Print

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

[dakenho]

Given my hunters effectiveness of feeding my last fort I decided to train one early game.  Grabbing one of my new immigrants I build him a wooden xbow and wooden bolts and send him on his way.  He kills a few things but then gets wacked by a giant rat .  So I train another hunter give him the same xbow a new stack of bolts and a hunting dogs.  The hunter proceeded to pick the worst game on the map Giant cave spiders.  The hunter runs right up shoots the giant cave spider twice than proceeds to attempt to melee it.  The hunter dies and the hunting dog rounds the corner to get wacked by the GCS.  I have seen this in more experienced hunters, where they will out run their dogs, whack there game and never ever need the dog.
Why is my hunting dog not keeping up with my hunter?  Why does my hunter insist on being 2 squares away from *insert large dangerous predator here*? And is there a way to improve effectiveness of hunting dogs?

[Derakon]

Hunting dogs generally aren't worth it. They're theoretically useful in situations where the hunter can't keep up with the game but the dog can, since the dog can engage the game in melee and hold it in place, but in practice they just provoke bad thoughts when they die.

I wouldn't send hunters out if there's a GCS loose.

[Shurhaian]

The new version should help with the "fire a few shots then melee" issue, because dwarves will pick up more than one stack of bolts to get to a certain total value. As it is, they might grab a single bolt off the ground, or go out hunting with only 2-3 left in their quiver, and as soon as they run out? Hammertime.

Dogs are probably only worthwhile, ironically, for your non-hunters. Assign a dog or two to a fisherdwarf, herbalist, or woodcutter, and when some random groundhog accosts them, the dog will attack, giving the dwarf time to run. Still prone to unhappy thoughts when the dog dies, though - but this will give you a bit of time to activate your woodcutters and send them in as well.

Hunting is, in short, very iffy. Until the dwarves get some sense of picking their fights, you'll have such frustrations as them deciding to go across the map for the cave with the resident dragon instead of the other way for the pack of mountain goats.

[dakenho]

Well the problem is more of they insist on being two tiles away and not so much to do with ammo.  But it is good that hunters will be able to carry more than one stack of bolts.

maybe I will just assign the hunter a wardog or two.  it will probably give the same effect but with a slightly stronger dog

[Shurhaian]

A thing to note about that - which may work in your favour, actually - is that I don't think war animals will sneak. Hunting dogs will sneak when their handler does, which also slows them down; if war dogs don't, that may make them close to engage faster than their handlers, and also make the marks more likely to engage them first than to attack the hunters. I can't confirm that, though.