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[ChairmanPoo]

Hello, so I hired some 10 monster slayers thinking they might actually be good... but I've been reading they're rather shitty.

Is there any way to properly manage these guys? Not so much for cavern monsters, as to use them as protection vs raiding parties

[PatrikLundell]

No. In my view the best you can do is to make sure you're not accepting their petitions.

You can't control them, and they'll litter the cavern with first the pieces of some occasional perfectly harmless creatures, and then with pieces of themselves, after having had you keep the access to caverns open for a long time while they eat, drink, sleep, pray, socialize, read, and then repeat a few times. Once they reach the cavern they shortly get hungry/thirsty/sleepy and return back up. Their litter generation draws you dorfs into harms way as they try to clean up the mess.

I expect you'll be provided with a more positive perspective by someone else, though...

[DrCyano]

They are good for filing your tavern/inn with customers, which doesn't have much tangible benefit to you but makes it look busy if you don't regularly get other kinds of visitors.

If you're careful about cavern access (use borrows and a draw bridge door), you can farm the slayers for their modest equipment, though it's really not worth it. At best, they're a good distraction to occupy cavern monsters while your militia gathers their weapons. At worst, they lure your sock-obsessed dwarves to their premature demise.

Personally, I like monster slayers, but they rarely live up to their name (much to my amusement).

[muldrake]

Hello, so I hired some 10 monster slayers thinking they might actually be good... but I've been reading they're rather shitty.

Is there any way to properly manage these guys? Not so much for cavern monsters, as to use them as protection vs raiding parties

Build a drawbridge to shut down the cavern layer, wait until a bunch are there and then close it off.  Wait for a forgotten beast to finish them.

[mko]

I edited https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Monster_slayer to mention their uselessness and added mention of drawbridge.

[muldrake]

I edited https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Monster_slayer to mention their uselessness and added mention of drawbridge.

There's also just declining their petitions.  I don't like doing that a lot but on my last couple forts I got swarmed with a bunch of these guys even less useful than migrants and developed a bit of xenophobia.

The one actually useful thing they do other than every now and then actually killing something you want killed is generating combat reports that might let you get civilians out of the way of something actually dangerous, or warn of something obnoxious like a troll before it starts causing havoc.