How can we improve the design of animals in combat?

[Tynan]

I'm investigating whether there's a problem with the current design of animals with regards to using them in combat. Some players do definitely use them, but I'm curious if more could be done to make this useful. So I'm opening the discussion and inviting players to answer the following questions:

1. Are animals useful in combat? Do you use them? If so, why?  If not, why not?

2. Are there annoying/weird points about animals in combat?

3. How are you using animals in combat?

You don't have to suggest any solutions at all, of course. I';m very happy to just collect notes on player experiences. However, suggestions are also welcome. But, this is not an open thread for new ideas, related to animals or not. I'm only attempting small refinement-oriented adjustments, balancings, and fixes to animal combat mechanics. Off-topic posts are likely to get deleted.

Thanks all!

[lauri7x3]

1. it depends. ofc big animals like elephants or thrombos are super cool in combat. but mostly for melee and small arm raids. boomaloops and rats are too undependable, and can backfire easily. all in all: i only use animals on early game against tribes etc. i dont use them on late game because they just have no real adventage. they are often too slow, have no armour, and do too few dmg to armored enemies.

2. the controllablity. since u cannot control them like pawns in combat its just a luck game. u cannot rly use them tactical.
also the mood debuff of bonded animals. (i know why it is in game and i totally like the possibility to bond to them. but in "war" its still annoying)

3.only as tanks and timesavers

[FGsquared]

I just plainly don't use them because of the mood debuff and the associated mental breaks that can happen if there's a death.

Maybe there would be a possibility to train them as war animals which prevents the mood debuff to happen when they are killed, but maybe that means that these animals can't haul or something like that to balance it.

[Flebe]

1. Yes they are, however once you have a few colonists with ranged weapons it becomes almost impossible to not hit most of you 'fighting flock' and possibly kill them.

2. I would say that the chances that stray projectiles hit them and wound them could be altered to include the size of the animal, for example a bullet it less likely to hit a squirrel when it misses, however would be more likely to hit a Muffalo.

3. after i get around 3-5 colonists with ranged weapons i just keep them out of combat all together to avoid losing most  of my animals.

[Bazkur]

1.  Occasionally.  When I do, I usually setup a scenario where I start with plenty of animals to get started.  I usually specifically start with enough food for whatever type of animal I choose to go with.  Most of the time, I don't use them though.  It takes too much investment to keep animals around and the risk is too high to actually use them in battle except when I'm desperate.  I'd rather invest in animals that can haul and let them just do that.

2.  They're too squishy.  Maybe if I could install bionics or give them armor/gear of some sort that would help them survive a bit.  There should be some trade off on this obviously, like if they have gear on they are slower or something.  I also don't like the major mood debuff.  It's be nice if I could direct them to a kill too.  EDIT:  Was just thinking, it could be cool if you did something like some RTS games where you set a preferred target system on animals.  Something like click a stance button for like Defenses, where animal would defend its master (or possibly others), another where it attacks the closest enemy, another where it attacks the largest threat, etc...

3.  Like I said, mostly don't unless it is an emergency situation.  I always train them to release but don't use it.  When I do, I create large packs (see #1) and basically go total animal army.  Haven't used them in A18 really, I'm running a tribal scenario maybe I'll give them another go without cheating and see if I have any new opinions.

[Thalyd]

I mostly use them coz i preffer them taking injuries rather than my colonist. when some animal gets a bound i move them to transport duties and remove him from combat. however, most of my "bullet lurer" pets fall by friendly fire. im pretty sure animals would be better and more dangerous at combat if melee combat has some extra game mechanics, like inmobilize enemy on the ground or just bite his leg so he cannot advance. (maybe you could teach animals to do non letal combat)

[cucumpear]

At the moment they're not really very useful for combat. The mood debuffs are often the thing that breaks an unhappy, injured colonist and I find them too hard to control.
A way to differentiate between pets, utility animals purely for work and attack animals would be useful if they had a lesser chance to bond or a lesser mood debuff.

[Mehni]

1. Are animals useful in combat? Do you use them? If so, why?  If not, why not?

Animals are sometimes useful. I avoid using them when I can, but will when I'd otherwise die. I don't want my dogs to die I'm attached to them, and they die a bit quicker than I can breed/train replacements.

2. Are there annoying/weird points about animals in combat?

They never target what I want them to. They walk around like fools, get themselves stuck in doors, walk away from the enemy when I want to attack and walk to the enemy when I want them to cover.

3. How are you using animals in combat?

When defending the base: I keep them assigned to an animal handler to pop out/ambush/patrol at opportune moments. This usually fails.
When caravaning: Offensively or as ablative meat shield. This generally works.

[XeoNovaDan]

1) They can be pretty handy since they lock AIs into melee combat, as well as them being expendable compared to colonists. Wild boars in particular I find are very good war animals because of their smaller body size, fast movement speed, decent melee DPS, relative ease of taming and training, ease of sustainability and rapid breeding rates - they're also very good outside of combat, and I generally favour them over other animals in the long run. I also like alpacas in the early game since they can take a few hits, dish out some fairly good blunt damage and are very easy to tame/train.

2) Yes, animals definitely have their quirks. As others have stated, the ability to replace missing parts - even with just the equivalent of makeshift/simple prostheses would be pretty nice. Other minor peeves I have is that when animals are wandering around masters in bunker setups, they tend to occupy spots for pathing which makes properly positioning colonists difficult. Not just that, but they tend to stray outside into the open which basically forces a release order. This is really just a limitation of my play style though. I'd also like to see an extension of release where you can have then target particular hostiles, even if it's only within a limited range of say 30 cells from the master.

3) Covered by 1.

[Simpology]

I only use animals in close combat, in situations where my primary defence has fallen and I've been forced to retreat or when prisoners escape, drop pods land on top or infestations. They make an excellent buffer and can deal a bit of damage too.

To make them more effect in standard prepared defence combat, maybe sticking a personal shield on them would do the trick since it would allow them to get in melee range more effectively and also protect them from your own stray bullets. It also sounds practically possible to be able to attach a shield belt to them.

[Mickyan]

Playing regularly on Extreme Randy, I tried many times to use animals in combat and although they can be handy, their upkeep and unreliable behaviour typically isn't worth the bother at all.

The most successful use I got out of them is to act as meat shields/melee fighters to protect shooters, but the critical issue in this tactic is that they're incapable of taking cover while my colonists are shooting, so they'll be taking hits long before one of the enemy melee fighters get close enough to release them. If you release them too early they'll just take hits from the enemy AND your own colonists.

And since they are incapable to effectively retreat, they can end up dead very easily, they're not always easy to replace and their death can give negative moods to my colonists.



I don't have any solid solutions but there's some ideas I can offer:

-Buff their chances to dodge a bit. Small animals in particular feel like they should be harder to hit, but perhaps their movement speed should also be accounted for instead of just size?

-I guess this is more of a bug than anything but when you draft a colonist the assigned animal will first reach the position where your colonist was drafted before it starts to follow. This might cause an animal to walk right into the enemy if for example you're drafting a pawn from outside the base to retreat inside when a raid just arrived

-I honestly can't remember whether untrained animals even attack enemies in self defense but I know they have no "pack mentality" unlike wild ones. If one of my wolves gets attacked I would expect nearby allied wolves to retaliate

-I hope this isn't outside the scope of what you were asking but they could really use better options to control their behavior. One thing I've always wished for was instead of assigning them a handler to follow while drafted, giving them the ability to automatically attack enemies that enter a designated area. Imagine you have your barn or kennel near your firing line, and as soon as the enemies gets too close a swarm of bloodthirsty chickens runs out to attack them!

[Calahan]

Might comment again later with further thoughts (if/when I get chance to put more thought into the subject), but my immediate thoughts for now are:

1 - Yes I use them and I do find them very useful (my favourite RimWorld update was at the time, and still is, A12). Although it can depend a lot on how readily disposable, or not, any particular animal might be. With readily disposable, readily replaced animals seeing far more usage than their opposite counterpart (but that's probably just obvious logic at work).

2 - A few annoyances, but for now I'll limit it to one point that hasn't been mentioned yet, but which has annoyed me for some time, and which I admit might be outside the remit of the question/this discussion.

Which is that one tactic I use in battles is to try and flank the enemy from behind, and/or try to ensure a 100% kill rate by covering the potential escape route of the raiders in advance of them fleeing, or rear attack as reinforcements if the battle isn't going as planned. I tend to do this by taking a time-out to create an allowed area for Pawn(s) that follows a route around and away from the action zone, and ending at a point where I intend to ambush the fleeing raiders. I then order a Pawn(s) to move to that end point (and be confident I don't need to do any babysitting because of the allowed area).

Now I would like to send some animal support along but there is usually a problem. Because if I just assign the animal to the Pawn as it's Master, the animal won't adhere to the allowed area the Pawn does, and so their path around and away from the danger zone might be, and usually is, anything but a path around and away from it. Depending on how closely matched their speeds are. So the only option right now is taking another time-out to create an animal zone that mirrors the Pawn zone.

Which to be honest is annoying, time-consuming and exudes pointlessness. Since why can't I just use the same zone for the animal that I just created for the Pawn? Why do I have to draw another identical zone? I'm not sure why there has to be separate zones for animals and Pawns, why one can't be assigned to the other, and why it can't be up to the player to decide if any particular zone is for Pawns only, animals only, neither or both.

As I said, something to do with zones is likely outside the scope of this discussion, but it has played a fair part in my own annoyances with how I like and tend to use animals in combat for a long while now. And that is the topic of this discussion, hence why I'm mentioned it (as a source of annoyance).

Suggested solutions. Either have free usage of zones and then have check boxes the player can use (if they wish) to designate a particular zone as animal only, Pawn only etc. Or when assigned a Master, the animal should adhere to their Master's allowed area rather than their own Although I suspect this latter solution to be fraught with implementation issues and likely asking for bugs and even more annoying behaviour. But the former solution seems straightforward to me (as a player).

3 - Mainly to deal with melee enemies (such as blocking their path), and/or as an alternative target to my Pawns for ranged enemies to shoot at. Faster animals I like to keep in reserve for chasing down those fleeing enemies. Raids convey a similar message to Pokémon for me. Gotta catch kill them all.

[RemingtonRyder]

My use of combat animals depends on the map and the availability of colonists who are good at training animals. In my current playthrough I actually have grizzly bears thanks to a lucky self-taming and a trader arriving with a grizzly of the opposite sex. However because they are quite wild, my animal handlers weren't skilled enough to handle them. Because grizzly bears have a fairly long gestation period, I haven't got a high population of them yet.

Huskies, on the other hand? I'm basically drowning in them. They're good for moving things around in the base, but because I'm usually combating the raiders with guns, I wouldn't really consider training them to release. Let's put it this way, sending a wave of dogs into a gun fight might have the desired effect, but I think they'll probably take a bit of friendly fire on the way. If they could use their relatively fast movement speed to take the long way around, avoiding most of the gunfire, then I'd feel a bit more confident about their chances.

Honestly, I'm thinking that maybe smaller, faster animals are better for swarming enemies. How many times have you seen manhunting squirrels or hares scratch someone's eyes? Okay, now suppose that you have forty to fifty squirrels trained and ready to be unleashed. Those raiders aren't going to have any intact eyeballs after the sea of red critters is done with them. Small animals are also harder to hit directly with ranged weapons.

Conversely, if you have a raid with lots of frag grenades, sending bigger animals (better hitpoints) may be the way to go, because even if the raiders manage to hit an elephant or a grizzly bear with a frag grenade, one blast might not be enough to take them down.

[Romi]

well:
1. I mostly use animals in combat for bait, like for thrumbos or stuff, boomrats and boomalopes are really useful during raids.
2. the thing that annoys me is that the pet doesn't stay close to it's master during combat, when I'm planing strategies before combat I often find pets taking walks like a few tiles away from his master, and this is crucial, because they always get attacked first or the colonist master dies because he or she did not have the pet guarding him/her.
Well this is all I guess

[Granitecosmos]

1. Are animals useful in combat? Do you use them? If so, why?  If not, why not?

Animals are always a lot less useful than colonists. Enemies hitting them instead of my colonists is always better so if for nothing else, they're always useful as meatshields. Even a bonded animal's death is not that big of a deal when I can easily get a free permanent +10 mood buff just for keeping the joy bar on maximum.

I use them when I play on a map that allows them to graze. Otherwise upkeep costs would make combat-only animals simply not worth it to employ in numbers sufficient to stand up against late-game raids as meatshields. Their actual combat power is fine, although the ranged weapons' melee buff in B18 didn't help making them more useful.

Keeping animals for combat only is not a good idea when you can't let them graze. The only thing they can do outisde of combat is hauling. The problem with that is the most hauling generated by a colony (that is not hauling loot after a fight) comes from harvesting. But currently you can't let most animals haul plants because they eat it. They prefer it over kibble for whatever reason and make you bleed nutrients/medicine/textiles/drugs, first one being quite important on maps where you can't let them graze. There are only three animals for hauling plants that don't make me bleed resources: timber wolves, arctic wolves and wargs. All three are a pain in the backside to tame and train, at that point the warg is simply not worth it because it eats more by default and on top of that it can't eat processed food so its nutrient consumption automatically jumps to double on top of that (and then I didn't even mention the fact they only eat meat). Wargs need a taming buff, drop their wildness to 0% please, otherwise there's simply not enough reward for the investment. The meat-only niche should be more than enough, why make them so damn hard to tame/train as well? Wolves are fine but I would never use them on maps I can let boars graze, at least not for combat. Maybe a few to help haul plants but definitely not for combat when I can have boars grazing and dying for me instead.

Which leads me to the next point. A few animals tend to die in every encounter because they don't use cover and attack by rushing into melee. Most of the time half or more of the casualties will be via friendly fire. This means you need an animal that reproduces and grows up fast but also moves fast since their primary objective is to draw attention and lock enemies in melee, not to actually kill them. Smaller animals are better because ranged opponents get a severe accuracy penalty against them.

Boars are just perfect. Two times easier to tame than wolves, smaller than wolves, fast enough, reproduces twice as fast as wolves. Can't haul plants due to reasons stated above but at least can haul loot after a battle. Funny enough, better at melee DPS than wolves too.

Using animals with larger than standard body size in combat is futility. They get hit all the time, are usually not faster to compensate for it and breed too slow. Since they get hit more, they'll lose more limbs and other parts (which can't be replaced without a mod) and since they breed too slow you can't just replace them as easily as boars. I can raise a 30-unit boar army in half an in-game year. I need several years to raise a 10-unit bear platoon.

2. Are there annoying/weird points about animals in combat?

Friendly fire usually taking more animals down than raiders, for once. Humans being able to outrun a bear, for twice. Other than that, no distinctively annoying or weird interations.

3. How are you using animals in combat?

• Raids: let enemy advance, then release. Shoot with colonists, not worrying much about friendly fire killing animals; more meat for dinner. Potentially walk up to 2-3 tile range and shoot point-blank if enemies are all locked in melee or distracted. Sometimes release only a few to bait out rockets if I don't have a psychic lance for it at the moment. After that, proceed as usual.
• Infestations: my own anti-bug zerg rush. Lets colonists fight nearest bugs with guns at point-blank range.
• Crashed ships: letting the animals completely surround the ship, then aggroing the mechs and releasing the animals is an extremely effective strategy.
• Sieges: almost like crashed ships, I just can't advance as close as for those before releasing them.
• Manhunters: manhunters will not gang up on them but they will. Very effective strategy when the manhunter horde isn't 80 elephants or other bullshit number.

For all the above, I need around 30 animals (read: boars) to make it effective enough. But once I've reached that threshold they become the new "I WIN" button. The problem is they don't work in small numbers and are too good at large numbers. Just like a zerg rush. Worse yet, it's impossible to balance them, they'll always be either trash or great.