Topic: [suggestion] Dogs

Could you please improve dogs in some way?

1.) Ideally make dogs like characters with stats and skills that could improved and additional items that could be added.

2.) Make dogs that get killed respawned after battle?

The problem is, right now dogs are really utterly useless. I can literally only see them being useful once youre basically completely done with the game and have just a few extremely powerful locations to defeat, so you drop dogs against really most powerful enemies in order to extend your HP pool (have enemies kill dogs instead of your brothers for a couple of turns).

And thats really a shame.

The biggest problem with dogs is that they are not very strong. So for example of one cliche suggestions youll get on this forum and steam is “use dogs against goblins” and this is only partly true. Sure releasing a dog means you can catch up to a goblin ambusher, but since dogs are so weak it also mean that a single goblin ambusher will kill the dog in melee fight in about 2 or 3 rounds. So if you are further away than 2 rounds, releasing a dog is useless as it will likely die. And even if youre just 1 round away, the dog still has a good chance to die because by the time you get there, and by the time you can actually deal damage to ambusher, it will have had a very good chance of killing your dog. So essentially you just wasted 260 gold to get very little experience and some items (not even 10% of the dog worth). Ah yes your characters also suffer initiative and fatigue penalties…

There are also 2 other problems:

a.) Dogs dont extend your field of view (which means you have no idea whats going on when they run off ahead of you)

b.) Dogs arent exactly intelligent, instead of chasing after archers and harassing them, they have a tendency to find the closest (and usually strongest *facepalm*) enemy that they can and simply charge it. Leading to even the best type of dogs dying in a turn or 2 (since enemies are evil and will focus on easiest enemy they can beat – your dog).

Unless c.) dogs are made more economically valuable or d.) put under player’s direct control (or at least let us guide them somehow, tell them what to do?) they really have very limited use (mostly to extend your HP pool or harass someone for a round or two).