Civilization 5 Trainer 6.1.7601
Lillia Iniguez
Another notable similar trend in RTS games is that in higher difficulties your AI allies are also notably dumber than the enemy AI and less helpful than they are in easier difficulties, just to force you to have to assist them to make the game more difficult.
Each request via this method bumps the trainer higher up the development queue.
Currently at the time of this post, only 69 of the 189,784 WeMod members who play the game have requested an update, which is not enough to prioritise it.
Animal trainer is the skill associated with the animal training labor. An animal trainer works with animals, either training wild ones or training certain species for war or hunting. They also train certain kinds of captured live vermin.
The Pets/Livestock tab of the citizen information menu (u) has a list of all animals that belong to your civilization, and are tame, trained, or trainable. Each animal on the list can be assigned a trainer, who will then train (if needed) the animal, increase its training (if not already tame) or train it for war or hunting (if selected for hunting or training). Which animals are known and how well can be checked with the "Overall Training" button in the lower right corner of the "Pets/Livestock" tab. There is no way to tame a specific type of vermin.
In order to train an animal, you must first have an animal to train, so before you can do any training, you must capture some wild animals. Which animals appear at your fortress (and thus which animals you can train, besides the subterranean creatures that are randomly present) is dependent upon your surroundings, which is in turn dependent upon the local biome or biomes, if your fortress overlaps multiple regions.
Wild creatures can only be captured by cage traps; as above-ground traffic is, as a rule, unrestricted, and as creatures can enter and exit the map from any direction, the only reliable way to force wildlife into your cages is to build a lot of them. The same is true of the caverns, although since they are usually not nearly so expansive, capturing passing creatures is a little easier; on the other hand, you have to be much more worried about exposing your dwarves to the various subterranean nasties. Note that animal traps are not used in this role, but are instead used by trappers to capture live vermin, and thus, surprisingly enough, trappers are not involved in the trapping of actual creatures.
Just because you have a creature stowed away in your cages stockpile, does not mean that it can be trained, as only creatures with the [PET] or [PET_EXOTIC] creature token can be trained. Most creatures have one of the two flags, but there are exceptions, notably some underground creatures. Sentient creatures (such as goblins or animal people), forgotten beasts and titans are among the creatures that can never be trained or tamed. Additionally, [TRAPAVOID] creatures ignore cage traps entirely. Captured war mounts and any other named enemies of your civilization can also be trained, but they will, regardless of training level, remain hostile to your civilization and will, if released from bondage, attack your units without mercy; even worse, these creatures may cause a loyalty cascade if you order your military to deal with the situation.Bug:6051 To make use of captured creatures that you cannot or do not want to train, see live training and mass pitting.
Once you have a captured, trainable creature trapped in a cage, you can start training it. You will need an animal training zone and some plants or meat depending on whether the animal is herbivorous or carnivorous. To have your animal trainer begin training a wild animal, use u to open the citizen information screen and select the animal menu. Scroll through the list until your captured wild animal is selected and use the whistle icon to set a trainer to train it. Note that if a caged animal is fed a plant, seeds will stay in the cage. This has no effect on training, but if you later release the animal, you will need to dump the seeds from the cage before it can be reused.
The trainer will bring food to the cage and perform the initial training, setting the animal to one of the trained levels (see table at right). A fully wild animal must be trained from its cage, but once an animal has been initially trained and it is no longer wild, it may be safely released from its cage (and preferably assigned to an enclosed pasture or restraint, to keep it hemmed in case problems arise later).
A notable exception from "training levels" are animals which are a member of a species your civilization already has domesticated. Only a few of them can occur in the wild to be captured - e.g. water buffalo and turkey. Such creatures become fully tame upon the completion of training, and after that they will never require or receive training again, even if assigned to a trainer.
Only wild animals can be trained in a cage. If you want your animal trainer to provide further training you must release the trained animal. Alternatively, with a difficult-to-train animal or a poor trainer, you may want to leave the animal in its cage. A caged animal will eventually revert to its wild state, at which point your trainer will perform the initial training again, safely giving your trainer experience and your civilization more knowledge about the animal. Note that [GRAZER]animals need a pasture to survive, and will die if left to linger in a cage for too long.
The overall difficulty and time required to train an animal is roughly proportional to its pet value. As a general guideline, animals with pet values of less than 100 are easy to train, those with values of 100+ take some effort and a few years to train well, and creatures with pet values of 1000+ such as dragons are very slow to train.
Adult trained animals will slowly revert to their wild origins over time, and must be permanently scheduled for training (through the animal status menu) to ensure they remain friendly, through regular re-training. Trained animals have a quality associated to their training that affects how long they will retain composure before reverting to the wild, but which may have other effects as well. The last state an animal reaches before it becomes fully wild is semi-wild, which prompts an announcement.
Dwarves will instinctively know when their animal training partners need retraining, and will prioritize doing so, but will obviously not be able to if they are injured, experiencing a strange mood, or are otherwise unable to reach their trainees. If you assign a single dwarf to an animal (Any available trainer is also an option) only that dwarf will ever attempt to train or retrain the creature, so care must be taken to keep your trainers healthy and available.
Trading animals brought by merchants will immediately make them belong to the receiving party. This means that if another civilization brought them as tame animals, and you buy them, they will retain their tame status and will never revert to a wild state. This is also true when you seize the animals, or kill all the merchants. Note that killing all the merchants will not make the pack animals a part of your civilization, and will become "friendly" and wander around the map. Also, animals that become yours in this way will be in cages at first, so you will have to release them in some way. Due to a bug, the only way to do this is pasturing them and then removing them from the pasture. This is very important if they are grazers as they will starve due to the lack of grass in the cage.
When training animals that your civilization has never domesticated before, successful training will result in some knowledge being transferred to your civilization every time the dwarven caravan returns to the mountainhomes. Although a number of farm animals are domesticated by your civilization from the beginning of the game, your fortress cannot individually "civilization-level" domesticate a species.1
Every tame animal job increases overall fort training points for that animal by 10, and the fort training knowledge levels are attained at 30, 100, 250 and 500 (it zeroes points when it increases level). War and hunting jobs are also worth 10 points, but a maintenance job is only worth 3. If your fort level is higher than the civ level for a given animal, 10 points of knowledge are transferred with each caravan that gets off the map (so it'd take 88 years worth of caravans to bring the civ all the way up to "expert", but just 3 years to get every subsequent fort to start at "few facts").
The fort level of knowledge has a strong effect on in-fort training. When attempting to train an animal, a skill roll will be matched against a threshold that depends on animal knowledge.For instance, if you know nothing about the animal, the animal training roll must be 30 to get past semi-wild and 100 to be masterfully trained (with 40/50/65/80 for the others). As you gain knowledge, the thresholds become lower and easier to attain:
The calculations for skill rolls are complicated, but by these numbers, your trainers are almost twice as good at expert-level fort knowledge, if they weren't already great trainers in their own right (in which case they'll probably crack 100 most times without help).
Animals who can be trained and possess a child state (allowed by the [CHILD] token) can produce a fully tamed population. Note that animals cannot get pregnant in cages (in fact, this is one of the few times they can't), so you'll have to move past the initial training stage to have them.
Animals born from a partially-trained mother will not revert to a wild state while they are still children: for example, if a wild female wolf is captured and trained up to the +T+ level, and gives birth, the pups may forget this "inherited" training, but will never go lower than Semi-Wild while they're still pups. They can, and will, revert to a wild state when they become adult wolves, though going back to a fully wild state will still take some time after they've reached adulthood. The training level of the father does not count for anything when it comes to the child.
7fc3f7cf58