matter that war training isn't much of an absolute benefit, so if you make it able to take years or decades of repeated training and food-bringing might want to increase the reward for it too. Like, say, an ability to wear armour and natural+increasing combat skills.)

[daggaz]

Barding  for war-trained animals is the logical conclusion, here. 

[IndigoSnake]

Barding  for war-trained animals is the logical conclusion, here.

Trained war monkeys.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[daggaz]

War wolverine cancels task, kill goblin ambusher, cannot find rope-reed socks.

[ColonelTEE3]

War hydras would be cool.

One of my fondest memories was capturing a hydra and sticking it in a deep pit where i fed captured goblins and elves to it. It painted every tile and wall a nice solid red sheen.

Sadly it eventually asphyxiated on the miasma it created from all the death...