Also, I count giant badger's [CLUSTER_NUMBER:4:12] as a bug/oversight.
Badgers live in clans of up to 15 or so, so why is that a bug?
A giant badger shouldn't just be exactly the same thing as a badger, but bigger, is what I think he was saying. Larger creatures need to eat more, which means they need to spread out their territory and stick to smaller groups.
Having creatures that are fierce and fly into a rage at the sight of a natural enemy, or when they are in danger is one thing - flying into a rage the instant they see ANY OTHER CREATURE besides another badger is another.
Agreed, that's pretty dumb.. they are extremely rage prone, but only when the need to fight arises, so if they get into a fight they should immediately go into a rage, but not beforehand.
badgers kinda do that though...get all pissy if they see any threat at all
If we have a scale from 1 to 20 for how "rage-prone" something is, though, we could simply use 20 for the "flies into a rage at the sight of anything at all" type of aggression.
1 should be something that is more rage-prone than a normal creature, but not so much more as to be a huge, marked difference between the prone_to_rage:1 and the normal creature.
Just looking at badgers in another embark, they seem to run away from the pasture creatures or woodcutters when they come near them about 3/4ths of the time, then fly into a rage 1/4 of the time. Whenever the badgers aren't in a rage (or the badgers are unconscious because they got kicked by a dwarf and lost an arm), dwarves ignore them and path past them.
When they do fly into a rage, it's chase-the-dwarf-to-the-edge-of-the-map time. Setting some cage traps makes this somewhat amusing, but winds up with multiple badgers I can't really tame or do much with. (Although releasing a badger inside your fort and letting a civilian kick it to unconsciousness lets you carry the badger from cage to cage without a fuss.)
If they were bothering a pasture creature, the pasture creatures just seem to stand there and take it for some odd reason. Badgers will run up to the yak, then run away, run up again, run away, run up, get enraged, attack the yak, and the yak won't really fight back, and eventually pass out from the pain.
If nothing else, making dwarves "respect" badgers by not ignoring their presence until they fly into a rage would potentially help this a little.
(Also, the giant badger is 300+ kg, and it's 20 times the size of a normal badger... that's still much smaller than giant tigers, which are 1,900 now that "giant" now actually means "more than twice the size of a normal creature". However, with these animals, it seems like attrition is more important than actual combat competency. Four dogs beat a giant tiger.)
I'm not sure what you're saying here. Badgers are large weasels, along with wolverines, and they are like wolves when they do have to fight. They can and will take down larger predators such as bears and lions by working together, so why couldn't a group of the giant versions do the same?
These weren't the giant versions - these were 15 kg animals taking down and killing a 5,000 kg animal. I managed to get 6 weasels to kill an elephant... and they don't even have one sacrificial weasel that takes one for the team, either, the elephant pretty much just immediately curls up into a ball and cries, even though the badgers can't even pierce the skin most of the time.
This isn't like wolves taking on a bear - wolves can genuinely threaten a bear, even though the bear is stronger and has a clear advantage. This is like flies killing a frog by suckering it to death. I literally had to run the arena for about an hour for the elephant to gradually bleed to death because the overwhelming majority of its wounds didn't even draw blood.
Author
Topic: Dwarf Fortress 0.31.25 Released (Read 184227 times)