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[vhappylurker]

I'm actually wondering if using training dummies such as those in the Higher Learning and the Genesis mods would work with this process. If I'm remembering it right, all you'd need is to make a few training weapons for them to use on the dummies and as a bonus they'd also be able to defend against more dangerous creatures, such as wolves or stripped gobbos.

Just a thought though. Testing needs to be done first to see if this would be an effective method.

[oidip]

When not do it real spartan style?
They sent children to live in camps with lots of other children with an adult overseeing them.

Now instead of "an adult" why not have "(area of the room) turkeys"
Drop food in the old fashioned way and have a wall lined with beds.

For instance you could have a 6X2 room.
6 beds all in a line.
1 food/booze pile, 5 nest boxes.

EG
 +------------+
 |  B B B B B B |
 |  FN N N N N |
 +------------+

B= Bed
F= Food
N= Nest box
The rest is walls.

Pros:
Space efficient
Dwarves will not be mentally handicapped when they come of age (possibly)
Due to more turkeys being born the difficulty of their training will scale up as they age.

Cons:
Super soldiers will have 11 friends who could die at any time
High risk of turkey-splosion

[Wannazzaki]

I prefer cave crocodile-splosions. They lay near 40 eggs apiece, if everyones too busy to haul them...oh dear

[Sroge]

Why one room with 11 kids? Why not 11 rooms with one kid in each, thus eliminating the need for friendship.

[Girlinhat]

And thus I find myself back into fort mode discussion.  My taste for the blood of children has gone unsated, in these other games I play that lack the... raw finesse of dwarven child slaughter.

A few notes on the recent posts:
1) Solitary confinement is ok.  They will suffer attribute rot, but just the unimportant ones.  We're training soldiers, not mayors, they don't need a good memory or personal skills.  They need an axe and some armor bolted into their scared and hardened form that we so liberally still refer to as "a dwarf".  Furthermore, we don't need friends, we need soldiers.  Let their minds decay, so long as their arms hold strong.
2) There does seem to be an issue here, namely that you have conflicting needs.  For the animals to become aggressive, they need confined spaces.  For the child to remain sane, it needs a bit of breathing room.  Achieving both requires you to walk a razor's edge of comfort zone vs unadulterated butchering zone.

It's time to start the testing anew.  Strap your +kitten leather cap+ on tightly boys, we'll be warming up the old torture cages and venturing into the dark side of science.  We shall adored as the heros of the new dwarven age, and we shall be heralded as the monsters of the armok-forsaken stone pit where we carry out our sick torture in a bloodstained box we so liberally call a "laboratory".

I have a few things to do today, but then science.  In the meantime, someone could get a list of likely candidate animals for the horror box.  I'm looking at turkey to start with, but cat and chicken are in the line as well.

[monk12]

I think I've done this before, but I'm too lazy to search the thread. We've established that adult dogs reliably maim children, making them the upper bound on the size of the animal we want. The following list is drawn from the readily available domestic animals currently in DF (are we getting new domestics next update?)

Adult Dog- 30k
Adolescent- 12.5k
Adult Turkey- 5k
Adult Cat- 5k
Adult Goose- 4.5k
Adult Peafowl- 4k
Adult Chicken- 3k
Adolescent Turkey- 2.5k
Adolescent Cat- 2k
Puppy- 1k
Kitten- 500
Turkey Chick- 85
Chick- 60

This list includes child sizes for several of the more popular choices- even with this, you can see there is a dramatic dropoff in size (and corresponding lethality) after Dog. In my personal assessment, Turkey remains the best poultry choice and is the largest creature that isn't a dog and doesn't adopt dwarves. I don't think I accounted for child sizes previously, however, and it appears that puppies and adolescent dogs may provide a more challenging opponent.

[Nan]

To confine animals, you only need to assign a 1x1 meeting zone. A dwarf will also go to a meeting zone when he or she has nothing better to do. This should mean you can create the room to whatever size required for amenities, and have a 1x1 meeting zone for the animal gladiators. You could probably even adjust the intensity by increasing or decreasing the size of the meeting zone.

I use tiny meeting zones quite regularly, and they're great for provoking fights.

If you fed the child exclusively high value masterwork food, it would help improve their mood, right?

[Girlinhat]

Food and statues will improve mood, yes.  I intend to have both, along with waterfall(s) that should help keep the mood well above tantrum limit.  In fact, it may be the happiest dwarf of the whole fort!  Current plan is probably a 1x4 area, with a bed at one far end and a nest box on the other, and a meeting zone on the inside closer to the nest.  For convenience sake I'll be modding creatures to be 'breeding age' when they reach full size, so turkey will be changed to [CHILD:2] which should not change their growth rate, but will make it easier to track what's fully grown and what's not.

On the other hand... what's the lifespan of a dog?

[monk12]

10-20 years, if I read the wiki right.

[Girlinhat]

I'll check raws later, but that sounds about right.  That should suffice then, yes...  This particular plan probably won't work, but I'll have magma on standby.  Because Magma.

[BastiBasti]

Okay this is getting insane. Fist we had training/sparring, the we had saw/cube inspired danger rooms, now we have throwing newborns into solatary rooms with wild turkers for all their childhood, whats next? Sending their minds into a computer while we use their body for powering our numerous millstones? Gawd...

[Girlinhat]

Not wild turkey, they're much too docile, they run from dwarves.  We need tame turkey, who are not afraid of a dwarf and will gladly scratch anything indiscriminately.  And as much as you decry our actions, you and I both know that you really want to see it work - and that you really want to see it fail, so that you can witness the bloodshed.

Next stage will be infecting one or all children with were-badger curses, and then letting them fight each other.  To the victor goes survival.  To the losers goes a special spot in the refuse pile, just for you.  Bonus points if you get child were-badger ghosts.

[jcnorris00]

I had decent luck using badgers, at least with immigrant children (i.e. those wearing clothes).  Seemed like an obvious choice at the time.  You'll need some sort of medical system, though, otherwise your little bearded mayhem-machines-to-be will succumb to infection.

Will children wash themselves?  Maybe a pool of water and a few bars of soap will reduce the chance of infection and simultaneously provide a happy thought.

If anyone cares, my daycare room looked like this:

Code: [Select]

###
#8#
#X#
#+##
#=c#
#bt+
####8 is a statue.
X is a meeting area full of badgers.
+ are doors (the one leading to freedom is locked).
b is a bed.
c is a chair.
t is a table.
= is a food stockpile.

Food and drink (and badgers) were dropped onto the stockpile from above.  All furniture was masterwork, and all but the bed were made out of either gold or platinum (I don't remember which now).  The little tyke was quite happy until the infection from a broken toe killed him.  He killed two or three badgers by punching them in the head.  It was pretty awesome.  Of course, then he had to stand around smelling their rotting corpses, so there were a few drawbacks.

[Orky_Boss]

I had decent luck using badgers, at least with immigrant children (i.e. those wearing clothes).  Seemed like an obvious choice at the time.  You'll need some sort of medical system, though, otherwise your little bearded mayhem-machines-to-be will succumb to infection.

Will children wash themselves?  Maybe a pool of water and a few bars of soap will reduce the chance of infection and simultaneously provide a happy thought.

If anyone cares, my daycare room looked like this:

Code: [Select]

###
#8#
#X#
#+##
#=c#
#bt+
####8 is a statue.
X is a meeting area full of badgers.
+ are doors (the one leading to freedom is locked).
b is a bed.
c is a chair.
t is a table.
= is a food stockpile.

Food and drink (and badgers) were dropped onto the stockpile from above.  All furniture was masterwork, and all but the bed were made out of either gold or platinum (I don't remember which now).  The little tyke was quite happy until the infection from a broken toe killed him.  He killed two or three badgers by punching them in the head.  It was pretty awesome.  Of course, then he had to stand around smelling their rotting corpses, so there were a few drawbacks.

Maybe you could make a retracable bridge in the meeting room that you can open when there's a lot of corpses and you're sure that the child isn't standing on it.

just my 2 cents.

[monk12]

Badger's are fair candidates as far as size go- the juvenile forms are larger on average than puppies, and they grow to 30k same as a dog. Their main drawback is the fact they are not common domestic animals, meaning you can't breed them due to the combined Dungeon Master and Elf Caravan bugs.