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[Pierre70]

I caught a dragon in a cage trap and tamed it without it doing any damage. I've chained her in a sealed room and dropped captured (stripped) goblins in there. I assumed that the dragon would attack the goblins on sight, and that the goblins would either fight back or attempt to flee to the corners of the room.

However, very little has happened. The goblins stroll around the room and ignore the dragon, and for the most part the dragon has ignored the goblins. I've had goblins in there for an entire season and the dragon has killed three of them (its breath seemed ineffective when it used it - 2 or 3 times in all that period). There are now four living goblins in the room and nothing more has happened.

Is this normal? The goblins wander around the room, sometimes standing on the same square as the dragon, but the dragon has ignored them almost all the time. Have I done something wrong?

[o_O[WTFace]]

pathing issues.  I used a kobalt in an unfortunate accident and it injured the baroness and then they stopped fighting.  The Baron literally ran in circles a few times then took a nap while the kobo just stood there, trying to find its way out of the sealed room, I think.  When I reset the trap with a skeletal rhinocerous, it ate both then started killing buildings.

Try making a 1 tile wide exit hallway with the dragon chained in it?  Or, put a meeting zone on top of the dragon chain, since it could be looking for a way to get there.  If that doesn't work, you could mod dragons to be trainable and make it a war dragon.  That should improve aggressiveness. 

[Pierre70]

It's strange. The dragon moves randomly about the area allowed it by the chain, just like my war dogs near the entrance to the fort. I tried making a meeting zone on the chain, but nothing new seemed to happen. The thing that puzzles me is that the dragon has attacked three of the goblins but is ignoring the rest. At first I put them in one at a time but eventually I dumped all of the remaining goblins in at once to see if things would get ugly. But the creatures seem to be ignoring each other.

The room is 10x11, with the chain next to the spot where the goblins fall in. Would a smaller room have helped?

The main reason I'm confused is because I've never attempted anything like this before and I'm not sure what's supposed to happen. Is the dragon meant to attack the goblins on sight, or is it vice versa? Does the chained creature only fight back in self-defense against tossed-in hostiles? Or do they both attack each other? Perhaps the goblins that died attacked the dragon first, and the other goblins haven't. Incidentally, the dragon did breathe at them once or twice but, as I've seen others comment, it seemed to do no damage. Are (naked!) goblins fireproof?!

[sunshaker]

This is going to sound odd but is the Dragon a Ruler of a Goblin civ? If he is it may be that he is only killing goblins of another civ.

[assimilateur]

In general, captured invaders will try to run away instead of fight your dwarves or pets. They will, however, fight back if cornered. Also, pets aren't aggressive unless they're trained, and they also seem to only fight when there's no other choice.

Accordingly, I think it's more strange that your dragon fought some of your captive goblins at all, than that he's now ignoring the latest couple of them. Perhaps occupying the same tile is viewed as aggressive action by non-aggressive creatures, prompting them to fight. Did you perhaps drop the first goblins right on top of your dragon?

Furthermore, if my hypothesis is correct, it would be advisable to keep this sort of "arena" design as small as possible, perhaps even as small as one single tile.

[Pierre70]

On checking, he dragon isn't the ruler of the goblins (though one of the goblins in there with her is a local leader!). It might be possible that one of the goblins was dropped directly onto the dragon and she killed it immediately, but I don't think that was the case with the other two. I've seen the goblin mace lord zipping around the room and frequently being on the same square as the dragon. But they refuse to dance.

[assimilateur]

In that case I don't know how to help you. You might want to give it a shot and make a very small "arena" for your dragon, but I wouldn't hold my breath about that working. Hopefully someone here will have better ideas.

Invader-pet relations are complicated anyway. Having read that chained pets were supposed to work as lures for goblins (so that you could seal off your fort proper) I've done my share of testing, using different species (from dogs to camels) and the vast majority of times my invaders would outright ignore them.

[Pierre70]

I let the goblins out of the room. My stationed marksdwarf and weapon trap eliminated the three thieves but the mace lord legged it all the way to the entrance of the fortress before being taken down by the traps there. I've built walls to vastly reduce the room the dragon is in, I'll try again when the next goblin harvest is in.

[ungulateman]

Mod the dragon so that you can make it a war animal (The [trAInABLE] tag). It'll tear them apart in short order as a war dragon.

[darkflagrance]

That the breath weapon is ineffective could be due to temperature off, or not removing the shields of the goblins.

When dragons come while my temp is off, they're wussies. When temp is on, they melt my bridges.

[Pierre70]

Time to bring an end to this sorry tale. I relented and made the dragon trainable, and placed my war dragon in the killing room. I dropped in a freshly-caught (stripped) goblin. Nothing happened. I then dropped in a human crossbowman who was part of the goblin ambush force that visited recently. He was completely naked with no equipment, yet he KILLED MY WAR DRAGON WITH HIS BARE HANDS!

I'll just fill the death room with nasty traps. As for Thali Iroeruwa Thalinifi, she is now an ex-dragon.

[SquidgyB]

Off the top of my head, this couldn't be s a bug along the same lines as trainable beasts killing dwarfs if they've had a taste of dwarf blood previously, could it?

What I mean is that if you somehow got the wild dragon to kill a few of each species/civ before you tamed/trained it, maybe it would be more likely to attack these creatures in the future?

Bit of an annoyance really, I wonder if it affects all tameable creatures. I'd like to catch a phoenix/giant eagle at some point and have it as a guard pet...

[praguepride]

Yeah, tame pets are buggy as hell. Lol'd at the guy killing the dragon with his bare hands but wrestling is very broken because size doesn't factor into it nearly as much as it should.

Realistically, it should be physically impossible for even a legendary wrestler to do ANY damage to a dragon or any other mega beast. You can't hit a pressure point that's behind armored scales. You can't choke a dragon if your hands can't fit around it's windpipe.

I think someone "COULD" kill a dragon by punching through the eyes and reaching into the skull to grab the brain, but unless the dragon was tied down or unconscious...that too should be pretty much impossible.

However, wrestlers can tear off colossus arms and choke dragons right now so /meh.

[Hyndis]

In general, captured invaders will try to run away instead of fight your dwarves or pets. They will, however, fight back if cornered. Also, pets aren't aggressive unless they're trained, and they also seem to only fight when there's no other choice.

Yes and no.

Pets are...complicated.

Dogs are aggressive trained or untrained. Have a bunch of stray tame dogs in your meeting zone, and if a dwarf goes berserk that will rip that dwarf apart in seconds. Same thing if a kobold is spotted, they will run after it on their own to try to kill it even if they are not war or hunting dogs.

Other animals try to run away, either trained or untrained. Even things you would consider to be aggressive, like fire imps. Mod it so they breed and you can train them, make war fire imps, and they will promptly run away from anything that can hurt them.

It may just be hard coded some way. Either that, or I just can't figure out the combination of tokens in the raws that will make animals always be aggressive to hostiles.

[assimilateur]

Dogs are aggressive trained or untrained.

Yeah, I forgot about that. It's a strange thing, really, because token-wise it's the lack of the benign tag that seems to do cause this behavior. This doesn't, however, explain why something like a dragon - aggressive in itself - will behave timidly when tamed.

It also doesn't explain why, at least in my experiments, chained animals would almost consistently fail to be recognized from afar and thus pathed to by invaders.