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[ahrtdd]

"A vile force of darkness has arrived!"

"What an excellent opportunity to rid myself of these 62 war dogs that are latched on to their trainer", I thought. After a quick googling to determine how to make them follow someone else, I used v->p->e to assign the dogs to six of my axe lords, around ten dogs per axe lord, in the hopes that they would meet their demise while my axe lords slaughtered things.

A goblin hammer lord managed to bolt past my rows of weapon traps, and was promptly surrounded by war dogs. As hoped, he proceeded to bash them all to death with nary a scratch.

However I quickly noticed that one of my axe lords was suddenly unhappy, and checking his status I found he was listed as "Miserable" with 0 happiness. Apparently the assigned war dogs counted as pets and it decimated his will to live. He had only been exposed to the dogs for about 2 minutes real time, but that didn't stop him from forming an everlasting bond of devotion, apparently.

An Axe Lord throwing a tantrum is a horrible, horrible thing. He also found it relieving to hack other war dogs to death, which sent another Axe Lord into a tantrum for the same reason.


Anyway, now I am faced with two tantruming axe lords in adamantine, and four other axe lords with loads of "pets", who are now ticking time bombs in my opinion.

How do I rectify this? (and not "magma")

[Urist Imiknorris]

Undraft them and they'll drop their equipment. Assign some other people to replace them and they'll have that deadly stuff instead of the dwarves who want to use it on other dwarves.

[ahrtdd]

Yeah but what do I do about assigned war dogs being considered pets?

[Psieye]

Uh... it's one of those things. Like "how do I undo the damage from flooding my fort?" - very hard to fix. I can foresee killing the pets one at a time via some complex spike trap system, but otherwise this'll just go down as another page on Losing Is Fun. Now you know never to assign war dogs to dwarves.

If you want war dogs following your soldiers, make THEM train them and not some dedicated animal trainer. If you just want to get rid of war dogs, stuff them all in a single cage, link it up to a pressure plate and use it as a dog bomb when goblins come through. It'll nuke your FPS, but it'll nuke their attention too.

[jei]

Uh... it's one of those things. Like "how do I undo the damage from flooding my fort?" - very hard to fix. I can foresee killing the pets one at a time via some complex spike trap system, but otherwise this'll just go down as another page on Losing Is Fun. Now you know never to assign war dogs to dwarves.

If you want war dogs following your soldiers, make THEM train them and not some dedicated animal trainer. If you just want to get rid of war dogs, stuff them all in a single cage, link it up to a pressure plate and use it as a dog bomb when goblins come through. It'll nuke your FPS, but it'll nuke their attention too.

I recommend building the 4x mist machine.

[zwei]

You can butcher unassigned war dogs ... just fyi for next time you want to get rid of them. Much better to have bones and meat you can use than 60 sacred pet skeletons.

I would also consider just chaining them on strategic places outside and in caverns - same exposure to eventual fun for them and is actually usefull for detecting ambushes and thieves.

[Hyndis]

Wait until the dwarves need to sleep, then once they're in their bedroom lock the door.

Keep the door locked.

Open the door about a year later to retrieve the skeleton and adamantine equipment.

[FleshForge]

You can't have a proper hero without pathos.  Cf. Elric, Aragorn, et al.

[Khift]

The only workaround to the war dog unhappiness is to never assign them but merely to have the dwarf who is supposed to have them do the training. A trained but unassigned war animal will follow it's trainer around like it is his owner but that trainer does not consider the animal his pet and does not care when it gets slaughtered in combat.

It sucks that this mechanic ruins war animals almost entirely, but it is what it is and we have to deal with it.

[ahrtdd]

Ok, thanks guys.

[zwei]

The only workaround to the war dog unhappiness is to never assign them but merely to have the dwarf who is supposed to have them do the training. A trained but unassigned war animal will follow it's trainer around like it is his owner but that trainer does not consider the animal his pet and does not care when it gets slaughtered in combat.

It sucks that this mechanic ruins war animals almost entirely, but it is what it is and we have to deal with it.

Whoa, that is pretty good trick! Guess it would be quite sane to simply enable animal training on all dwarves and let luck decide who gets bodyguards.

[Artificer]

Excuse me whilst I go turn the following into a sig: Done.

[Hyndis]

I find that war dogs are quite pointless against goblins. They're better off as a last ditch defense. Just allow them to roam around in your meeting zone. This way if any dwarf goes berserk or anything manages to sneak by your main line of defense it will be attacked by all of the dogs you have all at the same time. Individually they're not very strong, but 50+ dogs will take down anything, including FB's.

[Psieye]

War dogs are pointless against armoured targets yeah. They have their uses, e.g. wildlife, clearing away a river of hostiles, early defence against berserkers and dogspolosion-in-a-cage chaff bombs. I'm not sure how useful war elephants are, but the rule of thumb was "war animals suck against armoured targets - teeth are a weak material".