Pets and Combat, what are your thoughts?

[Hieronymous Alloy]

Id break down the problem three ways:

1) animals can't be micromanaged and colonists can, so they cross lines if fire and get killed,

2) the bonding mechanic makes combat trained animals a liability, and

3) animals use melee attacks and melee is deprecated in this game tactical ly.

I'd suggest allowing control of combat animals like colonists.

[ChJees]

Allow us to equip animals with specially made armor and adapted shields to make them more effective in combat. Heck let's augment their attacking ability by strapping on katars and scyther blades on them.

Or maybe give them the ability to pounce and pull weapons off enemies with combat training. Maybe just teach them to be sneaky so they can ambush enemies\prey.

[buttflexspireling]

"Pets", broadly redefined as animals, can be useful to distract raiders.  I've been suffering from a chickenpocalyps, when I got raided by a pair of mechanoids.  They sat right down and had a bunch of fun taking out the chickens.  Meanwhile, my colonists & turrets are plinking the shit out of them.  Same thing happened later in the game with pirates.

  Pets need their own Dance Dance Revolution-like dance pad
consoles connected to circuits that activate mechanical traps
so they can put the moves on raiders.

[Anomaly]

I second the suggestions for more control over our supposedly trained animals during a fight.  Maybe animal intelligence should play a part? We should be able to direct the smarter pets when they are close enough to their handlers

Guard animals is another good idea.  Guard dogs... what a novel concept.

One thing the game seems to miss completely. Most animals are rather close to the ground. Humans firing at other humans would have less than a 50% chance of hitting a dog between them.

[CodeRen]

pet armor!

[Hatti]

Anything smaller as a muffalo dies too fast to be anything near usefull in a fight after one or two hours of gameplay. As mentioned several times now here, pet armor would be VERY nice. In addition let us drug our pets. Muffalo on go juice would be a huge upgrade!

With animals in your attack group, you need to go meele or dont do anything cause most of the damage is done by friendly fire.
Some sort of ranged attack animals could round combat loadouts up a little bit and will make the rimworld even more dangerous

Another thing is, with pets you have to rely on the bad AI. You have absolutly no control what your pets are doing. You cannot force them to attack a specific target nor you can retreat. If your infight, your commited to it till the bitter end!
New trainings like attack command or fall back command would be nice. But it should not apply on one single pet and you should not be able to micromanage the pets.
Only the animal handler himself should be able to give the command and all pets assigned to the handler should follow this command.

To prevent forced micromanaging by changing their masters infight, the ability to change the master should have a cooldown or the new master have to retrain obedience to the pet to change the designated master.

To round all things up, a animal clicker for a secondary equipment slot (i know its half implemented) would be nice. This could be a alternative to prevent forced micromanaging. Pets needs to be trained to a animal clicker and will only listen to them.

Obedience training should be a constant thing. The animal obedience should decay from time to time to prevent mass animal stacking to one animal handler. With a lower obedience percentage the pet should have a chance to ignore the commands from their master.

Training animal brutality to increase their attack damage but decreases maximum gainable obedience.

[Shad]

pet armor!

[Ashiver]

Being able to put personal shields on them would help them a lot.  I think they are can still be useful but they are situational.  You need the enemy to be split up or few in number.  You need to be able to ambush them from around a corner or from behind a door close to them to minimize their opportunity to shoot.  The target needs to not be carrying a plasteel melee weapon that will wreck them.
grenades or molotovs.

[Shurp]

I like the personal shield idea.  If we imagine that it is some necklace that you snap on and push the button then there's no reason an animal can't wear it, and it'd make attack animal far more useful.

I'd like to see the pirates use them too.  Bring in shielded attack wargs with them.

[Harold3456]

I'm not saying anything here that hasn't already been said, but I hate pets in combat. I hate how they follow their master around, and then just wait out in the open and get shot all the time - and I hate that I have to unbond every animal from every master before a fight. Can't there be a "wait around the base" option alongside the "release" option, so that animals' default isn't walking into battle with their bonded masters?

Even in combat, all animals do is get in the way of my shooters, and they're too valuable to my colonists both emotionally and as hauling assets to justify being used as the meat shields they currently are.

My opinion: animals mulling around the base all the time, staying in their restricted section should be the default, while "accompany master" and "release" should be the options - not the other way around.

[adtrl]

I too love my animal friends, to the point that i'm annoyed they run out and are asking to be shot, even with friendly fire.

1. I would like to see animal armor.
2. Better training so animals learn to stay behind/next to their owner/master so they won't be shot.
3. Animal medical tabs and feed tabs so you can force your colonists to feed an animal that's starving(cause the animal will not eat anything even if you have food in their Animal only area.), give them prosthetic's, and heal them.

[GiantSpaceHamster]

Apologies, I have not read the other comments, so there might be some redundant comments/suggestions.

Currently, I do use animals for combat, but only for very specific circumstances. For example, I have a pack of panthers in my current game that I use to take out insects. That allows me to avoid gunfire and explosions inside my base along with pawn casualties. Worst case, insects AND panthers for dinner! I also use this panther pack to deal with the rare case of an enemy straggler that comes around to the opposite side of my base from where I am defending against the main attack.

However, it's annoying to use. I basically have to assign all my trained animals to one guy that I don't normally use in combat so they don't run into the gunfire. This has it's own problems. I have to remember to draft that guy before a major battle just to put him in the pasture with the animals. If I don't? He will probably try to fix something in the middle of the combat zone. That's a MAJOR problem because either I have to let him try (and probably get mowed down) or I have to draft him and move him back. But when drafted, all trained animals will converge on the spot he was drafted at regardless of where he moves to before they get there before they will turn around and follow him. So, if he gets too close to combat, the animals will run into the gunfire even if he is well out of the way by the time the animals get there. I have not found a way to avoid this except proactively drafting the trainer and forcing him to sit in a room during the battle.

More generally, animals are impossible to use in most combat situations because, as everyone knows, they run into gunfire and get mowed down. Some thoughts on potential improvements:
1) Allow enemies to be marked "animal only" and "human only" targets, so humans won't automatically fire on targets animals are going after and vice-versa. This would at least allow animals to go after stragglers that are off to one side or the other more safely.
2) Allow more fine-grained control over trained animals, such as the ability to tell them to go after a specific target.
3) Allow animals to be set to stay with a human such that they are always within 1 tile. This would at least prevent them from being hit by their associated human's gunfire. They could also act like a melee human with a shield as a blocker for incoming damage...maybe some doggy shields or at least animal armor would help support a feature like this.

I don't know that there's a good way to mix animals offensively into a gunfight directly unless there are major changes to combat such as missed shots never accidentally hitting an unintended target (which I think would be a net negative change anyway). I think the solution has to be related to how they can support combat generally, with offensive capabilities being more for running down fleeing enemies and dealing with things like 2-3 flankers going around the side of the base or insect invasions.

[tirramissu]

All those nasty pets just catch bullets from weapons. I have to lock them each time something serious starts, and this takes too much tome sometimes and doesn't allow to prepare for defense.