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[Archbaron]

I've been messing with my raws and looking at various civilizations in the mods I have set up, and I've started to get a few ideas. In the past, I have found that meat/leather economies with good breeding populations tend to do ridiculously well, since you get food, bone/leather commodities, war animals, and awesome menageries to impress your dwarves. It's also just plain fun to have pits full of cave crocodiles and merpeople (yes, that thread was amazing.)

However, I'm trying to make up innovative ways to expand on this pliable economy. First off, are megabeasts, by default, capable of breeding? Even if not, it would be easily editable and would make world gen and megabeast farms an intense fortress worthy of epic stories. Now, that's really just a side idea to the main one in this thread that I want to propose.

All the sentient races (dwarves, elves, humans, kobolds, and goblins) strictly adhere to monogamy and will only reproduce with their spouse, and will never remarry even if the spouse dies. Like all mating in Dwarf Fortress, it's done through spores. As such, you can't kidnap a few traders and expect a human or elf farm up and running within a few years, as they won't mate unless conveniently married. However, two approaches could be made to possibly start up a breeding farm of sentient creatures.

One option would be to simply raise the wealth of your fortress to ridiculously high levels, then capture every singly goblin and kobold that comes onto your territory, and toss them all into pits together, and hope that you caught a married couple. If not, there is always the next ambush. Within time, this model ideally would set you up with several married pairs that would begin to create offspring that could then marry the single captives or each other to create a stable breeding population.

Another option that is much more time efficient and seems more plausible, would be to generate a pocket world (for ideal circumstances) and start underneath a human town, goblin fortress, or elf land. Depending on how war-torn your world is, you should have a town with several married couples (since they obviously live together) that would naturally breed during your stay there. It would be very easy to set up traps or chutes to slowly begin to collect the breeding pairs, and to engineer a system to "flush" their babies into a butchery, as proposed in a thread I read previously.

What I'm asking is, does anyone have any experience on this that could help expand on this idea, or rule it out? I'm considering making a test run when I get more free time, possibly after the new version as well, but not necessarily.

Discuss.

[SkyRender]

The merman farms were horrific enough, but now you want to make breeding farms for your fellow civilizations.  You, sir, are a credit to the Dwarven species.  Well done, good sir, well done.  Urist Mengele would be jealous of your utter disregard for the rights of the non-Dwarves.

[NW_Kohaku]

You'll need to mess around with ethics to make your dwarves actually butcher and eat human or elf, I believe.  You should probably also make them trainable pets, since the notion of dwarf children tugging on their pet elf's leash has always tickled me.

The sad part is that (unless you mod it), making elf soap isn't going to get you the same insane value as making mermaid soap would.

There would, however, be the wonderful notion of building an entire tower out of elf soap, decorated in elf bone.  It's a pity you can't make ash out of bones, because then you could even go as far as making clear glass out of the ashes of elves.  Cacame would approve.

Alternately, going with humans, you could actually trade the pitiful human civilizations back their own children's bones, crafted into a mug - one of those useless contraptions humans use because they aren't dwarvenly enough to chug whole kegs without stopping to breathe.

[Acanthus117]

This shall be the next Mermaid Farm thread. Mwahahahaha!

Back on topic... I don't think that tossing gobbos and kobolds into your pits will make them breed. You hafta modify the raws a bit, and genning a new world might have to be done so your dwarves can slaughter the sentients so you can harvest their bones and skulls. Otherwise, just kill the basterds with pitfalls and the like, let their corpses rot and collect the bones!

[NW_Kohaku]

Oh, and you need to have the proper name for your new sentients slaughterhouse.

Hint: In the dwarf language:
ader = soil
dumur = aunt
omer = green

(no word for "ant", unfortunately)

[Archbaron]

If anything, it just seems like a few tweaks in the raws needs to be done to make this possible.

[Satarus]

I think you'd need worldgen elves/humans.  The ones from sieges are generated when they start the siege.  The only exception to that is the local leaders who come with the siegers sometimes.

Also, I don't think worldgen figures can breed at all in fortress mode.  Even if they are on your site.

[Canadark]

Oh, and you need to have the proper name for your new sentients slaughterhouse.

Hint: In the dwarf language:
ader = soil
dumur = aunt
omer = green

(no word for "ant", unfortunately)

FTW

[NW_Kohaku]

The only problem is that "Aderdumer Omer" sounds alot like what the Swedish Chef from the Muppet Show would say.

... Then again, nobody really did get a proper answer from him about what his meatballs were made of...

Was he really a dwarven chef all along?!

[SkyRender]

 Somehow I suspect the fortress that will emerge from this will be called Bonedust (Osodvesh).  On top of being fairly appropriate, it sounds vaguely like a certain famous Polish town where many people died in the name of scientific progress (and blithe inhumanity for petty reasons, of course).

[o_O[WTFace]]

Megabeasts can be modded to breed causing their survivability to INCREASE MASSIVELY.  I should be eligible for megabeast attacks in 8 more population so I'll tell you how it actually works in fortress mode then.

My guess is breeding pairs of non-site civ races can only come from worldgen, otherwise caravan guards would be getting married in our dining rooms and ambushers would appear out of nowhere when they have a baby and cancel ambush to go find it.  So that leaves you with only as many as you can find in a town plus the possibility of say, two married Goblin officers attacking you at the same time.  Keep in mind that every attacking enemy other then a handful of site leaders and military officers is randomly generated for that siege, so I don't ever think you will get a breeding pair of cannon fodder.

So I guess you could look through legends and identify living married couples and try to get them on your map at the same time, but its easier to just cage everyone with a name and everyone that shows up with the caravan. 

On the other hand, natural reproduction takes 3 seasons plus however long the whole pollination or spores thing takes, and then you only get 1 naked miniature creature.  If you have been a good dwarf fort, hard at work producing trade goods the whole year, then goblin santa will bring you a few squads of full sized presents wrapped in goblinite once a year.  Pissing off the humies and elves and locking some children outside for the kobalts so they all siege would bring you their leaders for ranching but more importantly give you just tons more stuff. 
 

[Archbaron]

I have found that by turning off the civilization population cap in the world gen parameters, then decreasing the growing up time for elven and human children, then generating a pocket world, results in very dense towns. I've been thinking on it more, and I think a system more like kidnapping the breeding pairs, then just flushing their children into spike pits would be the most efficient. I couldn't butcher them without modding that, but I could definitely get their bones from the traps. Getting it to be momentous enough would take time though. Perhaps increasing the litter sizes would do it, but then you start to diverge from the true nature of humans and elves. They're K-strategists, as in, they take a long time to age and have small amounts of children. Perhaps modding in subelves and subhumans that reproduce fast and quickly, and then become fertile within a year, would be more suitable. Although, that'd be less cool.

Muwahahah.

[caknuck]

Isn't the logical solution to embark on a forest retreat? There should be plenty of married couples already present. The problem is getting the subsequent generations to marry so the elven bone factory program will last indefinitely.

[Innominate]

Isn't the logical solution to embark on a forest retreat? There should be plenty of married couples already present. The problem is getting the subsequent generations to marry so the elven bone factory program will last indefinitely.

Elves have no max-age, so the factory will last indefinitely. It just won't be capable of increasing production.

For best results, somehow get a goblin breeding couple. They don't have a max-age either (or at least its thousands of years), and you might then be able to pit elves against goblins in interracial warfare for the amusement of your dwarves. I'm picturing a colliseum of some sort. If possible, have magma as well.

[Archbaron]

Isn't the logical solution to embark on a forest retreat? There should be plenty of married couples already present. The problem is getting the subsequent generations to marry so the elven bone factory program will last indefinitely.

That is the Occam's Razor approach here, and my original idea, but some people are skeptical. After this weekend, I'll be experimenting with this idea.