How effective are animals as combat units?

[EnricoDandolo]

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.

[Snafu_RW]

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..)

[Lys]

(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.

[Razzoriel]

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.

[EnricoDandolo]

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 

[Instill]

I like wolf they reproduce quite fast and you feed them with corpse.

Mostly use them as meat shield

[EnricoDandolo]

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.

[Snafu_RW]

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

[NiftyAxolotl]

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.

[Nainara]

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.

[Bozobub]

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

[doctercorgi]

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.

[EnricoDandolo]

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.)

[Bozobub]

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.

[EnricoDandolo]

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)