Morale system for (colony) animals

[b0rsuk]

Currently chicken, pig, dog hordes are stupidly effective against raids. I think a natural remedy would be giving animals morale rating. Most farm animals would scatter easily after taking a few casualties (more courage in bigger groups). Wargs, wolves, bears, elephants, cobras and other predators should be better for combat and have a higher morale rating. Animals assigned to a colonist would be considered a group, their morale values summed up and after dropping below certain percentage they would run away.

[Granitecosmos]

Currently chicken, pig, dog hordes are stupidly effective against raids. I think a natural remedy would be giving animals morale rating. Most farm animals would scatter easily after taking a few casualties (more courage in bigger groups). Wargs, wolves, bears, elephants, cobras and other predators should be better for combat and have a higher morale rating. Animals assigned to a colonist would be considered a group, their morale values summed up and after dropping below certain percentage they would run away.

This would be a nice mod suggestion but not a good suggestion for the main game. This would mean all one has to do is assign the animals evenly across all colonists, bypassing at least 50% of this system right off the bat. The game doesn't care who trained the animals, after all. Predators are already better for combat, it just so happens they're also harder to feed, find and tame. You don't see manhunters breaking and fleeing after taking a few casualties, you don't see predators aborting hunts because you shoot their legs off. Besides, we still have ridiculous lategame raids. If tribals get to get their low-budget weakling swarms, I say so do we, it's only fair. This would just take away from the game at this point rather than improve it, penalizing a system instead of fine-tuning it.

Also, this would be pretty hard to balance right. I don't want Tynan wasting his time on this while there are so many better things he could implement instead.

If you really want to see this in the game, fine. But make sure the system is extended to ALL animals, not just colony animals. I want to see that goddamn wolf cower and run away after I shoot it's kidney, trying to hunt one of my guys. I want to see the manhunters making a quick escape after I mow down half of them with miniguns in the first five seconds of combat. Hell, I want to see hunted prey actually trying to run away from predators.
I want all that but that doesn't mean I get to see it in-game any time soon.

[Aerial]

Currently chicken, pig, dog hordes are stupidly effective against raids. I think a natural remedy would be giving animals morale rating. Most farm animals would scatter easily after taking a few casualties (more courage in bigger groups). Wargs, wolves, bears, elephants, cobras and other predators should be better for combat and have a higher morale rating. Animals assigned to a colonist would be considered a group, their morale values summed up and after dropping below certain percentage they would run away.

I agree with the idea of giving animals more realistic behaviors, like prey animals scattering at the first gunshot, wolves working in packs and being dangerous in a group but easy to run off if alone, etc.  But to really solve the problem of animals being too effective in large groups for combat, I think you have to make the damage animals can do a lot more reasonable and make it impossible to train a fair number of them for combat release.  In history, how many trained squirrel armies have existed? 

I think animals need a pretty big overhaul, honestly.  Squirrels, rabbits, chickens - all small animals - should only be able to do minor damage and only to pawns with no clothing or armor.  And raiders should prioritize them as minor threats only, meaning they'll only attack them if they have nothing more threatening/useful to engage with.  A guy in armor should stride through a pack of chickens or squirrels without taking any damage, ever.  But to keep those small animals relevant, maybe scratches and bites, while trivial, always carry a small risk of rabies.

Herd/prey animals should also be untrainable for combat release, but as compensation perhaps they should be able to be used as a pack animal with a pawn as handler to allow the pawn to carry more stacks of stuff at once around the map.  So domesticating that docile deer or ibex could be useful, just not for combat.

tl:dr -  It is quite amusing that the game makes it possible to herd cats (as well as squirrels, turtles and monkeys), but I think it interferes with gameplay.