Bay 12 Games Forum

Can this be used to detect mineral deposits within aquifers?  Asking for a friend....


PS: if you are going to be a pedantic twat, at least make sure you are right.

this caused my early games to slowly turn into a monotonous drivel that was....hard to play.

Welcome to Dwarf Fortress. 

War wolverine cancels task, kill goblin ambusher, cannot find rope-reed socks.

People asked me to make a thread on this here, so here goes. 

Animals should have attributes like dwarves.  Each species should have a set of average and standard deviations. These could be further divided by sex as needed.   So for example yaks bulls could have 1500 +- 200 strength and yak cows could have 1400 +- 100, or whatever.  These values should then be used to handle trainability (and anything else).  Here you could set up some equations for various situations (trainability, how quickly the animal reverts, etc) based on the needed attribute values, and set up the equations such that lower attribute animals would take increasingly longer time/effort to train (here trainer ability also plays in of course), to the point where an animal whose required training time exceeds its lifespan, has effectively been given a "can not train" flag.  A slightly modified set of equations could be used for war-training, with more stringent requirements.    Ultimately, an animal's attributes would be to some randomized extent, inheritable through breeding.

In this way, trainability and such is an emergent property rather than an explicit (and often arbitrary) flag set in the creature's raws.  The natural but controlled randomisation on the averages, would make some species more or less suitable for training, but with careful work and time expenditure, the player could take an unruly animal species and move it towards usefulness in battle.   Different castes could even emerge, both thru breeding and through any sexual differentiation in the raws. 

Obviously, some of the more glaring bugs in involved with war animals would need to be resolved to make full use of any of these changes. 

Quote from: daggaz on June 17, 2019, 11:46:00 am

All animals should have attributes and personality traits, which should affect whether or not a specific animal is trainable and to what extent.    Species should have a set of averages and variances, so pretty much most dogs could end up being war trainable, whereas war bears or giant warvarines might be more tricky, and giant war hornets would take some luck and a legendary animal trainer.

Perhaps you could accomplish the attributes and traits parts by splitting the animals into multiple castes per sex, one with everything suitable to war-train and a not-trainable caste for each trait/stat required, so that there'd be 1 caste with bravery always between 1500 and 2000, 1 caste with bravery always between 1000 and 500 and N other castes with bravery between 500 and 2000.

Though that requires the trainable tag to be caste-level. Don't know if it is, better test first on just female dogs or sth if one wants to try it.


Making the success depend on skill would require dfhack, tho.

Why would you need to do that?  The attributes are all you need, you don't even need minimum requirements at that, just have some kind of computation that makes it increasingly unfeasible to train a given animal if it's relevant scores are not high enough.  At one point you will hit the lifespan of the animal and you have effectively set an "impossible to train" flag on it. 

This way, each animal type only needs its average and standard deviation defined for every attribute (how sentient species are done already) and the natural variance included there gives you a controlled randomization on how many of said species are trainable and to what extent, etc, on average. 

I was thinking more of a big red button hidden in one of the menus.   Push q-v-l-b-shift.d-V for volcanic armageddon. 

I have gotten goblin sieges at well under 80 pop without editting any of the triggers, (Siege in the top of the screen), but that may have well been an "ambush".  Ambushes definitely are wealth triggered.