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[TomiTapio]

Trying again to pay more attention to my elephant's status just before he faints, I actually manage to knock a badger over, and take the chance to gore it in the skull for a quick kill. (Eat it, badgers!) 

I have tried to address silly combat imbalances in the Genesis mod, for example:
- an animal should not faint from pain due to one or two wooden bolts hitting it non-severely. Reduced pain.
- I've increased bleeding a little, so ten dwarves versus super-durable not so dangerous opponent goes more realistically.

Now the "6 in combat skills" Cyclops and Dragon are much more badass than earlier DF versions, where NATURAL_SKILL didn't work.
Anything NOPAIN and bigger than dwarf, say a crocodile, are proper trouble.

[Spectre Incarnate]

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.

Okay, but it's not bug. That's how all the giant versions of animals have been listed so far, just straight copies of the smaller ones, so if you want it some other way you'll just have to mod them all differently. This is a fantasy world, though, with lots more large creature types to feed off of, rather than real life, so I don't think it's all that unrealistic, but that's just me.

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.

Yeah, a range would be nice.

(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".

These weren't the giant versions - these were 15 kg animals taking down and killing a 5,000 kg animal.

I was responding to the giant badger at 300 kg... and simply suggesting that a group of giant badgers could take down a giant tiger, since they do similar things in real life... so what did I misread? 

As for the elephant situation... that's just plain awesome. Elephants tend to be scared of small furry creatures, much like humans can be, so I can totally see an elephant crying and meandering around while a bunch of badgers nibble on it. Being bigger doesn't always make you brave. lol

[Michael]

I'd really like the Toad to announce a 6+ month release-free dev arc of something awesome so we can go back to the 40d days... playing and dreaming.  Good times.

Nothing stopping you from playing as if that was really happening. I've actually been doing that since 31.12. And I expect my personal release-free dev arc to last another year or two.

(I'm also in denial. It'll be a year or two before I can afford a computer that can run the newer versions. )

You might be better off with 31.25.  The first site-sprawl versions of DF were unplayable for me, as my laptop (Pentium M 1.86GHz, 512MB) would thrash badly during worldgen.  I did fear that I might have to "Get A Real Computer" before ever enjoying DF again.  But I've found that the current versions work OK on the same system.  (Although part of it may be that site history defaults to 250 years again.)

[Psieye]

Badgers... a lone badger forces me to replace my front door sentries every time it passes through. I chain roosters to my entry chokepoints to spot ambushers. Roosters because I ran out of kittens some time ago and I had an explosion of chicks hatching in the first year.

[Siquo]

Is it normal for badgers to form trains and run after eachother? I had this group of badgers that was playing hi-speed snake until they got butchered by a passing caravan. The only thing missing was a mushroom.

[Urist McAddict]

My dwarfs aren't using barrels anymore, they use for drinks and stuff, but they won't get them to stock anymore, my dorfs need to go all the way to the food industry section to drink, food sometimes rot in the kitchens and so...
Is it a bug or did i do something stupid?

[Thief^]

Try remaking your food/drink stockpile(s)

[profit]

My dwarfs aren't using barrels anymore, they use for drinks and stuff, but they won't get them to stock anymore, my dorfs need to go all the way to the food industry section to drink, food sometimes rot in the kitchens and so...
Is it a bug or did i do something stupid?

Most likely the second thing, but dont worry I did it as well.. There is a menu under o , and it is really freaking easy to accidentally change things in there.  Make sure it says dwarves haul food.

[NW_Kohaku]

I suggest not making a report until you've identified specific issues, and also looking through these existing combat bugs.

I'm leaning very heavily towards the problem being pain. 

An elephant fainted after 6 turns of getting nibbled on by 5/6 badgers, basically.  That means that about 30 "bruses the fat" injuries on the legs is enough to cause an elephant to faint from pain.

In other words...

The point is that combat/wound system in DF works well in some situations and awful in others - it is at its very best against armed humanoid opponents, and at its worst against beasts or non-living opponents. It is more a question of fine-tuning than bug fixing, IMO.

This is exactly correct. 

I've made some comparisons recently on how alligators and cows are basically the exact same creature, except a cow's bite is stronger because cows are larger.  Elephants are basically just the biggest cow in the game, and since they are all indistinguishable except by size, elephants are the de facto champs. 

The core problem is that Toady just hasn't taken the time to model beasts with the depth that this combat system was built for.

Trying again to pay more attention to my elephant's status just before he faints, I actually manage to knock a badger over, and take the chance to gore it in the skull for a quick kill. (Eat it, badgers!) 

I have tried to address silly combat imbalances in the Genesis mod, for example:
- an animal should not faint from pain due to one or two wooden bolts hitting it non-severely. Reduced pain.
- I've increased bleeding a little, so ten dwarves versus super-durable not so dangerous opponent goes more realistically.

Now the "6 in combat skills" Cyclops and Dragon are much more badass than earlier DF versions, where NATURAL_SKILL didn't work.
Anything NOPAIN and bigger than dwarf, say a crocodile, are proper trouble.

This is a good idea - I'm going to mod elephants to be NOPAIN and see how things go.  If the elephant can bowl over dozens of badgers, it's obviously the pain doing the creatures in.

[Budikah]

Excellente! I'll be getting this now!

[NW_Kohaku]

OK, pain is definitely the culprit.  I just curbstomped (fairly literally) a half-dozen badgers with an elephant immune to pain, and only occasionally had tiredness become a problem (and simply walking around for a little while cured that right up).

This means that the nibble attacks are causing constant fainting from an elephant (mass: 5,000 kg) being bitten about 30 times from badgers or other small mammals (I got this to happen with hoary marmots and rabbits, as well).  The nibbles only seem to need to be able to break skin to cause enough pain to overwhelm the elephant. 

I'm guessing this is a problem of how pain works in general - it may be that if 1 pain is generated for breaking the skin on a hamster with a sword and 1 pain is generated for breaking the skin of an elephant with a needle - all pain is tallied up the same.  Once 30 pain points from 30 individual 1 pain injuries is added up, it causes fainting, wheras having a shattered bone would generate about 20 pain.  (And creature size isn't a factor.)

Simply using low-integer values may be the problem here.

Likewise, it takes absurdly long for the elephant to actually die, because the low integer value for bleeding and simple size of the elephant means that the only way for a badger to actually inflict bleeding (the only way to kill the elephant) is to attack the softer/smaller trunk, ear, or tail parts of the elephant - repeatedly gnawing at the eyes and throat do essentially no damage (although eyes lose function and both eyes and throat are "dented", they never start bleeding). 

There is one open issue that at least partially matches what I am talking about - http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=2115

I'm not sure if this really is "the same issue", however, since he's talking about fainting from a broken bone, and I'm talking about fainting in a couple turns from nibbles.

EDIT:

To be more specific, I have had elephants be defeated by as few as 3 hoary marmots, thanks entirely to fainting from the pain.


On the front of the other issue I was talking about before this one, I'm fairly sure the problem with badgers being too easily enraged (and I didn't see any bugs on Mantis for this one) is caused by the dwarves and livestock basically not giving badgers any space until they actually do flip out. 

Essentially, badgers path towards the yak I got from the embark that's minding its own business, grazing.  The badgers see the yak, and flee in terror from the larger creature.  Then they path back to the yak.  Then they flee in terror.  Then they path back to the yak.  Then they see the yak and get enraged for being "disturbed" so many times, and attack the yak, who suddenly flees in terror from the suddenly hostile badgers.  When the yak runs away, the badger decides to instead lock onto some passing herbalist, instead.  The badger then chases the herbalist all the way around the map.   

Any time the badger falls out of rage, the dwarves start ignoring the badger again, and try to path past the badger back to doing whatever it was they were doing beforehand.  When they get close to the badger, it suddenly gets pissed again, and flies back into a rage, and chases the herbalist around some more.

The problem is, in a nutshell, that there's no real way to tell your dwarves or animals to leave badgers alone the way that they would avoid an animal that is dangerous all the time, like a hippo, so they keep wandering up to the badgers and enraging them.  This means badgers attack far more often than fiercer creatures that most dwarves just leave well enough alone.

Likewise, badgers just keep trying to path into places occupied by creatures that are bigger than them, and that they are afraid of, even though they are scared off the first half-dozen times.  After being scared off a couple times, maybe they should just try to find some other spot to mill around?  It hardly counts as "defending your territory" if you're invading someone else's turf.

I don't see any issue like this posted on Mantis searching for "rage" and "badger".  I guess this qualifies more as a bug (or rather, the lack of a feature in AI that should be present) than the previous, since this isn't specifically a balance issue.  (Of course, maybe flying into a rage just because someone comes too close to you and attacking other creatures when the setting is only PRONE_TO_RAGE:1, the lowest possible setting, is a balance issue itself.)

[Spectre Incarnate]

This means that the nibble attacks are causing constant fainting from an elephant (mass: 5,000 kg) being bitten about 30 times from badgers or other small mammals...

Once 30 pain points from 30 individual 1 pain injuries is added up, it causes fainting, wheras having a shattered bone would generate about 20 pain.  (And creature size isn't a factor.)

Let's take a step back on how large an elephant is. I would think it obvious that they would reel or faint from constant barraging pain, as it is a mental state based on nerves to the brain, not how thick a creature's leg is or how big they are overall. Being stung by 30 bees or by one small furry animal 30 times could very well make anyone fall over from the pain. If you were being constantly bit all the way through the skin by a relentless raging rat all over your body and nothing you did stopped it from happening because it would keep darting about and coming back around and barraging you again, what do you think your brain would do? It would be like "dripping water torture".

The largest animal in the world, the whale, will easily reel from pain if a creature just big enough to pierce it's skin were constantly piercing the flesh over and over and over and not letting up. I had a game when I was little called EcoQuest (actually I still have it somewhere) where you have to save a bunch of ocean creatures from man-made problems that they don't understand and a big whale is stuck in one place from the pain of one little harpoon shoved all the way through his lip, holding him captive. He wafts in and out of consciousness from pain and nausea and it's pretty darn accurate to what would happen to a person if they didn't have hands or fingers to remove a barbed needle connected to a string from their lip.

So let me clarify what I said earlier: being bigger doesn't give you more mental capacity. Withstanding mental issues such as pain and fear can be overcome with a determined personality and training. In addition to that, now that you've mentioned needles piercing an elephant's skin, they actually do very well with acupuncture procedures, but only because it's a small one-time-pain, not tons of needles all over the body at one time. I don't think anyone could withstand something like that without proper training.

Edit: Haha... Hell, that reminds me of when I passed out once from the pain of peeling skin on a rotting bruise where a brown recluse spider had bit me right on the face. Not fun. *shudder*

[Dradym]

well, i kinda like having the badgers like they are-they are small, worthless beings that cause chaos-but no real damage...
but yeah, it is a balance issue for the ability, should any other monster/creature use it

[profit]

Perhaps if there was something similar to adrenaline that caused creatures to be immune to pain for the first few bits of combat.  Kinda like a martial trance, but instead offers significant pain reduction for about 30+ (depending on creature) combat rounds.

It could also offer a speed boost to the creature being attacked if they do not plan on fighting back... But that is beyond the scope of fixing the pain problem.

[TomiTapio]

It could also offer a speed boost to the creature being attacked if they do not plan on fighting back... But that is beyond the scope of fixing the pain problem.

I could fancy animals slowing down a little when they're bleeding from multiple spots.

Master Toady, How about NOPAIN being 0-100% tag instead of on/off? Same for NoFear, Fleequick and Likes_Fighting.

Wow, my errorlog has "Receive job pay: NULL JOB" never seen that before!