siege animals

[*Zacari*]

I understand that the enemy creatures of the sieges do not want to be tamed (for example the Beak dogs) but that they do not want to reproduce? That seems exaggerated to me. I locked up two Beak dogs that I captured in a siege and they refuse to lay eggs (Yes, they are different genders) and their invader status does not disappear even though their siege has been eliminated long ago. They are animals, they should be able to reproduce even if they do not want to be tamed if they are left confined. And yes, I know I can get them if I steal them from the goblin camps but that's not the point.

[Other]

How did you confine them? Nothing breeds if the female is in a cage (the male can be caged just fine), and as an egg-layer, the female needs to be on a nest box and adjacent to a male to successfully breed. The easiest way to accomplish this is probably to cage the male, build that cage, build a nest box next to it, and build a chain in any other square adjacent to the nest box (minimum space would be a 3x1 room). Assign the female to the chain, and make sure no other nest boxes are in range, so if the female lays eggs, she can only do that in the nest box adjacent to the male. That should ensure that the eggs are fertilised as long as neither parent is asexual (not common, but it can happen).

Since the young will be wild or owned by your fort, they might be attacked by the mother as soon as they hatch, so if you get that far, having escape routes for the young to get somewhere the mother can't reach may be helpful. Once you have one batch of young, training and breeding those will almost certainly be easier than continuing to work with captured invaders, so you can retire or butcher them at that point.

[*Zacari*]

I had simply jumped them in a room with a couple of nests but several years have passed and they don't lay eggs, I don't know if it is because they are in the open air (but with walls) although it doesn't seem to bother them. Maybe I should tie the female as you say but I thought it was a bug in the game that doesn't let me reproduce creatures captured in a siege

[oOnaymanOo]

They actually breed even if theyre caged, i dont know if everything breeds though.
I've had such happening with Troglodites,hydras and elephants. They were on the same stockpile and next to eachother.

In fact, i didnt know what to do with the troglos and i had to kill the adult ones because theydnt stop inbreeding. Now i've marksdwarves a little more experienced and some babi troglos chilling on their cage.

[Other]

A bug, or deliberate code that prevents siege units from breeding is still possible - I was mostly trying to filter out possibilities where nothing would breed, regardless of whether or not they were invaders. From the sounds of it, if you substituted domestic birds like turkeys in the pen, you should at least get eggs; they might not be fertile if the male is not adjacent when they are laid, or if either parent is asexual.

If you are testing with only one male & one female, and you have extras of either or both sexes, you might want to design the next round of tests with more than one of each sex - asexuality is rare enough that you would need to hit very long odds to get two asexuals of the same gender, and the odds get longer if you have three or more of each.

I do recall some discussions from the pre-Steam versions about whether invaders giving birth should be considered a bug, but I believe that referred to the goblins themselves (presumably both parts of a couple got drafted in that case, and then the siege spent long enough on the map for the female to give birth; since Dwarven mothers in the military will give birth in the middle of a battle and keep fighting, that might just be how things are supposed to work). I don't know if anyone from Kitfox or 12Bay will see this and chose to comment, but if you have an account on the 12Bay forums, it might be worth dropping a question into the monthly Q&A thread ("Future of the Fortress", I think it is called) about whether invaders breeding has been deliberately disabled.

[*Zacari*]

I already did the tests. A non-asexual couple locked freely in a room did not produce eggs, not even non-fertile ones. And a female and two males in cages in another room did not give eggs either, so it seems to be a bug that takes away their ability to reproduce or at least I can't find a logical explanation for the animals to stop laying eggs, I'm going to try to comment on it in the Forum, thank you