Animal Army

[ssdg]

Have anyone tried animal army?

On my last saved file, I was able to purchase some golden retriever and huskies. I send 10 of them at a centipede, lost 5 and was able to disable the centipede. I didnt micro them at all, if I did, I might be able to save them by send the injured ones back to heal. Besides fighting, Once they can haul, your base become so organized, you just set the zones. The animal army also let me keep majority of my colonist working during a raid. I imaging this would come in really handy when your colony gets 10+. In my other saved game, I had 3 wargs, they are so much harder to train and feed, but does seem to deal really good damage. I just set up a couple turret and put a short wall on the side for my animals to hide, then ambush the attackers while I manages the turrets.

I'm still running into quite a few problems. In general, this is only my 4th day with the game, so my colonist seems to go mad and kill each other after a while. I have not make it late game yet, my biggest raid was something like 15, I'm really struggle to dealing with injure and mood, my colonist all went mad and kills each other, lol.

Regarding animal training specifically.
Number 1, my base building was suffering a lot because how much animal training I was dealing with. In my warg save, I have to have a dedicated hunter entire game to keep my wargs feed.
Number 2, when fighting things like centipede, my hunting pack took a rather heavy loose, how would a squirrel or boomerat army work, they are much easier to replace, the dead squirrel also provide meat and fur. If you then mix in some warg or husky, you can micro the injured ones out of the fight.
Number 3, is there an easier way to train the animals? right now you have to manually click each and every animal and train them, this becomes rather annoying and tedious if you were to create a huge pack of squirrel or boomerat.

I dont know if it's a bug or I'm just noob/unlucky, on both of my saves, I'm 10 month in with only 5 colonist. The hunting packs seem to leave no survivor. Also, Tynan said he's working on some animal control event to soft cap the max number of the animals you can have, I hope if this strategy is indeed viable now, the update wont kill it.

PS: English is not my first language, sorry for the misspells and grammar error.

[Mikhail Reign]

Double clicking a wild animal will select all others of its type currently on screen. Then you can set them all to be tamed at once.

[ssdg]

Double clicking a wild animal will select all others of its type currently on screen. Then you can set them all to be tamed at once.

taming them is not the problem, but train them. I have not find a way to train all animals at once. I guess it have to do with not all animal can be trained to haul and rescues.

[Mikhail Reign]

Ah. I'd already been used squirrel 'armys'. I just put their zone between me and raiders. You'd be surprised how many bullets squirrels will soak up. Meat shields are part of the army yeah?

[Coenmcj]

Ah. I'd already been used squirrel 'armys'. I just put their zone between me and raiders. You'd be surprised how many bullets squirrels will soak up. Meat shields are part of the army yeah?

That's the beauty of the tactical engine, Squirrels, thanks to their size, are quite difficult to hit, and when you unleash a swarm of them? Destruction on a grand scale.

[Kraehe]

How does taming work? I marked some wild animals to be tamed but nothing happens. I got my tamers the top priority to their handle animal jobs. Did i miss something or is it just random when my tamers decide to do their job? ^^

Thanks

[Mikhail Reign]

They need to be a certain level of handling - I'm not exactly sure what it is, but I think 6 will surfice for most animals. You also need to have food - your handlers will pick up food, put it in their inventory and THEN they can train animals. I'm pretty sure that you cant even get the forced menu to come up if they dont have food in their inven.

Anyway I was in your situation and then when my colony started 'running' a bit everything seemed to work, so I placed the problem with my lack of extra surplus food.

[zandadoum]

I didn't have much success with animal army.

Randy challenge and randy extreme

The problem was they just take too long and consume too much
And with a single wrong placed raid or a berserk colonist you will lose many animals

However once I was successful in having over a dozen dogs doing ALL my hauling and much quicker than my colonists would. But this was late game, I struggled a lot to get there

Next game I will try pig farms for meat and leather but I am afraid that also only works late game. And if you managed to get late game on randy random then animals are the least of your problems or needs.

I advise anyone to get a couple of chickens for eggs and a couple of dogs for extra haul and absolutely skip any other animals until you're late game with a stable colony

[Kraehe]

I tried it with somone who had animal handling 20 and she just did anything else except taming.

[Jan2607]

I think I'll try to tame an army of boomrats or boomalopes. When they attack the enemy and get killed by them, it's like a suicide attack on the enemy group

[fatwilf]

A large group (i think 8-10) of tame terriers just joined the colony.

I am going to train them into a mean yappy ankle biting fighting force

[ssdg]

I didn't have much success with animal army.

Randy challenge and randy extreme

The problem was they just take too long and consume too much
And with a single wrong placed raid or a berserk colonist you will lose many animals

However once I was successful in having over a dozen dogs doing ALL my hauling and much quicker than my colonists would. But this was late game, I struggled a lot to get there

Next game I will try pig farms for meat and leather but I am afraid that also only works late game. And if you managed to get late game on randy random then animals are the least of your problems or needs.

I advise anyone to get a couple of chickens for eggs and a couple of dogs for extra haul and absolutely skip any other animals until you're late game with a stable colony

Hmm, I seem to share more failed experiences like you do.
I had 2 more saved since the last posting.

The first one didnt go so well, I bought someone with 20 animal skill, the training and taming was going really well until a alien ship + 3 poison ships.

The 2nd one, I'm currently on, is going OK. Managed to survive a 7 month Volcanic Winter. The dogs gave birth for 2 round, so I have like 10 puppies running around ATM. The squirrel army is a disaster, I can release 2 out of my 40ish squirrel and 5 of them is obedient. My trainer only have 16 on animal, I dont know if this is the issue.

I'm not so sure about this strategy after the new update:
"Rebalanced animal hunger rates and plant nutritions so animals need larger grass pastures to be sustainable."

[Mikhail Reign]

No need to 'train' your squiral army. Just put their zone between you and the raiders..

[ssdg]

No need to 'train' your squiral army. Just put their zone between you and the raiders..

Can you explain a bit more how does that work? Do the raiders attack the squirrels from far away or just charge into squirrels while you take some free rounds at them. Also, Do you build a room for them or just zone them there? Also, how many squirrels do you lose in a typical raid?

Perhaps, I have been tunnel visioned into creating my own man hunter packs.

[Panzer]

I tried it with snakes, it worked pretty well, they quite fragile but pack a punch (10 dmg), glass cannons so to speak. I was playing on rough though, got a raid with about 40 tribals, killed 24, incapped two and the rest decided to flee. I lost 8 cobras during the raid and almost a colonist. To begin with I had 24 cobras and 9 colonists, didnt let the cobras breed all the time though because it is quite heavy on the food suppy, they can lay up to 6 eggs in a single batch.
Fighting with such fragile creatures requires a prepared battlefield though, a rangebreaker at least so you dont get sniped from afar, and maybe a colonist to tank some damage so the melee crowd doesnt one hit all your snakes.