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[Leonidas]

. . . since they're the most war-trained animal in history, with the arguable exception of the dog.

[Telgin]

My understanding is that war training for horses was mostly to condition them to not be afraid in combat, so that you could charge toward loud enemies without your mount freaking out and dumping you.
 That's in contrast to how war training works in DF, where the animals are trained to be outright aggressive and to attack enemies.

I imagine it'll come up when mounts are expanded though.  War training a mount would be an important task then, and it would be amusing to be able to assign mounts that weren't war trained who then dump their riders or flee from enemies and take their riders with them.  Or to see the same happen with disorganized or poorly trained attackers.

[Leonidas]

My understanding is that war training for horses was mostly to condition them to not be afraid in combat, so that you could charge toward loud enemies without your mount freaking out and dumping you.

I think the horses did a lot more than just not run away. In Steven Pressfield's The Virtue of War (about Alexander the Great), I recall him saying something like half the cavalryman's weapon was the horse. Lots of trampling and kicking.

[Bumber]

My understanding is that war training for horses was mostly to condition them to not be afraid in combat, so that you could charge toward loud enemies without your mount freaking out and dumping you.

I think the horses did a lot more than just not run away. In Steven Pressfield's The Virtue of War (about Alexander the Great), I recall him saying something like half the cavalryman's weapon was the horse. Lots of trampling and kicking.

What about those horses in Sherlock Holmes: The Seven-Per-Cent Solution? Locked in a stable with Lipizzaners trained to kill.

[Shonai_Dweller]

It'd be nice if animals needed actual war training, like sapients do, rather than just being told one day by the magical trainer, 'from today you run towards the enemy and not away'.

Because after all, who doesn't want to watch cave-adapted trainee cavalry dorfs projectile vomiting as they charge their horses back and forth across the map?

[FantasticDorf]

Skittish Rutherers & elephants could secretly be the perfect war animals we only really see in arena no quarter mode.

Have animal trainers install a healthy amount of discipline into the animal perhaps?

[King Mir]

Horses are trained to not be afraid in combat. War dogs are trained to kill. DF war animal classification is more similar to that of war dogs than horses so it would not be appropriate to use the same model. If dwarves rode horses they might train them to be good war mounts, but it would still need a different system than war dog training.

[FantasticDorf]

How would you feel about a change/addition to animal training to drill a animal like a regular squad training exercise for extended war training? The war animal is drilled over time and gains skills taught by its master part bled in by the teaching skill and personal experience.

It may keep animal training areas more occupied, K-9 units do extensive work in the real world with discipline and attack methods, so over time useless war animals like benign ones could become useful, the difference being that large predators like big cats or dogs can be used straight out of the gate for military service while more naturally docile creatures have to be trained up.

Have them do some sparring to test their skills and listening to their trainers as they build up muscle mass and gain some skills.

[Shonai_Dweller]

How would you feel about a change/addition to animal training to drill a animal like a regular squad training exercise for extended war training? The war animal is drilled over time and gains skills taught by its master part bled in by the teaching skill and personal experience.

It may keep animal training areas more occupied, K-9 units do extensive work in the real world with discipline and attack methods, so over time useless war animals like benign ones could become useful, the difference being that large predators like big cats or dogs can be used straight out of the gate for military service while more naturally docile creatures have to be trained up.

Have them do some sparring to test their skills and listening to their trainers as they build up muscle mass and gain some skills.

Large predators could probably benefit from discipline training with their squads to stop them just acting randomly on the battlefield (obviously post-formations development when dorfs have actually stopped acting randomly themselves...).

[Miles_Umbrae]

How about making it into two different classes of war-training depending on if the animal is a large predator or herbivore animal, i.e. combat war-training for predators and utility war-training for large herbivore animals.

[FantasticDorf]

How about making it into two different classes of war-training depending on if the animal is a large predator or herbivore animal, i.e. combat war-training for predators and utility war-training for large herbivore animals.

You can still have anxious predators with the right combination of tags like [FLEEQUICK], a singular kind of training could cover both bases and they're still subject to morale (actually the prior drinking problems came from a lot of horror if people remember correctly) failures, so healthy amount of training and what biting, scratching etc training is availible providing the dwarf doesn't get mauled by accident by a giant tiger.

Naked Mole Dogs for instance, pretty useless and small, shortlived and ineffective in combat, there are plenty of useless animals that could probably benefit from this training to at least be meat shields for the fortress.

• On the other hand training regimes would be a good use for animal trainers to improve their skills without relying on waiting for creature training to degrade.

[GoblinCookie]

You can still have anxious predators with the right combination of tags like [FLEEQUICK], a singular kind of training could cover both bases and they're still subject to morale (actually the prior drinking problems came from a lot of horror if people remember correctly) failures, so healthy amount of training and what biting, scratching etc training is availible providing the dwarf doesn't get mauled by accident by a giant tiger.

Naked Mole Dogs for instance, pretty useless and small, shortlived and ineffective in combat, there are plenty of useless animals that could probably benefit from this training to at least be meat shields for the fortress.

• On the other hand training regimes would be a good use for animal trainers to improve their skills without relying on waiting for creature training to degrade.

I don't think [FLEEQUICK] actually does anything anymore.

[IndigoFenix]

Certain personality traits have an impact on how animals behave, which makes more sense than simple tags IMO.  It lets you be more flexible with exactly how aggressive or skittish a species is.  I'd like to see that system expandes on to determine things like how easy they are to socialize (gregariousness) or train.

If animal training is an actual process rather than the placeholder system we have now, then animals can be given a spectrum of how easy they are to train for certain roles, rather than being an either/or thing.  Then we can have things like legendary trainers being able to train animals in unorthodox ways, like bear cavalry or guard alligators.

[GoblinCookie]

Certain personality traits have an impact on how animals behave, which makes more sense than simple tags IMO.  It lets you be more flexible with exactly how aggressive or skittish a species is.  I'd like to see that system expandes on to determine things like how easy they are to socialize (gregariousness) or train.

If animal training is an actual process rather than the placeholder system we have now, then animals can be given a spectrum of how easy they are to train for certain roles, rather than being an either/or thing.  Then we can have things like legendary trainers being able to train animals in unorthodox ways, like bear cavalry or guard alligators.

The problem is that animals presently have such a limited array of behaviours to start with.  Everything wild either has to attack you or run away or the game does not work properly. 

[Leonidas]

How about making it into two different classes of war-training depending on if the animal is a large predator or herbivore animal, i.e. combat war-training for predators and utility war-training for large herbivore animals.

It's a mistake to think of herbivores as peaceful and predators as violent. At mating time, there's plenty of violence between the males of nearly all large mammal species. Search YouTube for "horses fight" or "stags fight" for examples.

The question is whether you can get the animal to fight on command, and that comes down to social instincts. Dogs and horses are so trainable because they're so social. Here's a video about zebras vs horses.

DF is a fantasy game, so I'm not objecting to all the exotic war animals. It's just strange that the animal historically most trained for war is not war trainable, while so many animals that have never been trained for war are war trainable.