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My war dogs stop breeding entirely when I chain/leash them somewhere to guard an area. ALL of them. Even when just one is leashed. I'd suspected something of the sort before, but I tested it this most recent game.
I saved the game, leashed a single war dog (out of ~70), and ran the game a year. No puppies were born, although I had plenty of calves, lambs, and foals. Then I reloaded the save and left the dog unleashed, and ran the game a year. Lots of puppies (and the other animals as well of course).
I'm not sure whether this just applies to war dogs specifically, to war-trained animals in general, or to all tamed animals.
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That's odd. My dogs are still breeding even though I've got plenty of them leashed throughout my fortress. Maybe all your dogs are of the same sex by coincidence?
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Somehow, I doubt that 0.5^69 is a high enough chance for me to even check that possibility :p
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Hmm, this may explain something I've seen.
Once I get to the chasm I tend to start chaining up dogs as sentrys. Usually about a year later I notice a lack of dog breeding. That and my current fort has had two tamed gazelles chained next to each other for over a year with no results. I'll try caging the gazelles.
Although this might no be the problem, as I also have four unicorns caged immedately adjacent to one another (a 2x2 cage set).
Still trying to capture a male giant lion though.
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Once I get the chance to ask the human caravan for things, I order dogs every year. A couple new dogs seems to kick start the breeding back into gear when it stalls.
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Maybe the dogs realize they are inbreeding too much and wait for the new blood? :-)
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This likely has something to do with upper limits for animals and species.
Some versions ago the maximum number of animals were 200 in the whole fortress, then they stopped breeding. It led to some problems, when after an attack that killed most of them, they didn't start breeding again. Limit was relaxed, but some remains keep cropping up.
I always request a couple of animals from traders as well, this seems to fix the problem.
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I just tested this with horses - same exact thing happened (except my dogs didn't resume breeding after I unchained the last one :(). Now I only have sheep, cows, and cats breeding in my fortress.
I guess it's a good method of pet control, though. Tie up one of each type of animal you don't want breeding for a year or so and voila, no new tax... err, animals!
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Sheep?
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Probably added them.
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The chaining doesn't seem to come up in the code. There's just a cap at 50 for each type, and the number of young can't exceed the number of adults*3, or something.
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It might be that the animals that are chained want to breed but can't move, and that freezes the algorythm?
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There's been a discussion about this going on on the wiki as well. It is definitely the case that all dogs stop breeding if you chain 1, and ordering dogs from the human caravan (or unchaining all your dogs) will start the rest of the dogs breeding again. Incidentally, it was tested with other animals too -- the problem is not with dogs, but with chains.
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Wait, what would happen if a chained animal gave birth? Wouldn't the babies just hang around the animal until they're trained, claimed as a pet, or killed?
That'd be kindof... well, I guess it'd be kindof neat actually, if the animal's chained in a low-traffic area for guard duty, like near the chasm or something.
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Yeah, I've had good luck with chaining females. The babies do hang around, milling about. The dogs never accumulate too much of a crowd, because they get trained as soon as they grow up.
It works well with horses though. I chain up the female horses outside, a fair distance away from the entrance. Each chained female eventually becomes the nucleus of a herd of tame horses. That keeps the horses out of the way, and outside grazing on grass the way horses should do. I kind of felt a little guilty stuffing 20 horses into a cage in the zoo, but staking them out outside seems perfectly reasonable. And if their breeding gets out of control, all the better. Not only are they food on the hoof, but staked outside like that they will make irresistible targets for besieging archers. If enemy archers want to waste all their arrows on stray horses, I'm not going to argue with them.
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quote:
Originally posted by Angela Christine:
staked outside like that they will make irresistible targets for besieging archers
Which doesn't make you feel guilty at all. ;)
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Hey, one of my war dogs just gave birth to puppies, like a full year after I started chaining them. I have not yet purchased any dogs from the humans, although I did buy 3 cows...
A dog that was chained died due to old age recently. I wonder if that had anything to do with it.
Edit: actually I'm not even sure if that dog was chained. I remember reassigning all my chains to younger dogs recently.
[ November 02, 2006: Message edited by: Frugal ]
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Sorry for bringing up an old thread, but searching didn't result in an answer to my question.
At one place in the wiki (chasm) it says that one restrained dog means no breeding anymore. Is this (still) the case?
Cheers
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My answer hasn't changed. I don't think caging or chaining has anything to do with it, and I've never seen a save that proves otherwise. My answer above is how it's supposed to work. Now, the various strange theories I've seen posted make me suspect there's a bug of some kind, but I've tried chaining, and it doesn't stop breeding for me.
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ok thanks. I'll play around with it, and maybe at some point change that entry in the wiki accordingly.
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Not sure if this has been resolved or whatever, but this has happened to me twice in one fortress (13+ years). I have a LOT of war dogs, and at some point they totally stopped breeding. No idea what caused it, but I trained every last dog I owned so that I had something like 1/8 hunting dogs, 7/8 war dogs. I didn't get a single puppy for an entire year, until one of my marksdwarves who had a few assigned to him died in an attack. Suddenly, they started breeding again.
Now, several years later, it's happened again to the same save. This time I do still have some dogs. It's currently happening in this save: http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=1474
EDIT: Hmm... now that I've read the thread more carefully, I realize I did chain up a couple dogs and some wolves for guarding/breeding. I'll try releasing them and see if that fixes it.
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There's a maximum of 50 of any given type of animal on the map at a time. Once you exceed 50 you don't get any more births.