Pets and Combat, what are your thoughts?

[Ramsis]

Hey everybody! Your friendly neighborhood admin coming to bother you all with a question of curiosity!

I come to you all today with some personal interest on a matter Tynan posted on Twitter about:


Pets and combat... two things I shudder at the thought of. I'm the player who personally will keep a few dogs around the base for breeding and joy reasons. The message of "has given birth" when talking about my dogs gives me a smile on my face. We have a newly born hauler, medical mutt, and just overall benefit to the colony. Sure the little bugger will dirty the colony a bit with dust and the occasional nuzzle in the middle of important work, but all in all my colony benefits from a furry friend... or twelve...

... but then Combat. Oh no, the red siren... there are pirates on the horizon! Ladies, Gentlemen, Others, to your battle stations! Ricky grab your Sniper Rifle and duck behind the bags! Lucille pop your bubble shield on and stand in front of Ricky, you're on protective shield duty! Mordheim you've still got that Charge Rifle? Good, hide behind that rock and shoot anyone too stupid to duck!

WAIT A MINUTE. WHO LET THE DOGS OUT (WHO WHO WHO!) Put those suckers back in the base! The battlefield is no place for our furry friends! The question though is why isn't the battlefield a place for our furry friends? Is it the fact that all animals are strangely allergic to bullets? Maybe the fact that they don't know how to dodge to save their lives and seem to actually attract bullets? It could be that me myself, the actual person behind Ramsi, is the kind of guy who will have his own literal mental break down at the thought of any of his actual dogs taking a bullet or deity forbid die.

I'm a sap for RimWorld <3 every colony, every story, every colonist.. well they matter to me. I don't risk skin when I don't have to! Doesn't matter if that skin has fur on it or not I'm a very safe Turtle player and always have been, even since the earliest days of my RTS times.

So while Tynan asked the question "In RimWorld, are trained animals useful in combat? If not, how do we make them so?" I must admit I'm also curious on if I'm the crazy illogical player or if other people are too attached to the animal element to risk losing a few.

Speak up my fellow players, what do you think about your animal buddies and the wild RimWorlds. Are you the kind of person keeping a small puppy society behind Slate doors or do you have a wild flock of battle-chickens ready to distract the enemy at every turn? Tell me your thoughts and stories; I'd love to hear them

[AtomicRavioli]

Just not worth sending them in... Either they die too fast or get permanently and irreversibly crippled and your training investment is completely ruined... Or if you have something like a thrumbo... It soaks up a million small wounds that a doctor will spend ages patching up and might even die of blood loss or a nasty infection because tending the wounds is too slow.

[witchyspoon]

basically, what atomic said...the work you put into the animals taming/feeding/training etc stands in no camparison to how easy they die in combat.
maybe some kind of basic animal prosthetics in the base game would help with that or even the ability to put "battle pets" in some kind of armor.

[Einherjar]

I dont necessarily think animals are useful for combat. 9/10 times I avoid pets all together and am actually happy to see they die before an attachment is made. Animals are not good for battle. They are squishy and stupid. It's realistic, but the negative moodlet, especially if someone has trained them and is bonded, just isnt worth it. Especially, especially in early game when good weapons and armor are hard to come by (and I'm inevitably losing a colonist). To me... animals need some kind of buff (or the moodlet needs changed to like... noble sacrifice) before I'd consider them.

[historic_os]

I tried, a few times, and given up.
the bonding system alone was a deal breaker for me. don't get me wrong, it's a great system and I love it. but do I want to risk my bound animals in the battlefield? I'm not so sure about that...

there are obviously more reasons why I wouldn't send animals in battles. the most oblivious one, being that RTS had been mentioned, is the fact that honestly - there are no tools to micro manage animals in combat efficenetly. I'm not saying it should be added to the game, animals are animals and you can only control them so much. but the fact is, I just don't see a reason to send someone you can't fully control to combat.

jm2c :-)

[Serenity]

Dogs are too squishy. But I've seen tougher animals like bears being very useful in combat. That was with tribes people and crappy weapons though. In that situation, animals can really make a difference. But once you get decent weapons not so much.

[Alpha393]

Add an 'instinctive fear' effect that reduces accuracy and mood of enemies heftily while being mauled by predators or large creatures in general.

You shouldn't be able to aim that sniper rifle with three wargs and a thrumbo tearing your throat out.

[PrincessZulu]

even though cats are not used in combat, it still breaks my heart when my cat
gets killed by a wolf/bear during first winter (always bring one through; prepare carefully) ... not even my turrets helped the poor thing. So a way in general to increase survival chance
of pets would be nice

[Serenity]

Though keep in mind that any simple buff to animals would also make wildlife more dangerous. For some animals that makes sense, but others already do too much damage and/or take too long to kill.

[ArguedPiano]

I do believe they are useful, but, there has to be more control over their actions. Controlling them as you would a pawn seems a bit overboard but a good medium I have found was with Hatti's PetFollow mod.

The biggest asset is I do not have to unbond my pets every time I draft the pawn. I can set a default action with a button.

I have found it useful to tame boars in the spring and allow them to grass feed. Raids come by, especially sieges, and I take the hoard with me as tanks. Any casualties are cut up for food as I would kill off most for the winter anyway.

Dog's on the other hand are far to valuable to me, unless I have too many.

[Shurp]

I think people are going about this the wrong way.  Don't think dogs.  Think pigs.  Angry, hungry pigs charging your enemy.  This is something any evil mastermind should be able to manage -- except that the bonding system gets in the way.  This is the real problem with animals as they stand now.  If your colonists are training human-eating killing machines that breed quickly there should be no risk of emotional attachment.

But on the flip side, any animal trained this way should be too dangerous to allow to roam the base freely.  They should frequently turn on any human foolish enough to get close by and chomp on them.  They should be penned off separately and fed by nutrient paste dispenser like any other prisoner intended for long term capture.

So maybe the solution is to offer different training paths.  If you want to train a friendly canine who will haul for you and rescue injured colonists you go down the intelligence/bonding path.  But if you want to train a junkyard dog that will chew to pieces anyone it meets -- even its owner if he's not careful -- you have a separate training path.

[MikeLemmer]

Here's three changes I think will make combat pets much more viable:

• Assigned animals should be toggleable between Combat and Noncombat. Combat animals accompany their masters when drafted; noncombat animals don't. It's a pain to manually unassign animals before combat and reassign them afterwards just because I don't want Charlie's bonded mutt getting shot.
• Assigned animals currently wander randomly up to 2 squares away from a drafted master. This means they wander around cover out into the open and promptly get shot. Drafted animals should stay adjacent to their master, take cover beside their master, and when all else fails have a Prone state where they lay down on the ground (similar to sleeping) to reduce their chance of being hit.
• When released, attack animals should have a burst of speed to quickly close the gap between them and their target.

[Zhentar]

My last colony survived its first infestation thanks to the brave efforts of a Rhino...who stood up to the megaspiders long enough that my melee colonist only had to face one. And then she quickly recovered and went on to take many more bullets for my colonists little worse for the wear. I will certainly continue to use the largest animals as meatshields when I can acquire them. But IMO smaller animals are far too fragile and easily bonded to be good choices for combat. I consider PetFollow the single most essential RimWorld mod for this reason.

And as PrincessZulu notes, I find it far too difficult to protect pets from predators. Either I never let them outside at all, or I have to obsessively check the (mod added) Wildlife tab for predators and hunt them proactively.

[cawsp]

If all my guys are melee then pets can be good. As soon as my people have guns we end up shooting our own animals more than the raiders somehow. I don't know why pets seem to attract bullets. Sometimes my pets get hunted by animals and before I would try to use guns to save the pet but I ended up just killing them faster. 10 in shooting is suppose to be an expert but somehow that doesn't translate into hitting the correct target very often.

[makkenhoff]

Just not worth sending them in... Either they die too fast or get permanently and irreversibly crippled and your training investment is completely ruined... Or if you have something like a thrumbo... It soaks up a million small wounds that a doctor will spend ages patching up and might even die of blood loss or a nasty infection because tending the wounds is too slow.

This. Colony emotional penalties, training investment (the same can be said of pawns), excessive cost for pet medicine versus colonist - all of this adds up to not wanting to risk the pet, because they aren't very adept at combat, even when trained. I'd take a colonist with a wooden spear or club over a "release the warg" anytime. It helps that I can control the colonist, I can tell the colonist not to do something that I deem stupid.

I'd rather like to think smaller animals should be harder to hit both in melee and ranged combat. Anytime smaller than man sized should have a hit chance penalty with aimed weapons. Grenades and other explosives of course, shouldn't be affected.

But, I've got to admit, that personally I don't highly value the animal tamer/trainer. I'll find them more useful things to do. I rarely have any colonist assigned to it, because I don't value it as a skill. Though, I'd be remiss to suggest I'd like it removed. It does add flavor to the game, just not my kind of fun.