I'm about to start a tribal game in the jungle with this cool mod that adds giant cezo-era creatures like huge centipedes and wargs on steroids.
Im interested in how animals are effective in combat against other enemies.
Heres the scenario.
Tribal planet, no guns (At least I hope so), only bows and javelins (To be clear NOONE has guns. No guns.)
Which animals would be good to train? Im looking for animals that can do melee combat and can maybe take a hit or two, these animals should also be sustainable, so no boom rats as those seem to kick the bucket really fast and start synchronized explosions.
I looked thru vanilla animal DPS recently & was surprised to learn that emu & ostrich have even higher DPS than warg/wolf. They won't last as long tho.. Presumably Jungle biome means no muffalo; maybe dromedaries? Can't remember if grizzlies are available in jungle, but they may be worth looking into despite similar training setbacks to Megasloth (see below)
Megasloths ofc, but it's highly unlikely you'll get them trained in any reasonable period of time (maybe unless you get a breeding pair rlly quick; I /think/ training 'tame' young grants a bonus, but I'm not at all certain..)
(I play unmodded, so don't know in your case)
Animals are a good support. Of course, animals alone will not win a fight, but they provide extremely good distraction and can sometimes even down a raider on their own.
Now my favorite for that are boars. They breed pretty fast, deal decent damage and can also sustain some damage. And in non-wartime they can haul and they can be fed with the corpses of your enemies. I love them.
On the side, I also usually try to farm larger animals such as bears or elephants. Problem with those is however that they take very long to breed and grow up. As such I always feel the need to raise a certain amount (1 male, multiple females) which will never participate in combat and just stay in the barn for breeding. Any males beyond my breeding one will be trained for combat purposes, as will any females after I have a certain number of them in the barn. But as said, these take a long time to give birth and even longer to become adults so early on it is not as viable, even though they are way stronger than the boars.
Once you get a good-sized colony going, training all your livestock to be released at whim is essential for your survival. It's a fairly cheap and easy (dare i say, TOO easy) process which assures you roadblocks to anyone raiding your colony.
Vastly outnumbered, outgunned and/or with severe food problems incoming? No problems! Just unleash a stampede on the invaders!
My favourite strategy so far is to tame a couple boomalopes, let them breed, and use the males as disposable jihadist ALLAHU AKBAR over huge tribal raids. Never gets old.
With this advice I just started now (Like right now) Over the map here Is what I can see.
A large pack of boars
A pack of 4 boomalopes
Single turkeys around the map
One pack of alpaca and some other alpaca around the map
Rats
Arthopleura (One)
Pack of nine capyrbara
Turtles
Titanoboa
I like wolf they reproduce quite fast and you feed them with corpse.
Mostly use them as meat shield
Yeah I wish we had wolves in the jungle.
Im stuck trying to tame the giant centipedes or that beastly Titanoboa that does 60 damage with one hit.
Quote from: EnricoDandolo on July 17, 2017, 05:21:12 PM
With this advice I just started now (Like right now) Over the map here Is what I can see.
A large pack of boars
A pack of 4 boomalopes
Single turkeys around the map
One pack of alpaca and some other alpaca around the map
Rats
Arthopleura (One)
Pack of nine capyrbara
Turtles
Titanoboa
Boars are good (see above)
Rats.. shades of James Herbert? (cf squirrels in other biomes) ;) Boomrats would be preferable but I think they may be slower/larger (+ collateral dmg ofc)
Capybara may be good; they'll tank a fair amount but I'm unsure how easy they are to train; likewise turtle/tortoise for distraction only
Alpacas are terrific. They are super easy to tame and train. The damage per second is low, but so what? Just have more of them! Alpaca wool is a nice bonus, too.
Also, don't feel like you have to have just one kind of colony animal. Every time your handler is idle, go wrangle another species.
Your jungle has no snow in the winter, right? Zone them away from your crops and stockpiles and let them graze forever.
I like dogs since they reproduce fast enough to keep up with raid mortality once you reach a breeding critical mass. They have advanced trainable intelligence and train very fast, they eat almost anything, and they don't go after your growing crops. In numbers they're a great counter for melee situations like bug infestations. Just don't bring a dog to a gunfight.
When raising animals for use as defensive forces, several choices become important:
Go large or go small. The most effective animals in combat are large (bears, megasloths, muffalo, etc.) or as small as possible (squirrels or boomrats, say). Large animals dish out and can survive lots of damage, while small animals are quite difficult to hit, especially in a swarm.
To train or not to train. Training animals makes them more effective, BUT also inevitably bonds one or more of them with the trainer(s), possibly causing multiple bad moodlets simultaneously if/when the bonded animals die. You can, instead, simply surround your base with untrained livestock "holding pens"; raiders will often go after them 1st, and the animals will defend themselves.
Can you support both the extra food consumption AND the FPS hit? Each animal type has its food requirements; it's probably best to avoid the use of carnivore-only animals, for example, because they'll end up competing directly with your colonists for the limited meat "pool". Make sure you can satisfy the needs of your furry army!
Re: FPS, the single biggest problem with large numbers of animals is the eventual (but inevitable) hit to FPS they represent. Each animal seems to require much less CPU time per game "tick" (they simply don't have to make anywhere near as many decisions) but yes, eventually you will suffer the "chickpocalypse" if you let them breed w/o limit!
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=15469.0
If you tame the titanoboa, then be really careful with it. Animals can suffer mental breaks if a pawn they are bonded with dies or if a low level Handler tries to train or tame them. And by itself don't expect it to do much before it is killed. Animals work best in swarms.
Having a trained animal force can save your colony from disaster but does take time and resources to set up and feed.
Quote from: doctercorgi on July 18, 2017, 02:49:01 PM
If you tame the titanoboa, then be really careful with it. Animals can suffer mental breaks if a pawn they are bonded with dies or if a low level Handler tries to train or tame them. And by itself don't expect it to do much before it is killed. Animals work best in swarms.
Having a trained animal force can save your colony from disaster but does take time and resources to set up and feed.
To be fair it does 60 damage in one hit, and moves as fast (if not faster) then a colonist.
Also, I can get rid of bodies without cremating or graves by just putting them into the Titanoboa's chambers (once I tame it.)
The manhunting/mental break chance is also pretty low. This is exactly why I *tame* dangerous predators (and then slaughter them, if unwanted), rather than hunt them down; the chance of a violent reprisal is something like half that when being attacked by a hunter, if not even less.
Yeah if that titanoboa ever has it's owner die, my colony will also die because of it's beserk rage (once i tame it)
while animals tend to be alright at combat the problem is them dying and causing a tantrum spiral
Quote from: Nainara on July 17, 2017, 10:47:54 PM
I like dogs since they reproduce fast enough to keep up with raid mortality once you reach a breeding critical mass. They have advanced trainable intelligence and train very fast, they eat almost anything, and they don't go after your growing crops. In numbers they're a great counter for melee situations like bug infestations. Just don't bring a dog to a gunfight.
Boars are very similar in utility. They have the downside of eating crops, but the upside of being able to graze after being zoned out of crops, and are otherwise very comparable.
Quote from: TheMeInTeam on July 19, 2017, 10:54:25 AM
Boars are very similar in utility. They have the downside of eating crops, but the upside of being able to graze after being zoned out of crops, and are otherwise very comparable.
Boars are 30% weaker in HP, 5% slower, but take ten days less to gestate and are half as "expensive" as wolves, so two boars equate one wolf for raid size. So it's quantity over quality. Also, boars are more vulnerable to cold (-20ºC minimum temp vs -50ºC). People tend to elevate boars too much over wolves.
Quote from: Razzoriel on July 19, 2017, 12:48:11 PM
Quote from: TheMeInTeam on July 19, 2017, 10:54:25 AM
Boars are very similar in utility. They have the downside of eating crops, but the upside of being able to graze after being zoned out of crops, and are otherwise very comparable.
Boars are 30% weaker in HP, 5% slower, but take ten days less to gestate and are half as "expensive" as wolves, so two boars equate one wolf for raid size. So it's quantity over quality. Also, boars are more vulnerable to cold (-20ºC minimum temp vs -50ºC). People tend to elevate boars too much over wolves.
They've each reasonable tradeoffs. Both are much harder to train than dogs, but boars are still easier than wolves. 5% slower isn't ideal but it's fast enough to run people down. It comes down to what kind of scenario you have to feed them.
I don't like either as a first-line defense vs raids on extreme. If you're fortunate enough to get a critical mass of bears (which eat at .35 nutrition trolololol) then they can probably handle the task, but otherwise tamed animals are emergency stand-ins (IE stuff like drop pod raid) or flankers when it comes to combat. I suppose they can be used to bait super weapons too if you don't have another answer. A single chicken or something tanking a doomsday rocket probably isn't going to make it, but it's a little easier to replace than a colonist.
Large animals(Bears, Deer, muffalo...) can tear apart tribals and pirates early on,
Tiny animals(Rats, Boomrats, Squirrels) can get past pirates with guns and really tear them apart in large groups viva 10-20 animals biting everything.
Everything in between is only good for defending against other animals.
Animals can absolutely be devastating in battle, but it's a very complex question with a lot of factors involved.
Scale is a big issue. Animals (or any melee in general) does well in lower numbers battles. As the number on each side increases the animals will struggle more and more - it's the basic "zerglings vs marines" thing where range will always benefit from scale. Ultimately I think attack animals will hit a wall in terms of effectiveness as raids become too large to defeat without massive casualties (though to be fair, in late game you may be able to replace animals very quickly too given large numbers).
As for what animal to choose, that again is very complex. here are some things to consider at least:
- upkeep. Are they easy to feed and train (wildness)?
- size. Small animals are very hard to hit. large ones are easy.
- Tankyness. Weak animals will often die when they go down, but something like an elephant or rhino will usually just be incapacitated, and you can patch them up. With the right mod like "a dog said" you can even fix missing missing limbs and other such things, but tanky animals will also tend to be more resistant to these problems also.
- Breeding rate. A pretty big thing since it matter much less if you have large losses if you can replace them fast.
- Off-duty use. It's not very optimal if your animals can't do anything besides fight occasionally - not unless they are the type that can essentially feed themselves (graze) and not be a burden. So it often boils down to "can it be trained to haul in a reasonable amount of time" ?
Choosing a fast-breeding animal can be great if you can feed them, but be wary of bonded animal death debuffs. On the other end of the spectrum, having only large powerful animals is great - but they are usually slow breeders.
I think wild boars tend to hit a lot of the right points: decent damage, quite fast, very fast breeders with multiple offspring litters. Can be trained to haul. Can graze and feed themselves given the space for it. Just don't expect them to survive most of the time.
Good tank animals are rhinos, bears (they have an amazing stun ability), and elephants. These very frequently survive battles even if they get incapacitated - and can get patched up for re-use. It just takes a long long time to get them up to speed. Hard to tame, hard to train, slow breeders. At least rhinos and elephants can graze (though they do eat a whole lot).
It's worth mentioning also that there is a "exploity" way to get animals to attack without the release mechanic - including animals that really aren't very battle-oriented, like chickens. You can just use the zoning tools to make them run into the enemy and they will defend themselves when attacked. Pretty cheezy though... even if it is hilarious.
TLDR: It's not easy to primarily use animals for combat, nor optimal in most cases, but it is doable with the right setup.
-Stigma
Currently on extreme Randy random rain forest, 6 pawns and at least 100+ boars and less than 50 alpacas. Boars and etc is pretty much the only reason I am still alive.
Avoid friendly fire by not using ranged weapon.
Watch out for enemy molotov cocktail and incendiary launcher.
Train both alpacas and boars but keep the alpacas away from combat - it is an annoying task to find out which alpaca has a broken leg.
I suppose later in the game those doomsday rocket launcher can be an issue too. I am gona randomly place some walls all over the map to break raider's line of sight.
I found Cougars to be extremely good. They are fast and have a ton of hitpoints. They only eat meat though.
Either a Swarm or few Giant grade animals, the choice is yours.
Animals are good for taking and giving a few hits, but they aren't directly under your control so they can sometimes get stuck in a bad situation and die.
Fortunately, the animals which are squishy tend to also have faster pregnancies so you can replace their numbers as long as you have at least a breeding pair.
Move speed is useful. The more time animals take to get to the front lines, the greater the chance that the fight is over before they even get there.
The main limiting factors are the Animal Handling skill of your tamer and the wildness of the target animal. At skill level 13, for example, you have a 7.5% chance of taming an animal with wildness of 75%. So that might take a while.
Bears are pretty fun to mess around with, they're big, tanky and hit hard.
Now if you play with EPOE + A Dog Said you open up a whole new can of cybernetically enhanced worms.