What good are animals?

[Saathiya]

Sorry if it's a stupid question.

From what I can see, pack animals carry. This isn't necessary, since my people can move faster and carry plenty in trader backpacks. Dogs guard. This isn't necessary, since letting my dog get hit won't make my people better at combat. Goats are a meat source, I guess? But what's the point of raising them when it means expending food to get food back at a snail's pace? Hunting builds more stats and provides meat without such a wait.

Everything animals can do, my people can do better, while they remain less vulnerable than animals. Am I missing something else they can be used for, or some other non-obvious benefit to having them around? They can't pull plows, turn mills, nor be mounted, so I don't really see any use for them.

[Ivan the Gent]

Garru with a pack can carry way more than any person.

Many large weapons are too big for packs, an animal pack can hold many big 2 handed weapons.

Dogs will get to be much better fighers than new recruits/ farmers / labours just by being feed for a while no trainign required.

They add alot of flavour to the setting.

That said in most ways people are better.

[ipsos]

A pack animal can carry far more than a person, or even a few persons. Larger inventory, larger stack size, more weight reduction. If you are trying to offload a lot of crafted gear or moving to set up a new base, a pack animal is great. If you don't need pack animals then the only reason to have any is personal amusement.

[wordwaster]

people can't compete with the carry capacity of pack animals. absolutely not true that people can do better on that one. 1 garru is worth several trader backpacks. you'll leave a lot less loot behind on long trips if you have a pack animal with you.

dogs eat limbs to help keep your base tidy.

goats...yeah goats are worthless.

[RWild]

Roleplay I guess really, I mean goats are useless and dogs eat too much but if you just wanted to have nothing but farmers the animals will keep trash bandits from being a nuisance but they won't do much good if you're picking fights with uc or holy nation.

[Melk]

Pack animals can carry far more than any humanoid could. Also animals can train their stats and get stupid strong too.

[Emlock]

However i see the point that once the carrying is done, pack animal dont have much to do in the base..... would be nice if they could auto-haul or something useful like having special machine needing an animal to work it...

Dogs are pretty strong early, dont know later but they hit pretty hard so....

Goats..... yea.... i agree with wordwaster on that one

[DangerAce]

Every time I tried training up a pack bull, eventually it would have it's meat looted by starving bandits. So frustrating!

[davetlow]

I have 2 stealth bulls. I use it to totally take all the stuff out of ancient tech labs. That's why it's stealth is like 86 or something. Next I shall train its stength. I own dust bandits knocking limbs off with just very little training and mostly just killing bandits, but I've had it a while. I mean they're doing 96 damage and the bandits have like crappy heavy armor on so it's not that bad right now, but I haven't trained their strength. I didn't train their strength because I thought it would make them too deadly for training on prisoners. But they were already to strong to train on prisoners. So I've moved to beak things, lol, which they can kill, and will train strength.

But mostly they just move water, trade and construction goods, and stuff from places I clean out exploring. They're worth so much money. I've cleaned out beak thing nests with them.

TL;DR : My bull has 86 stealth and is developed enough to kill beak things.

[Bragdras]

Animals are very powerful early on since they grow up quickly and are never slowed down due to injuries, they fall off in combat effectiveness as your people get better but can remain very strong, especially bulls and garrus in terms of cleaving attacks.

Bulls and bonedogs will hit for 150 dmg on unarmored targets, bulls also get to cleave
Garrus will hit for about 80 but have insane cleaving

Then of course Garrus and Bulls have the benefit of being able to carry a hell of a big load, this can be very useful when you want to set up makeshift camps when injured, or bring a lot of materials to start a new town somewhere fairly quickly.

I'd love to have craftable armor for animals, especially since we likely won't have taming or mounting so's to increase their effectiveness and give us more to do with them.

First and foremost they have to fix animal turning speed though, it's infuriating how they always end up behind. Well everything has this awkward and annoying slow-turn when they reach high enough speed, but animals get to that point way quicker.

[mr_bman]

Goats have one of the highest dps attacks in the game. They're cheap offense. Hard part is keeping them alive until they mature. But if you get a few together they can be pretty vicious little buggers.

[yippeekiay]

Role play is the reason mostly. But I know for sure my dogs tear through enemies, especially with the more combat slot mod & one I made to reduce food slightly & speed them up.

Now have 21 of them...here's my first 17 babies lol ;o)

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1502881284

[Papasaurus Rex]

I do not generally mess with animals much either unless I decide to move my base or if I am making trips to sell large amount of trade goods. Trust me when I say it makes a world of difference to use one in those 2 situations. Outside of that I aldo do not see much use for them other than rp factors

[Ivan the Gent]

I always have a coupel of animals in my crew but rarely have more because they cant carry corpses/unconcious people.

Never want to be stuck in a dangerous spot waiting for my animals to wake up because i dont have enough concious humanoids to carry them off to safety. This rather killed my idea for a playthrough with 1 man and 10-20 bone dogs

[yippeekiay]

Yeah, I got in a sticky situation in the Hive closest to the Hub due to constant Beak Things. To save myself I ran for a few materials, built a small shack as close to Hive as I could then dropped some sleeping bags in there & moved my bonedogs inside to recover.

Luckily none died & I got lots of research done while they were healing. Now it doesn't matter how many Beak Things attack us, most of the time they don't even get a single hit in before my dogs have downed them, makes it hard for my single guy to get any training in. I have to put them all on passive to do that lol ;o)

[09Lip]

A Garru can carry loot that is too large for backpacks and it can also carry building material or ores while your squad guards it - not receiving the penalty from backpacks themself.